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?
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.
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