Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #24 Charting the Matches

The DNA Match Tree

This is what the family tree of my Zaturensky DNA matches currently looks like. You'll have to click on the chart to see a legible version. It shows our patriarch, Chaim Zaturensky, at the top, then his two sons, Movsha (orange) and Meir (blue). Movsha is shown with the two wives that we think we know of: *Chana to the left in light orange, and Sura to the right in yellow. *Chana has an asterisk because I'm not really sure that's her name. Movsha and Sura are my great-great-grandparents, and I am 4 generations down from them, in yellow with a red border. 

My DNA cousins are shown in the colours of their great-grandparents, and with the strength of their DNA relationship to me. All the matches are on the AncestryDNA platform, apart from one. Ancestry has a number of plus points - a huge clientele, a massive database of historical records, and many thousands of family trees submitted by users. However it is - to say the least - somewhat lacking in tools for analysing your DNA matches. So much so that this project would never have got off the ground - it would never even have occurred to me - without a crucial clue provided by a wonderful tool on a third-party platform: Auto-Clusters by Evert-Jan Blom of Genetic Affairs.

The Cluster
The idea behind clusters is simple, and it doesn't even need to analyse your DNA. You just try to put your matches together in groups where each person also matches each of the others in that group. In other words, every member of the group is related to all the others. All you're looking at is whether someone appears on someone else's list of matches, without reference to the closeness of that relationship, so some of the relationships might be quite distant. But they are real. Evert-Jan Blom's Auto-Clusters did this automatically for you. I say 'did', because shortly after I used it on my AncestryDNA matches a year or so ago, Ancestry issued him with a 'Cease and Desist' notice, and he had to stop offering it.

You could think of these clusters as extended-family groups. Once you start tracing back from the members of the cluster, they might point you towards a common ancestor. If you're lucky. And if you're really lucky, that common ancestor may not be too far back, and you may be able to identify them using the usual genealogical methods.

Which is more or less what happened here. A well-formed but mysterious cluster of seven matches led me to the Trees that the members of the cluster had put up. Some of them were quite sparse and tentative, but nevertheless they were full of clues which guided much of the subsequent research.

The Network
And here we are. The original Green Cluster of 7 matches has now become a network of some 20 cousins, all descended from Chaim Zaturensky. Note that not all of them are shown in this chart - there are a few who I have not been able to locate on the Tree with certainty, and there's also a pair of siblings, of whom I'm only showing one. Nobody - least of all me - was aware of the structure of the family; in fact I knew nothing except for the family name, which needless to say, nobody else knew.

Very few people were aware of the existence of cousins outside their own branch, and those that did, the knowledge was exceedingly vague. The branches of the family had drifted apart over succeeding generations, notwithstanding the concerted move from Pinsk to Peoria to Los Angeles which we have charted during the course of these posts.

The Branches

The Oranges
Here's my relationship to the descendants of Movsha and *Chana, the orange cousins. They had 3 children that I know of, *Beila (see The Beila Hypothesis), Dora and Joseph. I have located 2 DNA Cousins for each of *Beila and Dora, and none as yet for Joseph. They will all be 3rd Cousins of some sort to me, as they share descendancy from my great-great-grandfather Movsha; however, since these cousins do not share my great-great-grandmother Sura, they are half-cousins to me:

DP and PB are ½3C, as they are the same generation as me
KS and JM are ½3C1R (once-removed), as they are a generation below me

We also have to take into consideration that Ashkenazi Jews are a historically endogamous population, marrying within the community across many centuries. This has led to them sharing much more 'background' DNA with each other than is the case in other, non-endogamous, populations. This could become significant in cases where one person in a match has two AJ parents, and so has 100% AJ DNA, and the other has one AJ and one non-AJ, and will thus have 50% AJ DNA. As a consequence, this second person will have inherited less of the 'background' DNA, and the match will (usually) show a lower overall centiMorgan (cM) count.

All the matches in the Movsha-*Chana group have 100% Ashkenazi Jewish DNA, apart from DP; his father was a Zaturensky descendant, his mother was not Jewish, and so he has around 50% AJ DNA. I have denoted this with a dotted border, so that it is easier to take into account visually on the chart when comparing the strength of the matches. At first sight the cM figures for this group seem to fit in with what my research is telling me - DP matches me at 65 cM, roughly half the level of PB (138 cM), who is 100% AJ. And the matches in the following generation, KS  (58 cM) and JM (31 cM), would be expected to share about half the overall amount of DNA with me that someone in PB's generation does, as they only inherit half their DNA from their Zaturensky parents. JM's figure is a bit lower, but it doesn't alter the general picture, as the amount of DNA people share in the 3C-4C range can be quite erratic.

The Greens

This group are my closest cousins, descendants of my 2g-g'parents Movsha and Sura. They had 2 children that we know of, my g-g'm Shprintsa, and a son Shmuel. So these cousins are full 3Cs to me through Shmuel, but they are also related to me via Shmuel's wife, his first cousin Rochel Leah, daughter of Movsha's brother Meir. Which means our common ancestor is Chaim, the family patriarch. Chaim is my 3g-g'f, so these cousins are 4C to me via this route. To denote this dual relationship, via both the yellow and the blue branches, I have painted them green. Of course.

RM and PL are in my generation, and are 3C + 4C to me. RM has a non-AJ mother, yet the strength of her match to me (126 cM) is virtually the same as PL's. RM's sister's match to me, not shown in this chart, is about 20 cM lower.

GM, meanwhile, is one generation above me in the Tree, though there are only 3 years between us. He has a correspondingly stronger match with me (184 cM), and is my 2C1R + 3C1R. And yes, he's the original 'Private Morris', the mystery match whose appearance near the top of my AncestryDNA list set me off on this trail a year and a bit ago.

The Blues

The final group, the blue group, is composed of the descendants of Movsha's brother Meir. We've already seen the family of Rochel Leah; her siblings are Benjamin (Berl), Joseph and Sarah. I have not yet seen any descendants of Joseph coming up as DNA matches, but there are 4 from Benjamin, from 3 of his children, and 3 from Sarah, from 2 of hers. These are all one step further away from me than the descendants of Movsha; our common ancestor is my 3g-g'f Chaim.

DR, DB and MG are all in my own generation, so they are straight 4Cs to me. DR and MG share similar amounts of DNA with me, although MG is 100% AJ and DR is not. DB comes in as a lower match to me, although she has a higher proportion of AJ DNA than DR. 

Something similar seems to be happening in the following generation, where both JR and CK, my 4C1Rs, have quite low proportions of AJ DNA, and yet CK shares considerably more with me than JR. And also in the generation above, my 3C1Rs DM and HH: DM is 50% AJ, HH is 100%, and yet my match with DM is considerably stronger.

These sound like anomalies, where the numbers don't come out as we might expect them to. However, I think all these apparent discrepancies can be put down to the vagaries of random inheritance. That's what makes us all different.

The Next Steps
Unfortunately, at the moment we can't take the DNA analysis any further on AncestryDNA. Unlike the other companies I have my results on, they do not provide us with a Chromosome Browser, which makes it impossible to check the locations of our matching segments, and maybe find others who match us in the same places. Nor can we check how our matches match each other. This is a great pity, as all bar one of my Zaturensky matches appear to have their results uniquely on Ancestry.

There may, of course, be other members of the family who have tested with other companies. At the moment I have my DNA data on FTDNA, MyHeritage, GedMatch, LivingDNA, and Geneanet, and I look forward to finding more of them there.

I am in contact with many of my new-found Zaturensky cousins, and will be sharing the full version of the Tree with them. Doubtless there will be many corrections and additions to make. There may even be further branches out there somewhere - our 'patriarch' Chaim may well have had siblings, and he may have had more children than the two we know of, Movsha and Meir.

And if you think you are connected with us, whether through DNA or not, please have a look at what I have on my Ancestry Tree, and let me know!

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #9 Dora's Story

Who is Dora?
A couple of the Trees I was looking at referenced a Dora Turansky, married to a husband with the surname Kawin. 'Turansky' sounds like she could be a Zaturensky, so I am definitely interested. However, these Trees do not link Dora to any of the other 'Terensky' families.

One of the Trees in which Dora appeared was that of someone called Paul, who seemed from the Tree to be her great-grandson (he's the 'Private' above). Paul's DNA match to me is 138 cM, which suggests something in the region of Third Cousin. This implies that our common ancestor could be at the level of great-great-grandparents, ie in the generation prior to Dora.

The finger of suspicion
Just a minute. If Dora's father is to be the common ancestor for Cousin Paul and myself, and if the name Turansky comes to her from him, the finger of suspicion is pointing straight at my own great-great-grandfather, Movsha Zaturensky. In which case Dora would be the sister of my great-grandmother, Shprintsa.

So where can we find the name of Dora's father? Is he my Movsha? He's 'D Turansky' in Paul's Tree, but there doesn't seem to be any documentary evidence for this 'D'. Well, death records sometimes name the deceased's father ....

This appears to be the right person. It carries her father's surname, Toransky, but not his given name. Bear in mind that this record is just an index, and that the original may contain more information. Maybe if we can find the original death certificate ...

And here she is:

Aha! Born in Pinsk - sounds promising. And the informant is her son, Sam. He should know.

But look at her father: Morris Toransky, also born in Pinsk!

This has to be my Movsha Zaturensky!!

Another sibling for Shprintsa
So my great-grandmother Shprintsa has another sibling, Dora, to add to the one we found earlier: Shmuel (Simon Morris). Movsha Zaturensky does indeed have 3 children, as was suggested in Cousin Jennifer's Tree - except, two of them are daughters, Shprintsa and Dora, where Jennifer shows her with 3 sons. [We'll come back to the two sons who she shows at the head of the Terence and Trent lines in a later post.]

More to Dora
But there's more to Dora than meets the eye. You may have noticed that Paul's tree gives her mother as 'Chana', whereas Jennifer and I have the mother of Shprintsa and Shmuel as 'Baila'. I must say that I have not as yet seen any documentary evidence for either of these names, but the dates of birth suggest that the two-mother scenario could be a possibility. The best bets we have at the moment for these three siblings are:

Shprintsa b 1858
Shmuel b 1864
Dora b 1870

So it's certainly possible that Movsha's first wife - Baila? - could have died after having Shprintsa and Shmuel, and that he then married - Chana? - some time after 1864, and Dora was born a few years later.

Back to the DNA
This scenario has DNA implications, of course. It would reduce the amount of DNA I share with cousins descended from Dora, such as Paul. I would only share one gg-g'parent with them (Movsha, but not Chana), as against the two I share with Private Morris, and also Cousins Jennifer and Rebecca (all Movsha and Baila). Always remembering that I strongly suspect that Shmuel married his First Cousin Rochel Leah, so my relationship with this branch is doubled, with further implications for DNA sharing.

At this point I will throw in another member of the original Cluster Club, Cousin David, who is also descended from Dora, and who I believe is a half-2C to Paul (that's another story). You will notice that I share a whole lot less DNA with David than I do with Paul ...

Here are the numbers, with my current estimate of the relationships, and the names of the Most Recent Common Ancestors, assuming the double- and half-cousin scenarios outlined above:

As you can see, my matches with Paul and David are in different territories - and yet the paper trail says they have the same relationship to me, ie Half-Third Cousins. Whilst the cM I share with Half-Cousin Paul suggests he should belong in the same category as the Double-Cousins Jennifer and Rebecca.

Oy veh!

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #8 Brothers and More Brothers

Top of the Tree
To recapitulate briefly, we have established that the head of our Zaturensky clan is Chaim, and that he has two sons:
1) Moshe, who has a son Shmuel and a daughter Shprintsa (my great-grandmother)
2) Meir, who has a daughter Rochel Leah

NB: see this Tree in #6 It Takes Two Teranskys to Tango

Shmuel emigrates to the USA, changes his name to Simon Moses, and marries his cousin Rochel Leah. Shprintsa stays in Pinsk, marries Nevakh Schreibman, and does not emigrate. My mystery match Private Morris is descended from Shmuel and Rochel Leah, as are another match Rebecca and her sister Jennifer.

But who are the other members of the Terensky Cluster Club, and how do they all fit together? Some have not posted Trees, but of those that have, Jennifer's (above) is by far the most developed. When I first saw her Tree, she did not have a name for the patriarch, he was just 'Terensky'; after our initial conversations a few weeks ago, she has named him as I have: Chaim Zaturensky.

Three Siblings, Twice Over
However, it is the rest of the Tree that is intriguing. She has Chaim with 3 children: Herman (who is really Moshe) and two others.  Looking at Herman, he is shown with a wife Bailie Czar, and 3 children - Simon Morris with his wife Elizabeth (originally Shmuel and Rochel Leah), and two others, one named Trent, the other Terence. These last are surnames, not given names; they both look like adaptations of Terensky, so the likelihood is they are probably both male. Outside the Simon Morris line, only one given name appears to be known (Beylya).

What I find intriguing in this Tree is that, despite the lack of names, it clearly shows knowledge about the 'shape' of the family, as well as the name changes. The patriarch has 3 sons. One of those has a daughter who marries a Gitelman, another is Herman, who stands at the head of the Morris line, and about the third we are told nothing at all, except that he exists. There must have been a family story about 3 brothers, otherwise why include him?.

Something similar happens in the succeeding generation, within Herman's own line. He has 3 sons, but the only given name we see is Simon. However the family does appear to know that the others adopted different surnames: Terence and Trent. Which suggests there's another family story about 3 brothers.

One of the Clan
Note that the current generation do not appear to know that Simon's wife Elizabeth/Rochel Leah is also member of our Zaturensky clan. I am only in a position to suggest that she is, because a) I have found documentation that she is a Teransky from Pinsk, which some of the others don't seem to have found, and b) the strength of my DNA match to Private Morris indicates that there could well be a second strand to our relationship. There is a good possibility that (a) explains (b). This would require her father Meir to be a brother to Moshe/Herman (see #6 again). Might Meir be the lonely 'no-name Terensky' we see in Jennifer's Tree, next to Herman?

My Clustered Cousins
So who are the unnamed siblings in this Tree? Are their families correctly located? And is this where we will find the remaining members of the Cluster Club, who should all turn out to be Third or maybe Fourth Cousins to me? The first two questions need a bit more work, but I can tell you now that the answer to the last question is "Yes".

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #2 The Cluster Club

Records
I started by trawling through the records, trying to trace my new mystery cousin - the "Private Morris" of post #1. I was hoping that I would be able to find out how he was linked to the Simon Morris who appeared in his Tree. Maybe in the course of this search I would be able to discover how they were related to me. I'll come back to this later, because this line of research was soon overtaken by one that proved to be much more significant.

Clusters
I had just started playing about with Clusters. This is a technique for putting the DNA matches you share in common with someone into groups, in which each member of the group matches each other member, or at least matches most of them. If you're lucky, you could end up with a limited number of clusters whose members match each other more than they match anyone else. If you're really lucky, you might be able to identify each cluster as representing a different branch of your family. So Cluster #1 might be recognisable as your paternal Smiths, cluster #2 might be your maternal Joneses, and so on. If you're really really lucky, you'll get 8 clusters that you can pin onto your 8 great-great-grandparents, one cluster each. Genealogy solved, at a stroke. Simple.

I should be so lucky.

Endogamy
Unfortunately, DNA inheritance is not that straightforward for people of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. We are historically an endogamous community, descended from what was initially a relatively small number of people - maybe only a few hundred at first - who moved eastwards across Europe during the Middle Ages. Later generations continued marrying within the community, each time passing down and recombining bits and pieces of the same original pool of DNA. We end up looking, to the DNA-analysing algorithms at least, as though we are all related to each other.

Nevertheless I gave it a try, just to see what would turn up. Here's what turned up.

My first Cluster run

There were a dozen or so fairly clear clusters, each in its distinctive (randomly allocated) colour, and a host of scattered grey dots that indicate people who were related to a second group in addition to their main one - endogamy in dots, as it were. Scanning through the names - not shown here - I spotted my mystery man, Private Morris. He's in the green cluster near the bottom, along with half-a-dozen other people, and as you can see, it's the most fully-formed cluster of all.

Take a moment to take that in. The green cluster is offering me a group of DNA matches which includes my mystery cousin and 6 others, who are all related to each other - and to me, of course. In other words, it identifies for me a group of people who all share a common ancestor with me. Wow! But which ancestor? Which branch of my family?

Which side are they on?
I already suspected that Private Morris would probably turn out to be on my paternal side, as he didn't match a known 1C1R on my mother's side. Neither did he match a 2C1R on my father's mother's side. So he must be something to do with the family of my father's father, Movsha Schreibman, who were from Pinsk, in Belarus. You may recall that his father was Nevakh Schreibman, and his mother Shprintsa Zaturensky.

Needless to say, I didn't recognise any of the people in the cluster, and could see no clue in their surnames. Three of them matched me at over 100cM, so were possibly 3C; the other 3 were in the range 50-70cM, maybe a generation further out. And as we saw in the earlier post, Private Morris shares over 180cM with me, so he could even be a generation closer. The good news was that all bar one of them had Trees, and this is where the fun really starts.

Fun with Trees
Here we go.

(I'm using my matches' given names here, but not their surnames)

Paul's Tree:

Rebecca's Tree:

and:

Dorie's Tree:

Harvey's Tree:

So, between the four of them, they have:
names: Turnansky, Turiansky, Terensky, Terensky
births: Pinsk, Pinsk, Minsk, Pinsk
dates of birth: 4 different ancestors born between 1863 and 1882
deaths: Los Angeles, Peoria, Houston, Los Angeles

Plus, Rebecca seems to have:
- Simon turning into Sam, with slightly different dates
- Simon/Sam changing his surname from Turiansky to Morris
- Simon's father named as Herman

One family?
At this point it looks like we are looking at four descendants of the same original family, each telling substantially the same story, albeit with minor differences:

i) they all claim descent from some variant of  T*r*nsky
ii) they all reference Pinsk, or Minsk, which could amount to the same thing - it was the regional capital (and is now the capital of Belarus)
iii) two of them - with surnames recalled differently, so possibly from different branches - end up in Los Angeles
iv) the variation in the surname passed down suggests that they may not be as close as 1C to each other, and so may not know each other's stories
v) and the DNA says they are all related to each other, and are all around 3C-4C to me

You know what? I'm beginning to wonder whether there's enough here to suggest that the name T*r*nsky, from Pinsk, might be derived from my Zaturensky, from Pinsk ...

NB: If you have your DNA data on MyHeritageDNA, there is a basic clustering tool available on-site. Otherwise you'll need to go to Genetic Affairs, where the genius that is Evert-Jan Blom has developed a tool that will do clusters - and a whole lot more - for profiles on FTDNA and AncestryDNA.

If you're interested in how Clustering works, MyHeritage has a good explanation.