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.