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!

Genetic Groups on MyHeritage: 5 What Next?

In previous posts I've put down some First Thoughts on MyHeritage's new Genetic groups, discussed their Ethnicity Estimates and Historical Maps and found them both wanting, and had a first look at how the Groups themselves shape up in my own family, and found them very promising indeed. 

Here's a few ideas for next steps.

1 Match info
First off, MyH should add the Genetic Groups to the information it gives us about all our matches. This information is already quite substantial, but the GGs have the potential to add even more value to it. Up front, in the Match List, just below the Estimated Relationships, there's plenty of room:

2 Match filter
Next, add a Filter for 'Your Genetic Groups' at the top of the Match List, so that we can see in one list all matches who share a particular GG with us. Once again, there is plenty of room. This could be very revealing, and lead to immediate progress in tracing family connections.

3 Group info on segments
Let us see the segment information on which the Genetic Groups are based. This could be via an option to display a GG label on segments in the Chromosome Browser, for instance. This would immediately help us to distinguish maternal matches from paternal ones, and could even help us to further narrow down how these matches are related to us.

4 Maternal/paternal labels on segments
Once we have identified our closest maternal and paternal matches, MyH could possibly even automate the allocation of maternal and paternal sides to individual segments, thus taking the 'bucket' procedure used by FTDNA to a whole new level.

5 Pile-up info
MyH say they have taken segments of all sizes into account when compiling the Genetic Groups. I presume this includes the pile-up regions that are the bane of Ashkenazi Jewish genetic genealogy. Could it even be that the pile-ups themselves are pointing towards the Genetic Groups? For instance, could membership of a given GG be determined by a combination of specific pile-ups on specific chromosomes? If this is what is happening, MyH has all the info needed to identify this association for us.

6 Timeline
Following on from (5), might it then be possible to suggest a timeframe for the formation of these Genetic Groups? This could contribute towards our understanding of the patterns of migration of the AJ community, in particular the movement from Western Europe towards the East during medieval times, and even the origins of the community itself.

7 Time to MRCA
In turn, could (6) even lead us towards an estimation of Time to Most Recent Common Ancestor(s), for any given pile-up region? Where and when did a particular pile-up segment originate?

8 Location, location, location
How local can we get? In her original article - all of two weeks ago! - Roberta Estes said that MyH had "absolutely nailed" her Dutch ancestry, pinning one of her Genetic Groups down to an area 20 miles square.  I don't expect quite this level of precision for AJs - but ..... ???

9 Third Parties
I would love to see what our friends at DNA Painter and Genetic Affairs can dream up. I have in the past asked Jonny Perl at DNA Painter if they could find a way for AJs to identify our individual pile-up regions. Maybe he could offer us the option of colourising our Genetic Groups in the Chromosome Browser display? And Genetic Affairs' AutoClusters do not seem to be working for AJs as well as they do for non-endogamous groups. Can Evert-Jan Blom find a way of including MyH's Genetic Groups in the cluster information he gives us? We would then be able to see to what extent there is a correlation between the clusters, which are based on shared matches, and the GGs, which are based on shared segments - ie, actual DNA.

That's probably enough to be going on with.

Genetic Groups on MyHeritage: 4 The Tales They Tell

 

The Genetic Groups assigned to myself and my brother by MyHeritageDNA
NB: Confidence levels: High - Medium - Low

Genetic Groups (First Thoughts) are the most significant new feature of the recent upgrade to MyHeritageDNA. They are doing something that I don't think is even on the radar of any of the other consumer-oriented DNA companies. They compare the autosomal DNA of thousands of people at the segment-level, and where they find sufficient similarities, they assign us to specific Genetic Groups. I think this approach has huge potential for those of us who are looking to uncover our genetic background, at both individual and community levels, and also for those seeking to discover new - or long-lost - family connections.

Not ours, but theirs
But first, let's dispose of the Ethnicity Estimates and Historical Maps presented to us by MyH as part of this "upgrade".

In previous posts (Who I Am and Who I Am Not, and Mapping the Past, or Not) I have been highly critical of both features. They are based on faulty logic, and are consequently highly misleading. Both purport to tell us about our ancestry, but in fact both are based not on our own genetic history but on that of the people we have DNA matches with. The "ethnicities" and maps are not ours, but theirs.

This pseudo-science culminates in the absurdity of a map of Europe in the period 1600-1650, which appears to portray Britain as being home to a substantial proportion of the continent's Ashkenazi Jews. At this time, of course, there weren't any Jews in Britain at all. Jews - all Jews - had been excluded from the country for over 300 years.

Both features should be consigned to the bin marked "In need of urgent attention". At the very least they both need to display a Genetic Genealogy Health Warning, prominently and immediately. Maybe something along the lines of: "These Ethnicities and Maps can seriously damage your understanding of your genetic origins. Remember: they are not yours, they are those of your matches."

Genetic Groups
The Genetic Groups, on the other hand, appear to be built on a sound scientific basis. I shall look at what I think these Groups can bring to our family history research, and suggest ways in which the concept could be developed.

The chart at the top shows the Groups that have been assigned to myself and my brother. Both our parents were from Ashkenazi Jewish families, our mother's side from Poland and our father's from Belarus. I'm hoping that we can make some sort of sense out of these Groups. Are some of them paternal side, and some maternal? Is there a geographical logic to them? Or are they all one indistinguishable mess, as most of AJ genetic genealogy seems to be?

Note that MyH gives a us 'Confidence level' for each of these Groups, of High, Medium or Low. In the charts I have shown these in bold, normal, and italic script respectively.

I have been classified in 5 Genetic Groups, my brother Brian in 6 - the same 5 as I have, with one extra. For GG5215 and 5052, we are both High Confidence; I am High for GG5043 and Medium for 5073, whilst Brian is the other way round. We are both Medium for GG5032. Meanwhile Brian has a Medium for GG5227, which I don't seem to have at all.

So far, not so far. Brian and I are very similar, but not identical.

The cousins show up
However, I think there are indeed some interesting things to discover when we look at how some of our cousins show up.

Genetic Groups for myself, Brian and some of our cousins

NB: blue - paternal side, pink - maternal side

Brian and I have 14 known cousins on MyH-DNA, 7 on our paternal side (blue in the chart, from various places in Belarus), and 7 maternal (pink, from Central Poland 100km West of Warsaw, on or near the Vistula River). In the blue corner they range from Katy, a 1C1R (first cousin once-removed) to Gerald, a 3C1R. Katy shares all our ancestral families on the paternal side, the 2Cs represented here all share Ilyutovich and Levin, but not Schreibman, and the 3Cs share only Levin.

In the pink corner the cousins we have on MyH at the moment are a little more distant. The 4Cs share only Frankenstein, whilst the 3C-4C*2s are all closely related to each other - Arlene and Sandra are sisters, Daniel K and Laurie are also siblings, children of Sandra. This line is related to us twice over, via two brother/sister Frankenstein - sister/brother Zegelman marriages over 150 years ago.

As far as we know, there is no connection between our paternal and maternal sides, until our parents got together, of course. However, FTDNA does insist on telling us that a number of our matches there match us on both sides. We presume this is down to general AJ endogamy, especially given the geographical separation between the two sides over at least the past 200 years.

Intrigue
The resulting charts are intriguing; please note I am not necessarily looking at the Groups in order from left to right:

GG5215: nobody in the pink corner (maternal side) is in this Group, and there are only 2 blues; only one of these blues - Katy - has a High Confidence rating. She is our only Schreibman match on MyH at the moment. We can therefore confidently classify GG5215 as our Schreibman Genetic Group.

GG5073: has no pinks, but all the blues are there. GG5073 is therefore paternal, and associated with Belarus. Furthermore, the only High-rated cousins are the Ilyutoviches, who were from Lida in NW Belarus. Katy, who shares Ilyutovich, is Medium-rated, as are the 2 Levin cousins, who do not. Brian is High, I am Medium. This is our strongest Ilyutovich Group.

GG5052: is present across both blues and pinks - but all the pinks are High-rated; amongst the blues, only the Levins are High, whilst some of the Ilyutoviches are Low. This is clearly our main Frankenstein/Zegelman Group, and is based in West Central Poland. It could be that our Levins have a connection with this area that we do not (yet) know about. Or it could just be more general AJ endogamy creeping in.

GG5043: all cousins bar Katy share this Group. Only Gerald of the blues is rated High; on the pink side, only the double Frankenstein/Zegelman cousins are High. I am High, Brian is Medium. I don't think we yet in a position to definitively allocate this Group to paternal or maternal, to Belarus or to Poland.

GG5032: Brian and I are both Medium. No-one in either blues or pinks is rated High. All the pinks are in this group, but only half are Medium, the others are Low. On the blue side it is a bit more nuanced. All the Ilyutoviches have it, whereas of the others, only one Levin does, and he is Low. There are 2 Highs, Daniel and his nephew Jeffrey, one of whose lines is Rothstein from Miedrzyziec Podlaski in Eastern Poland, not far from the border with Belarus. So, more endogamy, but leaning towards E Poland.

GG5227: Brian is Medium, whilst I don't have this Group at all. The only others who have this Group are the two Rothsteins, and three of the Frankenstein/Zegelmans, but they are all weak. I'm guessing Central Poland for this one, maybe tending towards the East.

Strangeness and Litvaks
GG5031: this one is strange, as whilst neither Brian nor I have this group at all, most of our cousins on both sides do. Of the blues, Katy is High, and all the Ilyutoviches are Medium, as is Beatrice of the Levins. Of the pinks, all the Frankensteins and Zegelmans, bar Angela, appear, but at a lower rating than the blues. Katy's High rating is intriguing; this Group is clearly not a Schreibman Group - Brian and I would be there if it were. Katy's father's family is from Lithuania, and we have no known connection there, although Lida, our shared Ilyutovich area, is close to the Lithuanian border, and often came under Lithuanian influence. Maybe some of the other cousins have Litvak connections; we know little of their Trees outside how they connect to us.

As you would expect, there are further Groups like this last one that have some cousinly representation, but that Brian and I are absent from. However, there are not many of them, and our cousins' presence in them is sparser than in the Groups that we do share with them.

OK. That's a first analysis of our Genetic Groups. Fascinating, although at the moment I don't see much more that we can do with them. 

What next?

Genetic Groups on MyHeritage: 3 Mapping the Past, or Not

 

MyHeritage AJ Genetic Group 5215, distribution 1850-1900

Ashkenazi Genetic Groups
MyHeritage has discerned 24 distinct genetic groups for Ashkenazi Jews, based on their analysis of the autosomal DNA of the people who have tested with the company. I must say before we even start, that I don't think this has ever been attempted before. It is a huge advance on the vague, confusing and inaccurate "Ethinicity Estimate" approach that they and other companies have been using up till now.

I must also say that unfortunately, the most visually appealing element of the initial roll-out of Genetic Groups, the historical distribution maps, are presented in a highly misleading way. This post attempts to explain how this happens.

My 5 GGs
MyH has allocated me to 5 of the 24 AJ groups, which in itself is of interest. It suggests that I do not have much, if any, genetic affinity to the members of any of the other 19 groups. In other words, AJs are not all related to each other. It suggests that our endogamy is within our own genetic groups, and not across them. Which makes sense, but also raises an intriguing issue: many of these AJ Genetic Groups appear to cover quite wide geographical areas (see the map in the post First Thoughts), and many of these Groups appear to be in the same areas at the same time. How did they manage to keep the groups genetically distnct? Did they not inter-marry?

Also of interest, to me at least, is the fact that I do not appear to connect to any of the Sephardic Groups. That knocks that family myth on the head.

From Trees to Maps
One of my AJ groups is numbered 5215. About half the people in Genetic Group 5215 have posted family Trees on MyH. The company has used the location information included in these Trees to map the geographical distribution of the ancestors of group members over time. 

The map above purports to show where the ancestors of the members of Genetic Group 5215 were living in the period 1850-1900. There are other maps for each of the 50-year periods between the years 1600 and 2000, and it is highly instructive to see how the distribution of population shown on these maps evolves over the years.

A bit of a puzzle
The families of all 4 of my grandparents are documented in Eastern Europe in the period shown on this map - my mother's side in Central Poland, and my father's in Belarus. The map above shows a just a light smattering in Belarus, some in Central Poland, some in the Austria-Hungary area, and stronger concentrations in the Netherlands and in Britain. Were my 5215s really more concentrated in England than in Belarus or Poland in the late 19C? This is a bit puzzling, because we know that the mass immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe to the UK only began after 1880, and the bulk of it was after 1900. So why does the map suggest otherwise?

A little look at Belarus
Before we delve further into this, let's have a closer look at Belarus.

When we zoom in on Belarus in the 1850-1900 map, we can see that the 5215s are indeed represented in my three paternal-side areas - my Schreibmans and Zaturenskys are from Pinsk (bottom left), my Levins from Gomel (Homyel, bottom right), and my Ilyutoviches from Lida (upper left). But there are some wide open spaces in between. Some of my other Genetic Groups have even less presence in Belarus, so this might still be an indicator that this is indeed where my families are from. Unless, of course the pinpointing of these three areas has arisen at least in part from the information I have put into my own MyH Tree - in which case, we're going round in circles.

Pause for thought
At this point, we should pause, and remember where the information that has gone into these maps comes from. MyH has found that amongst the people who have tested with them, there are 1330 whose autosomal DNA is sufficiently aligned to justify the creation of a Genetic Group specifically for them, GG5215. Just under half of these - 623 - have Trees on MyH. The company has combed those Trees for whatever ancestral date and place information it can find, in particular births, marriages and deaths. It then maps this material in 50-year periods. So far, so good.

However, what they have not done, and cannot do, is DNA-test all the ancestors that appear on those Trees. They may not all be GG5215s. In fact, we know that many of them are not; for a start, they have allocated me to 4 other AJ Groups. The descendants who have tested may show sufficient genetic characteristics to warrant being allocated to this Group, but many or most of them will also have ancestors from other AJ Groups, or who are not AJ at all.

For instance
A couple of examples from my own case will illustrate this point. As I mentioned before, half my ancestors are AJs from Poland, half AJs from Belarus. I have both sides documented in those places back to +/- 1800. So I would be happy to accept that GG5215 covers both areas, and both sides of my family. But none of my genetic ancestors were in western Europe or the UK in that period, and I very much doubt that any of the AJ ancestors of other members of the group were there either, for the reasons outlined above. So what is the genetic connection between GG5215 members and these places? It can only be that some of them have ancestors who were not AJ. So I'm expecting to see evidence of non-AJ ancestors in the Trees of at least some of my fellow GG5215 group members, and specifically of ancestors from Western Europe and Britain.

Close to home
And I don't have far to look. Consider my 1C1R (first cousin once-removed), Katy. We share my paternal line - her grandfather was my Uncle Mick, my father's brother. Mick married Margaret, a non-Jewish English woman, so although Katy got enough of the characteristic GG5215 DNA from Mick to qualify for the Group, she also has 25% English ancestry through her grandmother Margaret. MyH have picked her English ancestors up from her Tree, and put them on the 5215 map. Where they don't belong.

And this is all exacerbated by the fact that people with English ancestry can generally take their lines much further back that AJs can, with the exception maybe of a handful of rabbinical lines, and this applies to places as well as names. So when you look at the earlier maps for GG5215, you find that the places where records are available show up much more strongly than those where they're not. And the further back you go, the greater the disparity, and the more skewed the results will be. 

Reductio ad Absurdum
And you end up with this absurdity:

MyHeritage AJ Genetic Group 5215, distribution 1600-1650

But there weren't any Jews in England in 1600-1650.

They had been expelled in 1290 and were not re-admitted until 1656. (See From Expulsion to Readmission, by Ariel Hessayon, for the background to both of these episodes). And even then they were mostly Sephardim, originating from Spain and Portugal, not AJs - including no doubt my GG5215 ancestors - who to the best of our historical knowledge, originated in Germany, moved towards the east in the late Middle Ages, and were by 1600 well established in Poland and probably settling in Belarus as well.

So whilst these maps do represent my GG5215 ancestors, to the best of our limited collective knowledge, they also represent the ancestors of all members of 5215 who have Trees on MyH. And this includes those of their ancestors who were not 5215ers, or not Jews at all, and could have come from anywhere, especially, it seems, from Southern England and the Netherlands.

So it's not my ancestors on these maps, it's theirs.

Genetic Groups on MyHeritage: 2 Who I Am and Who I Am Not

 

Who I am not

Well, that looks interesting. Under the heading 'Your ethnicity results', MyHeritage appears to be informing me that in addition to being 91% Ashkenazi Jewish, I am 2.9% Celtic Fringe, 2.8% Middle Eastern, 1.9% Mizrahi Jewish, and 1.1% West Asian. I must say that this comes as a bit of a surprise, as we have always considered ourselves to be 100% AJ, my mother's side coming from Poland and my father's from Belarus.

At first glance the 2.9% figure seems to be suggesting that one of my great-great-great-grandparents might have been from one of the Celtic areas of Britain. However, I have researched all 4 of my grandparents' lines back to this level - to 1800 or earlier - and as far as I can tell there's no sign of an Irishman anywhere. There's Leweks and Jankels, Movshas and Chaims, but absolutely no Paddys. There's no indication that anyone from Ireland, Scotland or Wales migrated to Poland or Belarus, married a local Jew, and forwarded their DNA down through the generations. And the same goes for the other "ethnicities" that I seem to have been allocated.

Something's not quite right.

Who they are

The list is wrongly labelled. Look at the subheading under 'Ethnicities' at the top. This is not the distribution of my own ethnicity. It's the distribution of ethnicities across all of the people who match me. It's not who I am, it's who they are.

Which could be of interest in its own right, of course. How come I share DNA with over 2000 people whose DNA has a strong element of Irish, Scottish and Welsh?

How it comes about

Let's do a mind exercise.

This is what my Ancestor Chart, back to my 16 great-great-grandparents, looks like, with me at the bottom. Yours will be similar.

Now here's the Descendant Tree for one of these couples, Shmuilo Gronim Ilyutovich b 1825 and his wife Tauba Belagratsky (they are at the top here, and this chart also shows their parents). They're from Lida in NW Belarus. I've taken it down as far as my own generation.

The chart is illegible because there are 83 of us in my generation. At least those are the ones I have been able to trace, there may be a few more yet to be discovered. There are also a number of people down the generations who I have been unable to follow through, and there will certainly be some who have slipped through the net entirely, especially in 19C Belarus where the records can be patchy to say the least. But I do have names and places for the intervening generations of all the 3Cs shown here. None of these cousins, nor any of their Ilyutovich ancestors, were in Ireland, by the way. However, one or two of them may well have married people with Irish ancestry, once they reached countries where there was Irish immigration as well as Jewish, such as the UK or the USA.

Now consider that this is the Tree for only one of my g-g-g'parent couples. There are seven more couples at this level, each of which may well build up through the generations as this one does. Even if they "only" come down to half the size of this family, say to an average of around 40 in each family in my generation, that is potentially another 300 or so 3Cs.

I have developed some of these families to a similar level to this one, and the same arguments apply. However there are a few families I know little about. Those 40 potential 3Cs may well exist in these families, I just don't know anything about them. I have no idea who their ancestors married, or who they had children with. Did they move elsewhere in Poland or Belarus? Did they emigrate? Were they killed in the Holocaust? Might one of them have married an Irishman or woman?

What about his brothers and sisters?

But there's more. Take Shmuilo Gronim, for instance. He was one of seven children. I have information on just two of his brothers, and that dries up around 1900. I have no idea what happened to them or any of their families. Some of them may have had descendant charts as fully populated as that of Shmuilo. Their descendants would be 4Cs to me, and there could be another 400 potential cousins out there. I have no idea if they even exist, let alone whether any of them might carry any Irish DNA.

And of course, we can repeat this exercise for the siblings of each of my 15 other g-g-g'parents. There could be another 400 unknown 4Cs in each of those families. That's 6000 more cousins. As if I didn't have enough already.

Celtic Connections

And there's a good chance that somewhere along the line, an ancestor or two of at least a few of these unknown thousands might have married a Celt. And when a descendant of theirs in the 2010s or 2020s takes a DNA test with MyHeritage, their Celtic DNA will show up in their results, along with whatever AJ DNA has come down to them.

It's not me that has Celtic DNA, or Middle Eastern, or Mizrachi, or West Asian - it's my matches.

What about my brother?

My brother also has his DNA on MyH. Here's his Ethnicity results:

Oh? Wot, no Irish?? My brother has a similar number of matches to me with Celtic ethnicity, over 2000 of them. However, he doesn't seem to share any of their DNA. He also has more West Asian, plus a trace of Central Asian that I don't have, but none of my Mizrachi.

Of course, although my brother and I received our DNA from the same two parents, we only actually coincide on 36% of it. The other 64% of my DNA consists of segments that he doesn't have, and vice-versa. This explains why our match lists can seem so wildly different, outside of known cousins. Even with known cousins we share significantly different amounts with many of them, and often share on different segments.

So it shouldn't be surprising that we see a difference in the ethnicities of some of our respective matches. I have segments, some of which my brother doesn't have, that I share with matches who have Celtic, or Mizrachi, origins. Conversely, he has segments that I don't have, that he shares with matches who have Central Asian origins.

Again, it's not us, it's them.

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: #16 The Person Who Will Always Know

Who is this Joseph?

Whilst researching the members of my Terensky DNA Cluster, I kept coming across documents for a Joseph Teranski (and versions thereof). The Cluster does not include any of his descendants, and I haven't managed to identify any from amongst my AncestryDNA matches. The documents showed him to be following a similar trajectory to my Zaturenskys - Russia to Peoria to Los Angeles - although I couldn't find anything to pin him down as a member of this family. After they moved to LA in the mid-1920s Joseph and his sons Sam and Myer anglicised their surname to 'Trent'.

This alerted me to another clue. In the Tree of Cousin Jennifer, a member of the DNA Cluster and a descendant of Shmuel Zaturensky aka Simon Morris, she shows one branch of the family adopting the surname 'Terensky', and another taking on 'Trent'. She didn't show any descendants of these branches, but at least this shows that her family were aware of the existence of these other branches.

One too many Josephs

Things began to get rather confused when I started looking more closely at a Joseph Terensky who definitely was one of mine - several of his descendants were in my DNA Cluster. This Joseph also followed the family trail from Pinsk via Peoria to Los Angeles. He's a son of Meir Zaturensky, who we came across earlier in this saga as the father of Rochel Leah Teransky. I'll be following this Joseph, and his brother and sister, in later posts.

 

The two Josephs appeared to have different birth dates, and their wives and children appeared to have different names; on the other hand, they were both shoemakers. They made the move from Illinois to California at different times, but there were periods when they were both living in the same town. On several occasions I came across documents and was not sure who I should allocate them to. Were they the same person, leading a very complicated life? We've already seen at least one like that in this family. Or were they two related people with (more or less) the same name? If they were related, how closely? Was this new Joseph Teranski indeed one of my clan?

All you need is a document

I have probably amassed more documents on this Joseph than on any of the other members of this tribe, but frustratingly I have been unable to find any mention of a specific place of birth. I want him to be born in Pinsk, of course - but all I see on Census returns is 'Russia', 'Russ Polish', 'Latvia', and 'Lithuania'. On the birth certificate of his son Samuel, in 1898, Joseph is shown as 'Polish' and born in 'Poland'. This is prescient, as Pinsk did indeed become part of Poland - but only 20 years later, after the First World War and the Polish struggle for independence from the nascent Soviet Union. And Latvia and Lithuania are hundreds of miles away, off the map. No mention of Pinsk.

Nor could I find any mention of Joseph's father's name. Joseph died in 1965, but my online searches have not turned up a death certificate, or a headstone, either of which might, if you were lucky, show a father's name. Ideally I would like him to be a son of my great-great-grandfather Movsha, or failing that, of his brother Meir. Or there could be an as yet unknown third brother.

However, even without confirmation of his place of birth, or his father's name, I was convinced that there was enough evidence in the surnames and the life-journeys, and in Jennifer's Tree, to suggest that Joseph was fairly closely related to my Zaturenskys.

All I needed was a document.

And then I found one.

I was following up Abe 'Albert Allen' Morris, born in 1912 in Peoria, the youngest son of our old friend Shmuel Zaturensky aka Simon Morris. Abe is probably the father of my mystery match, Private Morris. He was drafted into the US Army in 1940, and this is his draft card.

The 'person who will always know your address' is Sam Trent. And Sam Trent is Albert Allen Morris's cousin.

Cousin? Cousin??

Cousin? That implies that one of Albert's parents must be a sibling to one of Sam's.

Albert's parents are Simon Morris aka Shmuel Zaturensky, and Rochel Leah Teransky. Shmuel and Rochel Leah are First Cousins, children of the Zaturensky brothers Movsha and Meir respectively. Sam's father is the new Joseph Teranski. So Joseph should be a brother of either Shmuel, or Rochel Leah. And his father should be either Movsha, or Meir.

Just a minute. Meir already has a son Joseph - the other Joseph, the one we keep getting mixed up with this one.

So this new Joseph must be a son of Movsha, my gg-g'f. And Joseph's grandchildren, if I can find them, will be my Third Cousins.

When we were looking at Dora, we surmised that Movsha was probably married twice, and that his first wife may have been called *Bajla, and his second wife, *Chana. *Bajla would be the mother of my g-g'm Shprintsa, b 1858, and of Shmuel (Simon Morris) b 1861, and appears to have died by 1865. *Chana would be the mother of Bejla b 1866 and Dora b 1870. Joseph appears to have been born somewhere between 1866 and 1872, according to which document you are looking at, so he would probably be a child of *Chana.

As it now stands

So Movsha's family now looks like this:

We have no documentary evidence for either of Movsha's two wives, only that different family Trees suggested different names for their respective gg-g'mothers. The DNA evidence suggests that I am closer to Shmuel's descendants than to the other lines, so I am happy to suggest that he and my g-g'm Shprintsa are children of a first wife, whilst the other three are from a second wife.

We do not have documentary evidence for *Chana's daughter *Beila, but somebody with her name would fit very nicely. DNA evidence suggests that I have a closer connection to Dora's descendants than to *Beila's, so I am surmising that there may be a Kawin link further back, possibly via *Chana, that was reinforced when Dora married Joseph Kawin.

In Joseph Teranski's case, there is fairly good circumstantial evidence in the surname and the family journey from Russia to Peoria to Los Angeles, but crucially there is one document that clinches the relationship. It tells us that Sam Trent is Albert Morris's cousin, and that he is The Person Who Will Always Know.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #15 The Beila Hypothesis

The mystery of the missing sister 

The last post (#14 Dora and Ockham's Razor) left us wondering whether we should be looking for a sister for Dora Zaturensky. We need to find a mother for Benjamin Gitelman, and she needs to be sufficiently closely related to Dora such that:

a) Benjamin can say on his passenger manifest in 1922 that he was going to his 'half-brother", Dora's son Sam Kawin

and

b) my tentative analysis of my DNA matches with Cousins David (descended from Benjamin) and Paul (descended from Dora) still makes sense

So a sister would fit the bill on both counts. It wouldn't fully account for the 'half-brother' designation on Benjamin's manifest, as if their mothers are sisters, Sam and Benjamin would be first cousins. But I think I've exhausted the possibility of a half-sibling relationship - I just can't see it. So I'm going for sisters, and consequently, cousins.

Beylya Terensky?

Then I recalled this snippet from Cousin Jennifer's Tree on Ancestry, which I referred to in an earlier post, but we weren't looking at Gitelmans at that point.

In this Tree, Benjamin's father is a Gitelman, but his mother is shown as Beylya Terensky. Not Dora. At the moment we have no idea who this Beylya Terensky is. There is no mention of a Lipschitz; nor, by the way, does the name seem to appear anywhere else in relation to this family.

This looks to me very much like one of those half-recalled family stories, passed on to later generations by someone who is pretty certain of some details but a bit woolly on the rest. Which is not surprising, because the whole story is getting *very* complicated, and it's several generations back, pretty much lost in the mists of time. And Beylya's birth date of 1888 must be a typo - Benjamin was born in 1885 or 86, so if she's his mother she must have been born some time in the 1860s.

Beylya Turansky?

And then I remembered seeing that Jennifer has another version of this Tree, which uses the name Turansky.

This version introduces a whole crowd of new people that don't seem to appear anywhere else in either family knowledge or records. The father of the family is Morris (not shown here) - though Jennifer may have taken that name from the discussion she and I had a few weeks ago - and the name of his wife is unknown. They have 9 children, all shown with Yiddish names, all born in Pinsk.

These are the first 3 children:

Is this our Dora? And is this the Beylya that appears as the mother of Benjamin in Jennifer's other Tree? It's certainly looking promising.

No source is given for this family group. The fact that they all have Yiddish names suggests that this family did not emigrate; if they had, Jennifer would probably have known some at least of them by Americanised names. It looks to me very much as though the list has been provided by a Belarussian researcher, transcribed from one of the 'Revision Lists' compiled periodically throughout the 19C by the Russian authorities to keep track of citizens for tax and conscription purposes.

This immediately poses a problem, as we know that our family were using 'Zaturensky' in Russia, at least until they arrived in the USA. All the members of the family whose emigration I have been able to trace use some form of the name Zaturensky on their passenger documents. So how come they're using Turansky here? If it is the same family, of course ...

Notice that Beylya here is born in 1866; Dora's birth date, as we have seen, varies between 1869 and 1872, as suggested here. If this list is indeed from a Russian Revision List, the dates will probably be more reliable than those Dora gave after she got to America - the Russian authorities used to check names and dates against other records, to try to catch conscription-dodgers in particular. So if we lean towards 1872 for Dora, we have to conclude that Beylya looks the more likely of the two to be the mother of a child born in 1886, when Dora would only have been 14 years old.

Are they really ours?

Provided, of course, that this is indeed our family. Notice that there is no indication of the existence of a family for Morris by a previous wife, which is where I would expect my great-grandmother Shprintsa and her brother Shmuel (Simon Morris) to appear. However, Shprintsa had married by around 1880, and Shmuel left for the USA around that time as well. If the list was put together after 1880 there would be no reason for them to appear on it - they were no longer part of this household.

But how come Jennifer has Benjamin down as the son of Beylya, whereas when he emigrates to the USA in 1922, he says he's going to his half-brother Sam Kawin, who we know to be the son of Dora and Joseph Kawin? Surely this implies that Benjamin is also a son of Dora, but by a different father? How can he be the son of a different mother as well? What sort of a half-brother is that?

Tick-tock, tick-tock. Time for that thinking-cap again.

A Tale of Three Beilas?

Let's take a different angle on this. Let's ask, how might this putative Beylya fit in to what we know - or think we know - about this family?

Cousin Jennifer, who is a descendant of Simon Morris (Shmuel Zaturensky), shows his mother as 'Bailie', and Dora's mother as Chana. Cousin Paul, a desendant of Dora, also shows her mother as Chana. I don't know if Jennifer and Paul are in touch, but the differences in their Trees suggest they were developed independently of each other. There doesn't seem to be any documentary evidence for either name, so they may well both be reflecting the versions of the family story handed down within their own families. So the fact they both have Dora's mother as Chana could be significant, as could the fact that Jennifer shows Simon with a different mother; Paul doesn't show Simon at all.

This all seems to back up my earlier assumption that Movsha Zaturensky married twice. And at this point I go out on a limb.

If Movsha's first wife was Beila, as Jennifer suggests, and if Benjamin's mother was also a Beila, as Jennifer also suggests in a different version of the Tree, and given that Benjamin later named his own first child Beila, we can perhaps begin to construct a timeline of Beilas.

A Beila Timeline

We have previously had cause to refer to the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition of naming a child after a recently deceased close relative. Maybe that's what's happening here. Let's look at what we know, and see what we can deduce, in the light of this tradition.

1) Movsha and his second wife Chana have their first child Beila 2 in 1866, so his first wife Beila 1 must have died before then; Movsha would then be naming his new child after his deceased frst wife.

2) Benjamin's own first daughter Beila 3 was born in 1913, so it is likely that his mother - who was Beila 2, Movsha's first daughter with Chana - had died by then.

So our timeline now reads:

i) Beila1, Movsha's first wife: probably died c1865

ii) Beila 2, daughter of Movsha's second wife Chana: born c 1866, named after her father's deceased first wife Beila 1; mother of Benjamin; probably died before 1913

iii) Benjamin, son of Beila 2 and an unidentified Gitelman: born 1886

iv) Beila 3, daughter of Benjamin: born 1913, named after her deceased grandmother Beila 2

Here's how that might look in a Tree:

NB: I haven't shown Benjamin's daughter Beila 3 in this Tree, as the whole thing is just getting too crowded.

Sorted

I thought I had this sorted a month ago. I even posted #14, and thought, that's it, onward and upward. Next! However, on re-reading, there were several things I wasn't happy with. I revised, rephrased,  re-drew the Trees, then revised, rephrased and re-drew again, and eventually split the analysis into two sections. Dora's story now spreads over 7 posts, that have taken 6 weeks to put together. I'm going to stick with this version, until I see reason to change it, of course.

Many thanks to Jennifer and other descendants who have interrogated relatives, trawled through websites, paid for research, and drafted Trees, and also shared their DNA with me, whether they realise it or not. And especial thanks to Genetic Affairs, whose AutoClusters provided the clues and pointed the way.

But this journey is not over yet. There are at least 4 more Zaturenskys to come, wending their way over the water from Pinsk to Peoria. But we can relax a bit, I don't think any of their stories are quite as complicated as Dora's.