Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #6 It Takes Two Teranskys to Tango

What's going on?

We have established that Private Morris, my mystery match on AncestryDNA, is related to me via my Zaturensky line from Pinsk, and that our most recent common ancestor (MRCA) is my great-great-grandfather Movsha. This would make us Third Cousins. Movsha's father was probably *Chaim, but we're not sure about that so I'm giving him an asterisk for the time being.

However, the amount of DNA shared by Private Morris and myself, at 183 cM, is fairly strong for a 3C match. Is there something else going on that we haven't spotted yet?

We've been following the journey of Movsha's son Shmuel Zaturensky from Pinsk to Peoria, Illinois, where he became Simon Morris, and we've wrung just about all we can from his US records. What else can we find? What can his wife and children tell us?

Simon's wife

Simon's wife Elizabeth died in 1923, 3 years before Simon himself. Her headstone identifies her as Rochel Leah, daughter of Meir. So it seems the anglicised name 'Elizabeth' was a play on the Yiddish name 'Leah'. One of the other documents associated with her death was this transcription of her Illinois Death Record:

Father: Mayer Tarsusky? Tarsusky?? You do come across a few Tarsuskys in the records, but none of them appear to be Jewish. That's a bit odd ...

Simon's children

Then I went through looking for records of the children of Simon and Elizabeth. Here's the relevant bit of their daughter Sadie's Death Record, 1979:

Mother: Elizabeth Teransky. Teransky? Teransky?? But Simon's father was 'Turiansky', supposedly. Is this the same name? Are they related?? And might the 'Tarsusky' we found a few minutes ago just be a mis-transcription of a hand-written 'Teransky'???

I have not been able to find death records nor marriage records for any of their other children, that might have given their parents' family names. For the moment this is all the information we have to go on.

Two Teranskys

If Simon (Shmuel) Turiansky and Elizabeth (Rochel Leah) Teransky are related, the closest it could be would be via their fathers, Moshe Chaim and Meir/Mayer - if these two were brothers. In other words, the father of both Moshe and Meir would be the same person, *Chaim Zaturensky, and they may well have had the same mother as well. Or the connection may be one generation further back. For the moment I'm going to stick with *Chaim as their most recent common ancestor (MRCA). This of course would make Shmuel and Rochel Leah First Cousins.

Double Cousins?

This is getting complicated. If we're now looking at *Chaim, he is my 3xgreat-grandfather. Anyone related to me, with him as MRCA, is my Fourth Cousin. And anyone related to me via the couple Simon Morris/Shmuel Turiansky and Elizabeth/Rochel Leah Teransky, is related to me via both of them.

So my mystery match Private Morris appears to be a double cousin to me: both 3C via Shmuel through to our common 2g-g'f Movsha, and 4C via Rochel Leah through to Movsha's brother Meir, and on to my 3g-g'f *Chaim, who is also Private Morris's 3g-g'f but by a different route.

I hope that's clear.

The Two Teransky Tango
My software (MacFamilyTree), doesn't seem to be able to put this double relationship into graphic form, so I'm going to try to draw it out:

Private Morris and me

Is this the explanation of the seemingly high 3C DNA match between Private Morris and myself? Are we not just 3C, but actually double cousins, 3C+4C??

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #5 Herman unmasked

Finding Simon
So the challenge now was to find Simon Morris - and any references to his father Herman Turiansky - in the US records. Rebecca's Tree (above) shows a Sam Morris who looks as though he's the same person as Simon, and she also has a wife for him called Elizabeth Bessie, and a son called Al born in 1912. This was as far as her Tree went, so I presume this is probably her own family line and it's all she knows about it. As such, it should be full of clues, even if some of the detail might not quite be fully accurate. Plus, the only locations we have for them are Pinsk in Russia, and Peoria, Illinois.

If you've stayed with this story thus far, you will not be surprised to hear that I could find no suitable Simon Morris in any of the US Censuses in Peoria.

But here's Sam Morris with his family in Peoria in 1920:

Is this our 'Simon'? There are 3 daughters, followed by 3 sons: Herman, Meyer, and Abe. 'Herman' looks promising - is he named after Sam's father? And note that Abe, the youngest, was born around 1913 - could he be the 'Al' in Rebecca's Tree?

From Moses to Morris
Here's Sam in 1910 (the other family members are the same as in 1920, except for Abe, who hadn't arrived yet):

Yes, he's Simon at this point, and the surname is 'Mose'.

And in 1900 he's Simon Moses:

So Turiansky morphed to Moses, which became Mose and then Morris. At least we now know who we're looking for. The Census forms suggest that Simon and Elizabeth were married around 1892, but I haven't found a record for this as yet. Bessie, their first child, appears on the Censuses as born in Illinois in 1897.

Immigration and marriage
Unfortunately the US Census records for 1890 have not survived. We do find a Simon Moses in Peoria who took out US Naturalisation in 1886, which corresponds approximately with the year he gave in later Census returns. If this is the case, when they married in 1892 it was almost certainly in the US. There is also a Simon Moses in Joliet, Illinois in 1880, but he seems to be from Prussia, not Russia, so who knows?

Passenger manifests might possibly offer some information on his place of origin, and enable us to home in on given and family names, as well as confirming a date of arrival. There may even be travelling companions. There are several candidates for 'Simon Moses' in passenger manifests, arriving in the US from the mid-1880s onward, but I've not been able to positively identify any of them. There are none at all for Simon Turiansky/Terensky or similar.

Elizabeth was only about 18 when they married. The Census forms say she was born in Russia; she may have come to the US as a child with her family, or on her own as a later teenager. Either way, we don't know when she came (the Census forms give varying dates), we don't know how her given name would have appeared on the manifest, and we don't have her maiden name either.

This is beginning to look a bit like a brick wall.

Who is Herman?
At this point we need to remember that what we're really looking for is, who is Herman? He's almost certainly a Zaturensky, but where does he fit in?

His son Simon Morris died in 1926, as Simon not Sam, and if we're lucky, the Hebrew inscription on his headstone will identify him by his patronymic name, ie, it will say he is the son of Herman (whoever Herman is).

Here's the headstone:

The stone has been placed by his children - Elizabeth had died a couple of years earlier - so the information on Simon's Hebrew name will probably have come from them. This doesn't guarantee that it's 100% reliable, of course, but close family is a usually a better source for names than most others. All his children are under 30, and several of them had been living in the family home, at least until a few years previously. I think we can trust them, at least for the time being.

The second line tells us he is:

Mr Shmuel son of Mr Moshe Chaim

So Simon is Shmuel, and his father "Herman" is  ... Moshe Chaim.

Well, you must admit that 'Moshe Chaim' sounds a bit more Jewish than 'Herman'. Furthermore, the DNA relationship between Private Morris and myself is such that this has to be my Moshe Chaim, my great-great-grandfather. Herman Czar Terensky really is Moshe Chaim Zaturensky.

Saying "Hello" to the cousins my grandfather probably never knew he had
This in turn means that Simon Morris is the brother of my great-grandmother Shprintsa Zaturensky, and consequently his children were First Cousins to my grandfather Movsha/Morris Schreibman. This is significant to me, as it's the closest I have ever got to my grandfather, apart from his box of cabinet-maker's tools. And some of his DNA, of course. He came to London on his own in 1905, and we have never been aware of him being in contact with any relatives. This is not really surprising in this case, seeing that Simon - Uncle Shmuel - may well have left for America before Movsha was born in 1883.

My grandfather died in 1930, and I don't think my father and his siblings knew anything at all about his family apart from the name and occupation of his father - Nevakh Schreibman of Pinsk, a teacher of religion. I don't think they even knew the given name of his mother - Shprintsa.

So Private Morris and I are confirmed Third Cousins, or possibly one remove away, depending on how many generations down from Moshe Chaim Zaturensky he is. I hope he sees this!

Four more questions
All of which leaves us with at least four more burning questions:

1) Is Moshe Chaim one person or two - ie, is this one person with 2 given names, or should we read this as Moshe, son of Chaim? This question, which has come up previously over the records of my great-grandmother Shprintsa (see #1 Who is Private Morris? and #4 Two for the price of one), is not resolved by Simon's headstone.

2) How, and when, did 'Zaturensky' morph into 'Moses'?

3) The amount of DNA Private Morris shares with me is towards the top end of the range for 3C, and is getting on for 50% greater than I share with any of the other members of the Terensky Cluster, some of whom look as though they are from the same generation as him. This suggests that either:

i) he really is a generation above the others

or

ii) there's some other factor at play

4) And where exactly do all the other members of the Terensky Cluster fit in?

Questions, questions, questions ....

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #3 What's in a name?

Who is Herman?

You will recall that my mystery match, who I am calling Private Morris for the moment (see #1 Who is Private Morris?), has a Tree which suggests he is descended from a Simon Morris b 1864. Then in the following post - #2 The Cluster Club - I included a couple of clips from the Tree of one of my other matches, Rebecca. She has a couple of versions. In one she shows what appears to be the same Simon Morris, with slightly different dates. She also has a Tree which shows a Sam Morris, whose dates are close to the other two. It looks like all three of these are probably versions of the same person.

Rebecca's Sam Morris has a father, Herman Turiansky. Aha. Immediately, several questions rear up. I know many immigrants americanised their surnames after they arrived; in most cases they chose a name that wasn't too far distant from the original. So how did Turiansky turn into Morris? It's nothing like it, not in Yiddish, not in Russian, not in English. It doesn't even begin with the same letter.

How come he's Herman?

And while we're at it, what sort of a Russian-Jewish name is Herman, anyway? For a start, there's no aspirated (breathy) 'H' sound in Russian. Any Yiddish word with this sound is transcribed with the 'G' letter in Russian (a hard 'g' as in 'golly'), so for instance 'Hirsh' gets written, and pronounced, as 'Girsh'. 

The name Herman was certainly used by Jews in German-speaking countries, and 'German' (hard 'g') does exist as a Russian name, but I have never seen it used in Russian-Jewish records. My guess at this stage is that if Herman immigrated to the USA, he may have chosen to adopt the name as part of his new American identity. However, there is no indication anywhere, in the records or the Trees, that he ever came to the US; I can find no reference to him anywhere in official documents such as Passenger Lists, Censuses, City Directories, Death Records, in the US or anywhere else. I don't believe he ever emigrated.

I believe that the information shown for Herman - given name, surname, son's name - is probably based on family information, such as the recollections of parents or grandparents, or perhaps family documentation, such as letters. At this stage, I was thinking that the name 'Herman' may have been what Simon put when he needed to enter his father's name in an official document, such as an application for naturalisation. Simon seems to have naturalised in 1886, but the naturalisation documents do not seem to be available online, apart from an index card with not much on it. So I can't check that, for the moment.

And if Simon emigrated some time before 1886, well they weren't asking for contact information at that point, so his father's name would not appear on his Passenger Manifest. And I can't find that, anyway.

Herman the Czar

And then I found a Tree posted on Ancestry by Rebecca's sister, Jennifer. She hasn't tested with AncestryDNA, so she's not in my original Cluster Club. Her Tree goes a good deal further - and she has a different name for Herman, as you can see above. He's now Herman Czar Terensky.

Czar? Really?? I know that a few Jews - a handful - achieved some form of eminence under the Russian Empire, maybe in the medical or other professions. But I wasn't aware of any Jew rising to the very top of the pile, to rule over lords and peasants as Czar of all the Russias. Not one from Pinsk, anyway.

So where does the 'Czar' come from?

Tsar Terensky
This is one of those where you have to say the words out loud. Bear in mind that 'Czar' is an odd spelling for this word in English - it should be pronounced 'Tsar'. Go to a quiet corner and say "Tsar Terensky" a few times over. Try it. Does it sound a bit like "Zaturensky"?

Zaturensky. That's my great-grandmother's family name. It's taken several weeks of head-splitting DNA analysis, and 3 whole blog posts, but we've finally got there. This is indeed my family, even though neither of us recognised the name the other was using.

When I explained all this to Jennifer, she said "Wow!", and "Oh yes - that's my brother's middle name - Zarterensky".

Now she tells me.

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.