Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #1 Who is Private Morris?

My great-grandmother was Shprintsa Zaturensky. She was born around 1858, and married to Nevakh Schreibman. They lived and raised their family in Pinsk, Belarus, and she died in 1932. The clip above is from the burial register of the Pinsk Jewish Cemetery, which was given to me when I visited the Jewish Community there in 2011. It's an inconsequential scrap of paper, but it carries just about the only information we have about Shprintsa, apart from the names and dates of birth of her children. One of these was my grandfather Movsha, b 1883, who became known as Morris Schreibman after he got to in London in 1905.

What's in a patronymic?

The document shows her patronymic name - ie, it refers to her father's given name rather than his surname (her maiden name). It tells us that her father was Movsha-Chaimovitch. At first I interpreted this as indicating that my great-great-grandfather would be Movsha Chaim, ie, that he was known by two given names. However, since Shprintsa is female, you would expect the Russian expression to use the feminine form of the patronymic, which would be 'Chaimovna'; this is indeed what happens with the other females in the burial list.

However, the '-vitch' ending used here is the masculine form, which suggests that 'Chaimovitch' is the patronymic for Movsha, indicting that he was a son of Chaim. So, making a working assumption of 25 years per generation (which could of course be way out), it looks like my Zaturensky family might have gone something like this:

Chaim b c1810 > Movsha b c1835 > Shprintsa b 1858

This isn't much, and the dates are far from certain, but at least it gives me something to look for.

Who are the Zaturenskys?

Unfortunately in the 9 years since then, I have found absolutely nothing more. There are some Zaturenskys in the 19C Pinsk records, but none of them seem to match up with mine. There is also a concentration of the name about 100km further north, around the town of Nesvizh, but again, no discernible connection.

DNA to the rescue?

Then, a couple of months ago, I got my AncestryDNA results. There, right near the top of my match list, just below a couple of known close cousins, was this:

The numbers look good - sharing 184cM across 12 segments gives an average of 15cM/seg, which implies that there are probably several segments of over 20cM, and possibly a couple of quite big ones. This in turn suggests a relationship closer to 3C than to 4C. Unfortunately AncestryDNA does not have a Chromosome Browser tool, so there is no way of checking this level of detail (moan, moan). Nor is there a way of seeing whether any of my other matches triangulate with this one on any of these chunky segments, which could possibly point to where their common ancestry lies.

"No" is also an answer

I had no idea who this mystery cousin was, or whereabouts in my family he was situated. I have a couple of Morris-by-marriage cousins, but none that I know of who are directly related to me. This in itself, of course, is useful information. He's almost certainly not from any of the branches that I have well documented, backward over several generations, and outward across as many siblings as I could find. He's probably from one of the branches I know less about.

And crucially, he doesn't show as a shared match with either of the 2 known close cousins who appear above him in my match list - so he's almost certainly not a Frankenstein, a Waksman, an Ilyutovich or a Levin.

So what about his Tree?

Well, he does have a Tree:

Hmm.

So 'Private' has an ancestor called Simon Morris, who was born in 1864. OK, that's a start. There are a couple of other scraps of information. In the Person Profile, Simon is shown as born in Lithuania, and being resident in Peoria, Illinois (USA) in 1969. 1969? He'd be 105 years old. Possible, but not very likely. Is 'Private' the son of Simon? And is 'Private' the person who took the AncestryDNA test?

Plus, one more sliver of information: the Tree has a name. It's the 'elizabeth terensky' Tree.

What I knew, and what I didn't

So, to sum up, at this stage:

- I knew of no direct relative with the surname Morris

- I had no known family from Lithuania - my mother's side are all from Poland, my father's from Belarus

- I had no idea where Peoria was - not until I looked for it on a map, course - it turns out it's near Chicago

- I have no known relatives in the Chicago area, apart from some Ilyutoviches and their DNA does not match Private Morris

- I had never come across the name Terensky

- I could discount at least half my ancestral families

- but the DNA doesn't lie - Private Morris shares enough DNA with me to be a Third Cousin, at furthest

As I tried to think through how to start the search, I wrote to my mystery cousin, via the Ancestry messaging system, which is the only way you have of contacting people. As yet, there's been no response, but I live in hope.

There was nothing for it but to get searching, by whatever means I could.