The Guru and the Grandma

 Hi Michael
"I am writing to you in your capacity as the guru of the Ilyutovich family of Lida!"
- Guru, eh? No pressure, then.
"You come up as a very distant DNA match to my father"
- Ah, a distant match. I've got lots of those. 149190 and counting at the moment on AncestryDNA.
"My father has numerous shared matches who have Ilyutovich in their tree. His grandfather was born in Lida and his name was Jankel Zizemsky"
- Never heard of Zizemsky, but Ilyutovich + Lida sounds promising.
"Jankel's mother died when he was a young child. Her given name was Leah, but her maiden name was lost to posterity"
- Ah, so that's the question. Could great-grandmother Leah be the root of those Ilyutovich DNA matches?

The Guru gets going
My correspondent was RR, and she told me that her great-g'father Jankel Zizemsky was born around 1877-79, and that his mother Leah had died when he was about 6, so around 1883-86. Jankel's father was called Movsha, born c1825, and I soon found him in the Lida records with wife Leia and three sons.

Job done!

Except. The Leia in these records was born around 1819, and the 3 sons were all born between 1846 and 1851. Plus, they did not include Jankel, who was born in the late 1870s, some 30 years later. This Leia would have been approaching 60 by then.  Not possible. Right name, but she's not his mother. Jankel's mother must have been a different Leia, who would need to have been of child-bearing age, say roughly 20-40 years old, in the late 1870s. So she would need to have been born in the 1850s (probably), or 1840s (possibly), or late 1830s (at the earliest).

Impossible women
As we have noted before (Locating Louis Litowitz), there are huge gaps in the 19C records from Lida. For starters, we have very few vital records (birth, marriage, death) until the last years of the century. The census-type 'Revision Lists' that do exist were compiled for the purposes of taxation and conscription, and there were gaps of anything from 16 to over 50 years from one list to the next. And they were not always complete family listings; married women were usually shown, but daughters not so much.

Daughters are especially problematical, as they tended to get married and acquire a new surname, and move household, often to a different town or village. So they might well be in a list somewhere, just in a different place and with a different name. And with maiden names rarely shown, they become almost impossible to trace.

And indeed, although there are a few Leia Ilyutoviches in the Revision List records, none were born in the period we're looking at - late 1830s to late 1850s. Given that she probably married Movsha Zizemsky some time in the 1870s, and died in the mid-1880s, it's quite possible that she missed out on all the records that we have at our disposal, both as an Ilyutovich and as a Zizemsky.

A Tree with many branches
And the Ilyutoviches themselves are not easy to pin down. The 1903 Revision List for Lida, as an example, has 450 Ilyutoviches, in more than 30 different households. My own family, in Household 186, has 24 people; Household 212 has over 40. I have not been able to find an earlier connection between these these two families, or any of the others. Many unconnected families appear to have taken on the name during the course of the 19C. Nobody seems to know why.

So the Ilyutoviches that RR and her father SR are seeing in the Trees of their DNA matches may be nothing to do with mine. Especially since my DNA match to them is indeed very weak: I share 11 cM with SR, and nothing at all with his daughter RR. This could just be endogamous noise, from centuries ago.

Let's check.

AncestryDNA's new Shared Matches feature
AncestryDNA, along with all other DNA platforms, offers you a list of 'Shared Matches'. When you're looking at a particular match, such as SR in this case, this list shows you which of your own matches also have a match to them. If you have some known Cousins on the same platform, this can help you sort out whether the target person is related on your maternal or paternal side.

However, until recently this has been of limited use to Ashkenazi Jews such as myself, as our endogamous history means that people often show up as related on both sides of our family. What's more, most of my 149k "distant matches" on AncestryDNA probably date back to the 18C or earlier, and will be untraceable in the records, which only reach back to the late 18C at best. In any case, our Autosomal DNA loses all potential for matching after 6 generations or so.

A few months ago AncestryDNA introduced an upgrade to their Shared Matches feature, as part of their 'Pro Tools' package (warning: you pay a few ££ extra for this) . The key step forward is that they now show you the strength of the matches your target has with the people you match in common - not just the fact that they match, but how strong that match is, measured in cM (centiMorgans, the term used for the length of a segment of DNA). This could be significant because the more cM two people have in common, the closer their relationship is likely to be.

My Ilyutovich Cousins are quite well represented on AncestryDNA - I have matches with around 20 of them, so hopefully some of them will show up as matches to SR, and we will now be able to see how strong those matches are.

Our shared Ilyutoviches
It turns out that eight members of my own branch of the Ilyutovich family match SR on AncestryDNA, 4 in my own generation, 4 in the next. My own generation will be the most helpful, as we are closer to whoever is our common ancestor.

The new Shared Matches feature shows us the strength of each of our matches with SR:

my generation
myself: 11 cM
RS: 117 cM
AL: 134 cM
RC: 20 cM
- RS, AL, RC are all Third Cousins to me

next generation

JR: 9 cM
LK: 16 cM
JS: 21 cM
RL: 19 cM
- JR is Second Cousin Once Removed to me, the others are all 3C1R

What can we glean from this?

The Shared cM Project
You can see that the matches for most of us range from quite weak to very weak, but two stand out: RS: 117 cM & AL: 134 cM. A quick look at the Shared cM Project Tool on the DNA Painter website confirms that 134 cM cannot be further out than Third Cousin of some sort, whilst 117 cM is almost certain (99.7%) to be in the same range. In other words, the DNA says RS and AL are Third Cousins to SR.

Third Cousin means that they share the same great-great-grandparents, who in the case of RS and AL are Shmuilo Gronim Ilyutovich b 1825 together with either his first wife Leia b 1826, or his second wife Tauba b 1832. I also share these gg-g'parents. So despite our weak DNA match, SR and I are also 3C of some description, and the same applies to RC.

The implication of this is that SR has to have an ancestor - probably a g-g'parent - that is a child of Shmuilo Gronim. Could this be one of the children that we know - ie, one of the g-g'parents of the 4 of us in my generation? Or could it be someone we don't yet know - ie, a new sibling? In fact, it would be another 'new' sibling (see Locating Louis Litowitz, again).

And did you spot that Shmuilo's first wife is a Leia? There's that name again!

What Are The Odds?
The WATO Tool on DNA Painter is designed for this sort of situation. We know now that SR has an ancestor amongst the children of Shmuilo Gronim, but we don't know which one. Shmuilo Gronim had 5 sons (that we know of), and this group of matches represents 4 of them:

Shlioma Dovid b 1851: myself and JR (via 2 different children)
Shimel aka Simon b 1856: LK, JS, RL, RS (all 4 from different children)
Iudel Elia aka Elias b 1860: AL
Evel aka Louis b 1866: RC
Isser aka Isaac b 1870: no matches

So, 8 different strands in all. I put this part of my Tree into WATO. It juggles all the DNA numbers and comes up with possible locations for SR and his g-g'm Leah. Each hypothetical location is given a likelihood score according to how well it fits, taking account of all the match information you have entered, ie it considers the structure of the Tree and the location and amounts of matching DNA for each individual.

At first WATO came up with 90+ hypotheses. Daunting, at first sight. However, over half of these hypotheses had very low likelihood scores, so I discarded them immediately. I then looked at the chronology. From the information RR had given me, I was pretty certain that SR would turn out to be in the same generation as myself, but I decided to give WATO a generation of leeway either side. I therefore discarded all hypotheses that placed SR a generation earlier than my own father, or a generation later than my children.

We eventually ended up with this:

Q: WATO - who is the parent of SR's great-grandmother Leah?

WATO+ Tree for SR's g-g'm Leah

Ans: WATO says: Leah's father is in the blue box - Shmuilo Gronim Ilyutovich
 

NB
1) click on the image to enlarge it
2) the target person SR is the one in the red box
3) WATO doesn't know the names or dates of birth of SR's ancestors - I have added them in to this diagram as a visual check that the generations do indeed fit

So RR and her father SR were right all along, in their intuition that his g-g'm Leah would turn out to be an Ilyutovich. Despite our failure to find her documented in any records anywhere, we have managed to confirm that she was a daughter, previously unknown to us, of my gg-g'f Shmuilo Gronim Ilyutovich. So the five sons now have a sister, and we have more new Cousins.

Consequences
Having a sister called Leah has consequences for this family, which we shall look at in a further post.

Locating Louis Litowitz

Seven years ago - yes, seven! - I posted here about a major family discovery that I was "Over The Moon" about. It was a listing from the 1903 Revision List (census) for the town of Lida, now in Belarus. I won't go over the detail again here, just to say that it provided us for the first time with the names of 24 members of my grandmother's Ilyutovich family, only 8 of whom we had known of before.

This in turn enabled me to trace the family back, eventually into the mists of the 18C, and forward, to the present day. At least, I've managed to trace some of them - several of the lines dried up after a generation or two, and we're pretty sure that a goodly number have passed under the radar.

This then is the starting point for my Granny's Ilyutovich Tree - she's Sheina Zlata; her father Shlioma Dovid, and his father Shmuilo Gronim, were no longer living:

I have since then found descendants, including some DNA matches, for Shimel, Iudel Elia, and Iser, who all emigrated to the USA around the turn of the 20C. Evel is the mystery man - this is his only appearance, as far as I have been able to find, in Russian or any other documents. Maybe he stayed in Russia, maybe there are cousins there we know nothing of, maybe, like so many others, they perished in the Holocaust.

One other thing to note in this Tree is that Shmuilo Gronim seems to have 5 children, all of them male. This is not impossible, of course, but you can't help thinking there must be some daughters somewhere. If there are, they don't show up here or anywhere else in the Russian records.

ThruLines or No Through Road?

AncestryDNA has a feature they call ThruLines, which looks through the Trees put up by your DNA matches to see where they might coincide with your own Tree, and thereby enable you to extend it. I'm all for finding new cousins, of course, but ThruLines' suggestions depend on the accuracy of the Trees it uses, and sadly Ancestry's AI algorithms don't as yet seem to be able to filter out guesswork and wishful thinking. All too often I find that these 'ThruLines' can lead you on a Road to Nowhere.

NO THROUGH ROAD

So I was wary when I came across this suggestion a couple of weeks ago:

(click on pic to enlarge)

Shmuilo G is clearly my great-great-grandfather Shmuilo Gronim, Shlioma D is my g-g'father Shlioma Dovid, Shimel is Shimel, Iudel is Iudel Elia and Isaac is Iser. So far, so good. But who is Louis Litowitz? The surname Litowitz is not a concern in itself, in fact it could well be a clue - the 3 brothers who went to America all americanised to Litowitz, and so did several other Ilyutoviches who do not appear to be related to my family. It was an easy name to slide into.

But where does this 'Louis' come from? We've never heard of him. And how come ThruLines thinks he belongs in my Tree?

Looking for Louis
ThruLines indicates I have 2 DNA matches descending from Louis, albeit quite weak ones, and it may well have been their Trees that have prompted the suggestion. So I had a quick look, and sure enough they pointed back a couple of generations to Louis Litowitz. But no further. There are another 3 or 4 Ancestry Trees that detail his family - his wife and children - but no-one seems to know who his parents were. So how come he is attached to my Tree as a son of my g-g'father Shmuilo Gronim?

So I went looking for Louis.

It didn't take me long. Glancing through my immaculately organised filing system, I realised I had already come across him a couple of years ago, when I was conducting a 'Litowitz trawl'. I must have thought he was promising then, as I had downloaded a number of census and other records, but I had not gone any further. So I put all this information into a fresh Tree - and ended up with exactly the same as the others had. No mother, no father.

Head for the Stone
One of the most useful tools in a Jewish genealogist's toolbox is the headstone. For centuries Ashkenazi Jewish headstones have named the deceased person's father. Indeed, until the use of surnames became obligatory across Europe in the 18C and 19C, the customary way for Jews to identify themselves was as the son or daughter of their father. So if we could find Louis' headstone, it might tell us whether he was a son of Shmuilo Gronim. Or not.

We haven't found it. Not yet, anyway. His burial is listed on the FindaGrave website, but there is no photo of the stone. One of his descendants has put in a request, but the photos are taken by volunteers, and no-one has volunteered as yet.

The Names of Louis
We only have American records for Louis, and they all call him 'Louis'. However, this doesn't tell us what he was called in the 'old country'. The name 'Louis' was commonly used by emigrants to the USA whose Yiddish name began with an 'L', such as Leib, or Leizer. Or sometimes, just because. And those names - Leib and Leizer - don't appear in Shmuilo Gronim's family.

So how could we find what Louis' Yiddish name was? Why, on the headstones of his children, of course! (See 'Head for the Stone' above).

Head for the Stones
Louis had 6 children. Ida, Rose and Ethel do not seem to have entries on FindaGrave, Samuel changed his name to Litt but I can't see him there either, Anna's stone is there but it doesn't have a Hebrew inscription. That leaves Mildred, the youngest. Her stone is indeed on FaG, and it does have a Hebrew inscription:

I don't read Hebrew properly. I read this as: "Mikhlya bat r (something)" - Mikhlya daughter of (who?).

I couldn't work out her father's name. I read the 4 letters - the last word, right to left -  as: " y - o/u/v - a vowel - l ".

I did so want it to be 'Evel'.

I asked the experts on the Tracing the Tribe group on Facebook. They said it was 'Yoel'. So I asked if there might be a connection between the two names, Evel and Yoel.

"Evel is how the name Yoel is recorded in some Cyrillic records from Ukraine," came the response.

QED, as they say in Latin.

• Mildred's father was Louis Litowitz
• his Hebrew name was Yoel
• Yoel is written as Evel in Cyrillic script (ie, Russian)
• there is no other Evel Ilyutovich in the Russian records
• so the mysterious Evel Ilyutovich in our 1903 Revision List is indeed the Louis Litowitz suggested to me by Ancestry's ThruLines
• and Louis' great-grandchildren, although weak DNA matches to me (16cM and 19cM) are indeed my 3rd Cousins

And I still have no idea how ThruLines came up with this suggestion, seemingly unsupported by any evidence available to it.