Tuesday 17 March 2020

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #4 Two for the price of one

So it looks like my mystery cousin Private Morris and I are related in some way through the families of his ancestor Herman Czar Terensky and of my great-great-grandfather, Moshe Chaimovitch Zaturensky. They have the same surname, they are from the same town, they look like they are from the same generation.

Wading through the DNA
Private Morris and I share 184cM across 12 segments. This gives an average of 15cM per segment, which in turn means that there are probably 2 or 3 segments of over 20cM each, if not more, and possibly one or two substantially bigger ones. Multiple shared segments of this size suggest 3rd Cousin or thereabouts. AncestryDNA puts him at the upper end of my 3C range.

The chart at the Shared DNA Project, which is based on figures for known relationships submitted by thousands of volunteers, suggests that 184cM lies well above the range for 4C. It's at the upper end of 3C, but well above the average, which comes in at 74cM. There are also a number of possibilities in the 1CR-2CR range, but it is clear from the Trees below that this cannot be the case for this relationship. Another part of the chart shows half-relationships, and maybe we'll have to take those into consideration at a later stage.


Peering through the Trees
So where does our shared DNA come from? Who is our common ancestor? Let's put the two Trees, as we have them at the moment, side by side:


Now, bear in mind that I still don't know who Private Morris is. He could be a son of Al Morris, or of an as yet unknown second son of Simon. It is also possible that there could be a further generation between Simon and Al - there appears to be a gap of 50 years between them - in which case he would be a great-grandson of Simon, which would place him in my own generation

My Tree is I hope a bit clearer. If I'm starting off by looking for a 3C, then the common ancestor must be Movsha Zaturensky, or possibly a half-relationship descending from his daughter Shprintsa. Anything further out would not be able to produce the 184cM match. And Shprintsa doesn't seem to have had children with any other husband, so 3C it seems to be.

All I know about Shprintsa is that she was born about 1858, and was the second wife of Nevakh Schreibman, with whom she had a number of children, including this one:


One person or two?
So her father is Movsha-Chaim Zaturensky, who has what looks like two given names. This is the only document we have that mentions him, apart from her burial record. As I discussed in the first post (#1 Who is Private Morris?), he is shown there as 'Movsha-Chaimovitch', which suggests that he is Movsha son of Chaim.

So is Movsha-Chaim one person or two? This could be crucial, because we're hoping to find one or other of these names amongst Private Morris's ancestors.

So far, all we have is Simon Morris and his father, Herman Czar Terensky. They're not in the vestigial Tree attached to Private Morris's DNA results, but they are in Jennifer's Tree and they do seem to belong in mine. So where do they - and he - fit in?

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