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.

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.

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.