Genetic Groups on MyHeritage - 1 First Thoughts

 

MyHeritageDNA have introduced 'Genetic Groups', a new feature which I think could have a huge impact on our understanding of Ashkenazi Jewish (AJ) history in general, and of our own families' histories in particular. The same will undoubtedly apply to other groups across the world.

MyH has published an account of how they have put these Groups together. Briefly, they base them on the segments of DNA, including very small ones, that you share with other people. These patterns of shared segments can be regarded as the signature of a Genetic Group. These shared segments must have come from a common ancestor, who may well date from long before any of the ancestors that most of us can trace by traditional genealogical methods. MyH then combines this shared segment information with the historical and geographical information contained in those people's Family Trees.

This technique will not point directly to a specific common ancestor, but the fact that you share a Genetic Group with someone should help narrow down the field, and may suggest likely areas for further research. It should eventually provide a more reliable, and potentially much more informative, indicator of ancestral origins than merely looking at shared matches, or vague "ethnicity estimates". 

My Genetic Groups

The map above shows the geographic reach of the 5 AJ Genetic Groups that they have found for me, based on shared segments and the date and place information my matches have included in their Trees. Of course, not everyone has a full Tree, but when the numbers of people providing this information are high enough, MyH can begin to see patterns emerging. These patterns show that people who match me on particular segments tend to have ancestors that come from particular geographic areas.

You can see immediately from the map that these Genetic Group areas cover distinct territories. There are two Groups in smaller regions that have a definite western bias, running from the Netherlands across to Poland; one of these reaches a bit further north than the other. Another Group has an eastern bias, reaching from Poland to central Russia. One of the Groups seems to cover much of the map, stretching most of the way across from Germany to Ukraine. The fifth Group is centred in the East, across Belarus and Lithuania. My matches in each of these Genetic Groups share a DNA signature with me that corresponds with these areas of origin. You can almost see the Litvaks and the Polacks peeking through.

My mother's parents both came from central Poland, and my father's from various places in Belarus. Jews came into these areas from Western Europe during the Late Middle Ages, moving gradually eastward over a period of several centuries. You can sense the pattern of this migration even in the roughly-drawn areas on this map. I have documented Trees back to 1800 or so for the male lines of the families of each of my four grandparents, but I do not as yet know where any of these families were living before they moved east, nor when they moved. Any source that can suggest answers to this is worth looking at.

My initial thoughts are that a common ancestor for me, with someone who is in one of the more western groups, will probably date from medieval times, and will be correspondingly hard to trace. Matches from the two groups that cover the eastern areas may well trace back to more recent times. My Polish matches could come from any of the five groups, as the map shows that all five of them include the central part of Poland.

I'll be looking more closely at my five Genetic Groups, from the geographical, historical and genetic perspectives. What can they tell me about the stories of my ancestral families?

NB: Roberta Estes has posted an excellent guide to using this feature, on her DNAeXplained site: Introducing Genetic Groups at MyHeritage

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #17 Shipped to Peoria

Shipped to Peoria Illinois by Sloan and Shelton

 

Joseph?

Throughout the story of Dora (see #10 There's more to Dora .. and thereafter) I have been trying to establish the identity of her first husband. Every reference in her own documents, and in those of her children, refers to him as Joseph Kawin. That seems pretty clear, then. 

However, I have not been able to find a single document that shows them together, nor any that refers to him in his own right, apart from a couple of entries in Directories for Peoria, in 1890 and 1896. By 1898 the entry is for Dora Kawin, "widow of Joseph". This suggests he died some time in 1896-98. However, searches on the usual online sites reveal no references to a Joseph Kawin dying in Peoria or anywhere else during that period. Nor is there a marriage record for Joseph and Dora, in Peoria or anywhere else. Nor any records of the births of their children - Abraham in 1888, Sam in 1889, both of whom appear as born in Peoria, or at least in Illinois, in later documents.

Or Jacob?

At the same time, there are abundant references to a Jacob Kawin, born in 1862, who came to the USA in 1871 with his mother and siblings, to join up with his father who had emigrated earlier. The whole family is in the 1880 Census in Peoria. Jacob got himself naturalised, and started up a business with his brother Nathan, and they are in and out of the Directories and the newspapers through the 1880s and into the 90s. Nathan married in 1885 in Chicago, but there does not appear to be a marriage record for Jacob.

What we do find, however, is a death record for him - or at least, his headstone, in the Mount Sinai - ie, Jewish - section of the Springdale Cemetery in Peoria. He died in 1897. Just about the time we believe Joseph Kawin, husband of Dora, died.

Was this a coincidence? That the only two J Kawins in Illinois both died in the same year?

I went back to the Peoria Directories, and looked a little closer. I found that from around 1886, Jacob seems to have left the family home, and he no longer appeared as a partner in the business. 'Kawin Bros' had become 'Kawin & Co', run by Nathan, and Jacob was nowhere to be seen.

Or William, John or George?

Then a suspicious series of one-off Kawins started appearing in the Directories. Over the course of a few years we find William, John, George, and Joseph, all making fleeting appearances, with a variety of occupations and addresses - but no sign of Jacob.

This led me to conclude that maybe some of these mysterious Kawins might in fact be Jacob in disguise. Could they all, including Joseph, be the same person?

Was Dora's husband really Jacob, even though her records always referred to him as Joseph? I convinced myself that this was the most likely explanation, and added him to my Tree as Jacob, as he was known in his family. And I wrote up Dora's story accordingly.

Irene

Then I found this:

It's the headstone for Irene Kawin, Nathan's daughter, who died in Chicago in 1976. There are a couple of other names on it, female Kawins: Gertrude and Helen. I didn't recognise them - Nathan's other daughter was called Ethel - and I thought they might be connected to a Chicago Kawin family that I had noticed, but which didn't seem to be related to the Peoria Kawins. In any case, my focus is on Dora and on finding out who her husband is, rather than on any wider Kawin family.

Nothing doing here. I switched my attention elsewhere for a while.

Gertrude

A few months later Gertrude cropped up again, and this time she drove a horse and cart through my interpretation of Dora's story:

The marriage of Jacob Kawin and Gertrude Goldstein in Chicago. This immediately caught my attention, because Jacob's brother Nathan had married a Goldstein - Lotte - a few years earlier. The Kawin brothers had married Goldstein sisters. Don't ask me why I hadn't noticed this before, but I hadn't.

Later censuses show Gertrude with a daughter Helen, born in 1894. So this Helen must be the third person on the headstone above. And then I found directories and newspaper articles showing Jacob and Gertrude running a Kawin & Co business in La Salle, halfway between Peoria and Chicago, in the early 1890s. So the reason Jacob stops showing up in the Peoria Directories, is, he wasn't living there any more.

Where does this leave Dora?

Joseph the Elusive

Well, she clearly wasn't married to Jacob. She must have been married to Joseph, as the documents insist. So, why did I persist in ignoring the evidence? Why had I been unwilling to accept that Jacob was Jacob, and Joseph was Joseph? And that Dora was only married to one of them?

In my defence, please remember that I had not been able to find a single record of a type that might be expected to show them together, such as a Census. Indeed, the only Census they would both have been present for was the 1890 one, and that is not available to us - it was destroyed in a fire. Directories in some places show the name of the spouse, bracketed alongside the head of household; not so in Peoria. I could find no record of their marriage, or of the birth of their children. To obscure matters further, Joseph appears to have masqueraded as George for a couple of years, in the Directories at least. And then, I could find no record of Joseph's death, just later references to Dora as "widow of Joseph".

And of course the mysterious Jacob and the elusive Joseph both seem to have died in the same year: 1897. However, I have no death record for either of them, only the headstone for Jacob in Peoria, with minimal information.

Going Local: Peoria

Time for a change of plan. How about local information sources? Was there anything available at town or state level, that hadn't been opened up to the websites that I had been using?

Well, yes.

I found that the Peoria County Office has an online database of births, marriages and deaths, that covers the period I am looking for. I didn't find a marriage for Joseph and Dora, but they may have married in Chicago. Maybe it was not possible to have a Jewish wedding in Peoria; I have not yet checked establishment dates for Peoria synagogues, but I have seen elsewhere that couples sometimes had to travel to other towns to get a kosher marriage.

Sam and Moritz

But I did find a couple of birth records for them, that do name them both. This is the one for Sam:

Several points of interest:

- Dora and Joseph on the same document!

- Sam is shown as Dora's 3rd child; Abraham was born a year or so earlier, although there doesn't seem to be a record for him. This suggests that there must also have been another, earlier, child, that didn't survive.

- the address, 303 Gallatin Street, is confirmed by Directory entries for 1890 and 1891.

- Dora's maiden name, Zaturensky, is shown as 'Darengsky'. Love it!

There is another birth record, for Moritz, b 1894, shown as Dora's 4th child. He does not appear in the 1900 Census, where she says she had had 4 children, of whom 2 were living; these must be the two living with her, Abraham and Sam. The two who did not survive would thus be this Moritz, and the putative earlier child mentioned above.

Mr Kawin

And then I had a look in the deaths database.

- no given name, not even an initial!

- 36 years old, so born 1861; died 24 Dec 1897

- married

- 13 years in Illinois, so immigrated 1884 or earlier

- ill with tuberculosis for 5 years

- died at 221 Howett Street, in Peoria

- buried in the Jewish Cemetery, in Peoria

It has to be Joseph, all the dates fit with what we have seen for him in other documents. In particular, it shows him in Illinois only since 1884, whereas we have a passenger manifest for Jacob's immigration in 1871.

Further, I have just come across Joseph's entry in the 1897 Peoria Directory - as Joseph Kavan - that shows him at this address, 221 Howett Street. So he died at home, not in a hospital. Earlier Directories have him as a peddler, but the 1896 and 1897 lists show no occupation for him. It looks like his illness must have prevented him from earning a living.

It's puzzling that no given name is shown, as Dora was almost certainly in Peoria at the time of his death, and you would have thought that she would have been the informant.

If only we could find a similar record for Jacob.

Jacob in the Records

He's not in the Peoria death records, which were entered by hand in a register book, in chronological order, as they were reported. You have to assume that if a death is not in this book, it didn't happen in Peoria.

So where did he die? I tried Chicago. He doesn't appear in any Chicago - or other Illinois - records available online, so I tried the Illinois State Archives. They wouldn't let me in. Literally: 'the server where this page is located isn't responding'. I checked with people in the USA, and they can get in OK. Apparently some US archives are blocking access from Europe; it's something to do with the GDPR data protection scheme. Some kind friends did a look-up for me - but Jacob isn't there.

Jacob in the Trees

Time for an indirect approach. What had other researchers found? I had another look at references to Jacob in online Trees, and came across something I had noticed before - that a couple of them had him dying in San Antonio, Texas. Moreover, they had a specific date, 10 Feb 1897. This is the date shown on his headstone, and sometimes headstones can be wrong; however the Trees didn't show any other source to corroborate either the date or the place. I had not given much credence to San Antonio, presuming it probably referred to someone else. Why should he go to Texas? It's a thousand miles away. Maybe they were trying to expand their business down there? However, there don't seem to be any Kawins in the records there.

Going Local: San Antonio

Nevertheless, I checked San Antonio, expecting either I'd be blocked, as in Chicago, or draw a blank, as everywhere else. And guess what - they too, like Peoria, have a database, with records available which do not appear on the usual sites.

And guess what again?

In the entries for February 1897, there he is: J Kawin, 34 years old, married, native of Illinois. As far as they go, these biographical details more or less fit our man. It also tells us he'd been ill for a year, and had been in San Antonio for 9 months, which implies in turn that, if this is him, he'd have left Peoria around May 1896.

But, as we've seen, "our" Jacob's headstone is in a cemetery in Peoria, over 1000 miles away. Can this really be the same person?

What does the right-hand page tell us?

He died of heart failure due to pneumonia, on the 10th of February, which is the date that appears on his headstone and in the Trees I had seen. I have since seen that San Antonio was promoting itself as a spa resort around that time, with a couple of "Hot Sulphur Natatoriums". If Jacob had fallen ill a year or so earlier, around February, and then gone down to San Antonio in May - maybe he'd gone to take the waters?

He died at 503 Pinto Street, which seems to be a residential address, and his body was ...... Shipped to Peoria.

Jacob and Joseph

So here we have it. Issue resolved. Jacob and Joseph are two different people. Jacob died on 10 Feb 1897 in San Antionio, Texas, and Joseph died in Peoria 10 months later, on 24 December. Jacob's body was taken 1000 miles across America to be buried in the Jewish section of Springdale Cemetery in his home town Peoria; Joseph was buried in the "Jewish Cemetery" there, which may well be a reference to the same burial ground.

Joseph was the husband of Dora, my great-grandmother's sister. Jacob was not, and is probably not related to me at all.

Next steps

I now have to go back through all the material I have gathered on these families, everything I have written, the Trees I have constructed, the DNA matches I have attempted to analyse, review it all and re-write where necessary.

And attentive readers will recollect that there are still a number of documents I have not yet been able to find. I do not have passenger manifests for either Joseph or Dora; I do have one for Jacob, by the way, but I don't need that now, do I? I do not have a marriage record for them, nor birth records for their son Abraham or for the mysterious first child, nor a death record for the latter. Of course, some or all of these things may not have happened in Peoria, or in Illinois, or in the USA, even.

Two things I don't have for events that did happen in Peoria, are a death record for their 4th child Moritz, and the location of Joseph's burial. The latter could be particularly helpful, because if his grave has a headstone, it may carry his father's name, which in turn may help me work out whether he is related to Jacob's family.

I am currently consulting with some of the finest genealogical brains in Illinois. Hopefully they will be able to advise me where to go next. Watch this space.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #16 The Person Who Will Always Know

Who is this Joseph?

Whilst researching the members of my Terensky DNA Cluster, I kept coming across documents for a Joseph Teranski (and versions thereof). The Cluster does not include any of his descendants, and I haven't managed to identify any from amongst my AncestryDNA matches. The documents showed him to be following a similar trajectory to my Zaturenskys - Russia to Peoria to Los Angeles - although I couldn't find anything to pin him down as a member of this family. After they moved to LA in the mid-1920s Joseph and his sons Sam and Myer anglicised their surname to 'Trent'.

This alerted me to another clue. In the Tree of Cousin Jennifer, a member of the DNA Cluster and a descendant of Shmuel Zaturensky aka Simon Morris, she shows one branch of the family adopting the surname 'Terensky', and another taking on 'Trent'. She didn't show any descendants of these branches, but at least this shows that her family were aware of the existence of these other branches.

One too many Josephs

Things began to get rather confused when I started looking more closely at a Joseph Terensky who definitely was one of mine - several of his descendants were in my DNA Cluster. This Joseph also followed the family trail from Pinsk via Peoria to Los Angeles. He's a son of Meir Zaturensky, who we came across earlier in this saga as the father of Rochel Leah Teransky. I'll be following this Joseph, and his brother and sister, in later posts.

 

The two Josephs appeared to have different birth dates, and their wives and children appeared to have different names; on the other hand, they were both shoemakers. They made the move from Illinois to California at different times, but there were periods when they were both living in the same town. On several occasions I came across documents and was not sure who I should allocate them to. Were they the same person, leading a very complicated life? We've already seen at least one like that in this family. Or were they two related people with (more or less) the same name? If they were related, how closely? Was this new Joseph Teranski indeed one of my clan?

All you need is a document

I have probably amassed more documents on this Joseph than on any of the other members of this tribe, but frustratingly I have been unable to find any mention of a specific place of birth. I want him to be born in Pinsk, of course - but all I see on Census returns is 'Russia', 'Russ Polish', 'Latvia', and 'Lithuania'. On the birth certificate of his son Samuel, in 1898, Joseph is shown as 'Polish' and born in 'Poland'. This is prescient, as Pinsk did indeed become part of Poland - but only 20 years later, after the First World War and the Polish struggle for independence from the nascent Soviet Union. And Latvia and Lithuania are hundreds of miles away, off the map. No mention of Pinsk.

Nor could I find any mention of Joseph's father's name. Joseph died in 1965, but my online searches have not turned up a death certificate, or a headstone, either of which might, if you were lucky, show a father's name. Ideally I would like him to be a son of my great-great-grandfather Movsha, or failing that, of his brother Meir. Or there could be an as yet unknown third brother.

However, even without confirmation of his place of birth, or his father's name, I was convinced that there was enough evidence in the surnames and the life-journeys, and in Jennifer's Tree, to suggest that Joseph was fairly closely related to my Zaturenskys.

All I needed was a document.

And then I found one.

I was following up Abe 'Albert Allen' Morris, born in 1912 in Peoria, the youngest son of our old friend Shmuel Zaturensky aka Simon Morris. Abe is probably the father of my mystery match, Private Morris. He was drafted into the US Army in 1940, and this is his draft card.

The 'person who will always know your address' is Sam Trent. And Sam Trent is Albert Allen Morris's cousin.

Cousin? Cousin??

Cousin? That implies that one of Albert's parents must be a sibling to one of Sam's.

Albert's parents are Simon Morris aka Shmuel Zaturensky, and Rochel Leah Teransky. Shmuel and Rochel Leah are First Cousins, children of the Zaturensky brothers Movsha and Meir respectively. Sam's father is the new Joseph Teranski. So Joseph should be a brother of either Shmuel, or Rochel Leah. And his father should be either Movsha, or Meir.

Just a minute. Meir already has a son Joseph - the other Joseph, the one we keep getting mixed up with this one.

So this new Joseph must be a son of Movsha, my gg-g'f. And Joseph's grandchildren, if I can find them, will be my Third Cousins.

When we were looking at Dora, we surmised that Movsha was probably married twice, and that his first wife may have been called *Bajla, and his second wife, *Chana. *Bajla would be the mother of my g-g'm Shprintsa, b 1858, and of Shmuel (Simon Morris) b 1861, and appears to have died by 1865. *Chana would be the mother of Bejla b 1866 and Dora b 1870. Joseph appears to have been born somewhere between 1866 and 1872, according to which document you are looking at, so he would probably be a child of *Chana.

As it now stands

So Movsha's family now looks like this:

We have no documentary evidence for either of Movsha's two wives, only that different family Trees suggested different names for their respective gg-g'mothers. The DNA evidence suggests that I am closer to Shmuel's descendants than to the other lines, so I am happy to suggest that he and my g-g'm Shprintsa are children of a first wife, whilst the other three are from a second wife.

We do not have documentary evidence for *Chana's daughter *Beila, but somebody with her name would fit very nicely. DNA evidence suggests that I have a closer connection to Dora's descendants than to *Beila's, so I am surmising that there may be a Kawin link further back, possibly via *Chana, that was reinforced when Dora married Joseph Kawin.

In Joseph Teranski's case, there is fairly good circumstantial evidence in the surname and the family journey from Russia to Peoria to Los Angeles, but crucially there is one document that clinches the relationship. It tells us that Sam Trent is Albert Morris's cousin, and that he is The Person Who Will Always Know.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #15 The Beila Hypothesis

The mystery of the missing sister 

The last post (#14 Dora and Ockham's Razor) left us wondering whether we should be looking for a sister for Dora Zaturensky. We need to find a mother for Benjamin Gitelman, and she needs to be sufficiently closely related to Dora such that:

a) Benjamin can say on his passenger manifest in 1922 that he was going to his 'half-brother", Dora's son Sam Kawin

and

b) my tentative analysis of my DNA matches with Cousins David (descended from Benjamin) and Paul (descended from Dora) still makes sense

So a sister would fit the bill on both counts. It wouldn't fully account for the 'half-brother' designation on Benjamin's manifest, as if their mothers are sisters, Sam and Benjamin would be first cousins. But I think I've exhausted the possibility of a half-sibling relationship - I just can't see it. So I'm going for sisters, and consequently, cousins.

Beylya Terensky?

Then I recalled this snippet from Cousin Jennifer's Tree on Ancestry, which I referred to in an earlier post, but we weren't looking at Gitelmans at that point.

In this Tree, Benjamin's father is a Gitelman, but his mother is shown as Beylya Terensky. Not Dora. At the moment we have no idea who this Beylya Terensky is. There is no mention of a Lipschitz; nor, by the way, does the name seem to appear anywhere else in relation to this family.

This looks to me very much like one of those half-recalled family stories, passed on to later generations by someone who is pretty certain of some details but a bit woolly on the rest. Which is not surprising, because the whole story is getting *very* complicated, and it's several generations back, pretty much lost in the mists of time. And Beylya's birth date of 1888 must be a typo - Benjamin was born in 1885 or 86, so if she's his mother she must have been born some time in the 1860s.

Beylya Turansky?

And then I remembered seeing that Jennifer has another version of this Tree, which uses the name Turansky.

This version introduces a whole crowd of new people that don't seem to appear anywhere else in either family knowledge or records. The father of the family is Morris (not shown here) - though Jennifer may have taken that name from the discussion she and I had a few weeks ago - and the name of his wife is unknown. They have 9 children, all shown with Yiddish names, all born in Pinsk.

These are the first 3 children:

Is this our Dora? And is this the Beylya that appears as the mother of Benjamin in Jennifer's other Tree? It's certainly looking promising.

No source is given for this family group. The fact that they all have Yiddish names suggests that this family did not emigrate; if they had, Jennifer would probably have known some at least of them by Americanised names. It looks to me very much as though the list has been provided by a Belarussian researcher, transcribed from one of the 'Revision Lists' compiled periodically throughout the 19C by the Russian authorities to keep track of citizens for tax and conscription purposes.

This immediately poses a problem, as we know that our family were using 'Zaturensky' in Russia, at least until they arrived in the USA. All the members of the family whose emigration I have been able to trace use some form of the name Zaturensky on their passenger documents. So how come they're using Turansky here? If it is the same family, of course ...

Notice that Beylya here is born in 1866; Dora's birth date, as we have seen, varies between 1869 and 1872, as suggested here. If this list is indeed from a Russian Revision List, the dates will probably be more reliable than those Dora gave after she got to America - the Russian authorities used to check names and dates against other records, to try to catch conscription-dodgers in particular. So if we lean towards 1872 for Dora, we have to conclude that Beylya looks the more likely of the two to be the mother of a child born in 1886, when Dora would only have been 14 years old.

Are they really ours?

Provided, of course, that this is indeed our family. Notice that there is no indication of the existence of a family for Morris by a previous wife, which is where I would expect my great-grandmother Shprintsa and her brother Shmuel (Simon Morris) to appear. However, Shprintsa had married by around 1880, and Shmuel left for the USA around that time as well. If the list was put together after 1880 there would be no reason for them to appear on it - they were no longer part of this household.

But how come Jennifer has Benjamin down as the son of Beylya, whereas when he emigrates to the USA in 1922, he says he's going to his half-brother Sam Kawin, who we know to be the son of Dora and Joseph Kawin? Surely this implies that Benjamin is also a son of Dora, but by a different father? How can he be the son of a different mother as well? What sort of a half-brother is that?

Tick-tock, tick-tock. Time for that thinking-cap again.

A Tale of Three Beilas?

Let's take a different angle on this. Let's ask, how might this putative Beylya fit in to what we know - or think we know - about this family?

Cousin Jennifer, who is a descendant of Simon Morris (Shmuel Zaturensky), shows his mother as 'Bailie', and Dora's mother as Chana. Cousin Paul, a desendant of Dora, also shows her mother as Chana. I don't know if Jennifer and Paul are in touch, but the differences in their Trees suggest they were developed independently of each other. There doesn't seem to be any documentary evidence for either name, so they may well both be reflecting the versions of the family story handed down within their own families. So the fact they both have Dora's mother as Chana could be significant, as could the fact that Jennifer shows Simon with a different mother; Paul doesn't show Simon at all.

This all seems to back up my earlier assumption that Movsha Zaturensky married twice. And at this point I go out on a limb.

If Movsha's first wife was Beila, as Jennifer suggests, and if Benjamin's mother was also a Beila, as Jennifer also suggests in a different version of the Tree, and given that Benjamin later named his own first child Beila, we can perhaps begin to construct a timeline of Beilas.

A Beila Timeline

We have previously had cause to refer to the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition of naming a child after a recently deceased close relative. Maybe that's what's happening here. Let's look at what we know, and see what we can deduce, in the light of this tradition.

1) Movsha and his second wife Chana have their first child Beila 2 in 1866, so his first wife Beila 1 must have died before then; Movsha would then be naming his new child after his deceased frst wife.

2) Benjamin's own first daughter Beila 3 was born in 1913, so it is likely that his mother - who was Beila 2, Movsha's first daughter with Chana - had died by then.

So our timeline now reads:

i) Beila1, Movsha's first wife: probably died c1865

ii) Beila 2, daughter of Movsha's second wife Chana: born c 1866, named after her father's deceased first wife Beila 1; mother of Benjamin; probably died before 1913

iii) Benjamin, son of Beila 2 and an unidentified Gitelman: born 1886

iv) Beila 3, daughter of Benjamin: born 1913, named after her deceased grandmother Beila 2

Here's how that might look in a Tree:

NB: I haven't shown Benjamin's daughter Beila 3 in this Tree, as the whole thing is just getting too crowded.

Sorted

I thought I had this sorted a month ago. I even posted #14, and thought, that's it, onward and upward. Next! However, on re-reading, there were several things I wasn't happy with. I revised, rephrased,  re-drew the Trees, then revised, rephrased and re-drew again, and eventually split the analysis into two sections. Dora's story now spreads over 7 posts, that have taken 6 weeks to put together. I'm going to stick with this version, until I see reason to change it, of course.

Many thanks to Jennifer and other descendants who have interrogated relatives, trawled through websites, paid for research, and drafted Trees, and also shared their DNA with me, whether they realise it or not. And especial thanks to Genetic Affairs, whose AutoClusters provided the clues and pointed the way.

But this journey is not over yet. There are at least 4 more Zaturenskys to come, wending their way over the water from Pinsk to Peoria. But we can relax a bit, I don't think any of their stories are quite as complicated as Dora's.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #14 Dora and Ockham's Razor

The story so far
Dora Zaturensky was the sister - or half-sister, maybe - of my great-grandmother Shprintsa. Their father Movsha may have had 2 wives; Shprintsa was born in 1858, and may have been the daughter of the first wife, and Dora, b 1869, the daughter of the second.

I have identified DNA matches with 2 of Dora's great-grandchildren, Cousin Paul and Cousin David. David is a descendant of Dora's first husband, Gitelman (we don't know his given name), whilst Paul is from her second husband, Jacob Kawin.



The paper trail says I have exactly the same relationship to both Paul and David: half-3rd Cousin. So why is there such a huge difference between the amounts of DNA I share with them? Or, to ask the question another way around: why do I share so much more DNA with a Kawin descendant than I do with a Gitelman one?

I've had a question like this before, in this same family. In that case, it seemed the solution was that there was probably a double relationship somewhere along the line - that Movsha's son Shmuel had married his cousin Rochel Leah, for instance. Is something similar happening here?

For this to be the case, I would have to have a single relationship with David, via Dora, and a double relationship with Paul. This second relationship could occur at any point in the Tree I have researched so far - via Paul's father's family (which I think is most unlikely, having had a quick look at his ancestry), that of his maternal grandmother Alice Cowan (wife of Sam Kawin), which also seems unlikely, or through Jacob Kawin himself. And the implication of this is that Jacob and Dora would have to be be fairly close cousins.

In other words, one of Dora's parents would have to be a sibling to one of Joseph's: either Dora's mother ('2nd wife' in the Tree above) would be a Kawin, ie a sister to Joseph's father Max, or Joseph's mother would be a Zaturensky, a sister to Dora's father Movsha. We don't have any information on Dora's mother, but we do have several references to Joseph's mother as 'Hinda Sandusky'. It is possible that this could be a variant on 'Zaturensky', but the Sandusky name does occur in several places, and in any case it's not a very convincing rendition of Zaturensky. At the moment I'm tending towards Dora's mother being the connection.

A tantalising Tree
Then I came across this tantalising clip from a Tree on the JewishGen 'Family Tree of the Jewish People' (log in required). It was posted nearly 20 years ago, at a time when it was not possible to do much online research, so I'm assuming it's the product of family knowledge, and possibly some archival research in Belarus. I've written to the person who posted it, asking where the information comes from; fingers crossed I'll get a response!


The layout is not 100% clear, but it seems to be saying that Benjamin is the son of a Mosha Lipschitz from Pinsk, who died in 1886, the same year as Benjamin was born. The mother is unknown, but she is not Dora, who seems to be Mosha's second wife. The dates given here suggest Dora must have married at the age of 14, though we have her down elsewhere as born in 1869, which would make her 17 at the time of this marriage.

In addition, if Benjamin is the son not of Dora but of an earlier wife, this first wife would need to be closely related to Dora - preferably a sister - so as to retain my DNA relationship with David (see my draft Tree above).

Fact or fancy?
All this suggests the following scenario:

1 Mosha Lipschitz and first wife have child Benjamin in Nov 1886
2 maybe first wife dies in childbirth or shortly after
3 Mosha remarries immediately, to Dora
4 Mosha himself dies
5 Dora packs her bags and goes off to Peoria to marry Jacob Kawin, leaving her stepson Benjamin behind

- all in a matter of weeks.

Oh dear. There's too much going on here, and it's putting a tremendous weight on Dora's 17-year old shoulders. I'm not happy with it.

Ockham's Razor
At this point I am reminded of the wise words of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham, who is reputed to have argued along the lines of "Don't make an explanation more complicated than it needs to be", or, as expressed by Bertrand Russell, "always opt for an explanation in terms of the fewest possible causes".

So what can we identify as the "fewest possible causes" in this case? Looking at our suggested scenario again, the only things we can take as fact are:

1 Benjamin was born around 1886, probably in Pinsk
and
5 Dora went to the US around 1887, probably from Pinsk

Plus,
6 We have seen that Benjamin brought his own family from Pinsk to Peoria in 1922, and lived for 20 years or so in a house built in Dora's back yard
7 I have the DNA relationship with David and Paul outlined above

Do we really need 2, 3 and 4 to explain 6 and 7?

A closer shave
What happens if we apply Ockham's Razor to this scenario, and shave off the bits we don't need? How about discarding the marriage between Dora and Mosha Lipshits shown in the Tree above? We have no evidence for it, or reference to it, other than this Tree, and this Tree shows no sources, and could be wrong.

The consequences for Dora's story would be:
2 Mosha's wife does not need to die at this point
3 Mosha does not need to remarry, so he does not marry Dora
4 we no longer need to 'free' Dora from the marriage to Mosha, nor do we need to posit his death at this point

That feels better.

Wanted: a sister for Dora
In fact, it feels much better. Applying the razor leaves both of our outstanding queries untouched. Point 6 - Benjamin coming to live next door to Dora in Peoria, and point 7 - my DNA matches with Paul and David, are covered by just one assumption: that Benjamin's mother is indeed a sister of Dora.

This implies that when Benjamin emigrates to Peoria, he is going to live close by his Aunt and Cousins. We know he took on their surname, Kawin, shortly after arriving in the US. And it would not affect my DNA relationship with David. Our Common Ancestor would still be my great-great-grandfather Movsha Zaturensky.

The only problem is, we don't have an eligible sister for Dora.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #13 Schrödinger's Rabbi

A crucial year
1900 has now become a crucial year for Dora Zaturensky, sister of my great-grandmother Shprintsa (see #9: Dora's Story onwards, for her story so far). The US Census, taken on 2 June, finds her living in Peoria, Illinois, in the house at 108 Gallatin Street that she has been in for a couple of years or more, with her two sons Abraham and Samuel. Her husband Joseph had died in 1897.

Samuel is on the next page:

This is the first US Census that Dora and the boys appear on, so we need to pay attention to what she says. Dora is born in July 1870, she's a widow, and has had 4 children, of whom 2 are living. Abe is born Dec 1888, Samuel Dec 1889. She also says she emigrated in 1888, when by her own account she would have been 18.

Who are the 2 other children that she says are no longer living? They could have been born before she immigrated to the US in 1888. That would imply 2 children born before she was 18, that she left behind in order to emigrate to the USA, where she immediately married Joseph Kawin and had 2 more in quick succession. Or they could be 2 children born with Joseph in Peoria, who did not survive; there is no record of any such births, or deaths, but records from Peoria are quite erratic for this period, so it is still a possibility.

Or at least it would be a possibility, if Benjamin Gitelman hadn't arrived from Pinsk in 1922 acting for all the world like her long lost son, and claiming a brother Hirsz back in Pinsk (see previous post). So I'm going with the 4 births story until I come across evidence to the contrary, even if it implies that she had her first child at 15 or 16, if her stated birth date of 1870 is to be believed. And of course the arrival of Benjamin confirms that, although she said in 1900 that the two sons she had left behind in Pinsk had died, they were in fact still very much alive.

What about the Rabbi?
What about her husband-to-be Ephraim Goldberg, who she married 2 months later in Chicago? Where was he in June, when the Census was taken?

Well, he's in Peoria, at 608 Johnson Street, about a quarter of a mile from Dora's house at 108 Gallatin Street. And he's a Rabbi. So maybe they could have met in the street, or at the synagogue. He's a widower, he immigrated in 1880, and has a son Julius aged 10. And he's down as Efrof, which didn't make him any easier to find.

He also appears in the 1900 Peoria Directory, as Rev. Ephraim Goldberg. He's at a different address, 1509 S Adams Street. Maybe he moved house between the time the Directory was compiled, and 2 June, the date of the Census.

Just a minute. Who's this other Goldberg - Frank, the butcher, boarding at 108 Gallatin? Isn't that our Dora's house?

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Is this Ephraim the Rabbi, under a different name, and with a different occupation, by any chance? In two places at the same time? Schrödinger's Rabbi?

Ephraim Goldberg: The back-story
At this point I went off for a week or so, looking for Ephraim Goldberg's back-story.  His forward story turned out to be quite interesting, too. I've had to compile a 2-page timeline to try to pin him down. He has a story of his own, what follows is a brief summary of those bits that concern Dora.

Ephraim Goldberg seems to have been born in Suwalki, Poland around 1851. He first appears in the US in the early 1870s, with his wife Rosa and a number of children. In the 1880 Census they're in Chicago, and he's a Hebrew Teacher. He's still a Teacher in Chicago in 1889 and 1891, but he's clearly having problems with his given name, which appears as 'Abe' on the birth record of his son Julian in 1889.

From 1892 to 1895 he's in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as a Butcher. He has a child there in 1892, Rachel Leah. I may be willing to write up my analysis of her birth registration document, for a reasonable fee.

He does not reappear in Milwaukee, but there is an Ephraim who appears amongst the 200-odd Goldbergs in the Chicago Directories between 1896-99. This Ephraim is a labourer in these listings; there are a few butchers, and one or two teachers, but none of them appear to be our man, and there are no rabbis at all. This one could be him, or he could have spent these years somewhere else entirely, in a place we haven't got the Directories for.

The irregular Schochet
Then this cropped up, thanks to an eagle-eyed member of the Tracing the Tribe Group on Facebook. It's from The Inter Ocean, a Chicago newspaper, dated 8 August 1895:

Halfway down the report, we see this:

Is the schochet - kosher slaughterer - named in this report, 'Mr Goldberg', the same person as the Frank Goldberg, butcher, who 5 years later we find boarding with Dora in Peoria? As I mentioned above, there were a few butchers called Goldberg in Chicago at the time, and the Ephraim listed in the Directories is a 'labourer'. As yet, I have found no other reference to this incident, so for the moment at least I'm agnostic on this one. But it's a lovely story.

Dora with Ephraim
Then in 1900, Ephraim enters Dora's life. His wife Rose dies on 30 April, in Chicago. In the Census, taken on 11 June, he's in Peoria, as above. The 1900 Peoria Directory (above) shows him living in two places at once, with two names and two occupations: Ephraim the Rabbi and Frank the Butcher, boarding with Dora. In the Census he has his son Julius with him; we later find his 7 year-old daughter Rachel Leah (see above), now known as 'Lillie', living with her older sister Emilia, or 'Millie', in Chicago.

He marries Dora in Chicago on 14 August, and within a year their child Sarah is born in the small town of Oskaloosa, in Iowa (see previous post for the delayed birth certificate).

Dora without Ephraim
At this point Ephraim seems to disappear from the records. I can find no further reference to either Ephraim or Dora until the 1910 Census, which brings its own puzzles. As we have seen, Dora and her daughter Sarah are Goldbergs, and her sons Abraham and Sam are Kawins, and they are in Chicago. Dora is 'married', but no husband is listed as living with them.

So what about Ephraim?

He's in Whiting (Indiana), a Rabbi. He has his 17 year-old daughter Lillie living with him. He's been married for 9 years, but there's no wife listed - as we know, Dora is in Chicago at this point. So they are living apart, each with their own children, but both attest to being married, presumably to each other. At the moment I don't know when Dora and the children moved to Chicago, or when or why Ephraim found his way to Whiting.

The Wandering Rabbi
Ephraim then embarks on a series of rabbinical appointments across the mid-West, in places like Fort Wayne (Indiana), where he's a 'Grocer'; Muncie and then Marion (Indiana); and Wausau (Wisconsin). Throughout this period he is with a wife Katie; there is a son Israel aged 9 with them in the 1920 Census. I did start looking into this relationship, but didn't get very far. Life's too short.

Ephraim eventually dies in Chicago in 1926. On his death record, his occupation is shown not as 'Rabbi', but 'Schochet'. So maybe it was him in the Chicago kosher meat scandal of 1895, after all.

I keep asking myself - why am I researching this man? Well, I respond, he's the father of Sarah, one of Dora's children, and Dora is the sister of my great-grandmother. I may one day stumble upon a DNA match with one of Sarah's descendants. And understanding these half-sibling relationships could help us to unravel the story the DNA is trying to tell us. Or it could just tie us up in even more tangled knots, of course.

You never know.