Randy over at Genea-Musings has another great Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge for us tonight:
- Who is your MRUA - your Most Recent Unknown Ancestor? This is the person with the lowest number in your Pedigree Chart or Ahnentafel List that you have not identified a last name for, or a first name if you know a surname but not a first name.
- Have you looked at your research files for this unknown person recently? Why don't you scan it again just to see if there's something you have missed?
- What online or offline resources might you search that might help identify your MRUA?
- Tell us about him or her, and your answers to 2) and 3) above, in a blog post, in a comment to this post, or a comment on Facebook or some other social networking site.
My MRUAs are half of my eight 2nd-great-grandmothers (no maiden names):
21. Hanna Minka Smorgonski
23. Ita Segalchik
29. Sarah Zinberg
31. Miriam Benditovich
For the first two, on my father's side, I only have my sister's roots project family tree as well as Yad-Vashem pages of testimony for their children, listing them as the mothers. I have not been able to track down any other information from JewishGen or family members about these two women.
The other two are on my mother's side and all I have for them is oral history from my grandmother. Both of them were her grandmothers, but she can not recall their maiden names. I suppose I could try my grandmother's brother, but since he is younger I don't think he will be able to help me either.
On my wife's side, I was surprised to find that her MRUA is also her 2nd-great-grandmother, Maria Kearney (also number 31 with maiden name unknown). This is obviously due to me not doing enough research on this branch. Here's what I know about her:
She was born in Ireland in January 1843 and immigrated to the US in 1847 at the age of 4. She married Thomas Kearney (born 1840, Ireland) about 1868 and had 4 they had at least 4 children: Thomas Jr. (born April 1876), James (born July 1878), Mary (born May 1880) and Margaret T. (born 27 Dec 1882). Most of this basic information was found in an interview done in 2000 with Agnes Auth, who was her granddaughter. I also found some of the family in the US Census, but it's obvious to me that with a little digging I will be able to find a lot more information about Maria.
The difference in information about my side versus my wife's is staggering. Especially because my wife's ancestors have been in the US for centuries and almost every line is well documented. I mean, if I pull up my pedigree chart, I have only 9 out of 32 people in my 6 generation chart and most of those are unconfirmed first name only ancestors. My wife, on the other hand, is only missing 8. I have done some basic research on some of her branches and they easily go back to early the 1600's colonial settlements. I also know she is descended of several Revolutionary War patriots. The next challenge is documenting all this properly and citing all sources correctly. That will take a very long time.
I have to thank Randy Seaver for his challenging Saturday night fun posts that help me get out of my genea-blogging slumps. This time around he asks us to:
1) List your 16 great-great-grandparents in pedigree chart order. List their birth and death years and places.
2) Figure out the dominant ethnicity or nationality of each of them.
3) Calculate your ancestral ethnicity or nationality by adding them up for the 16 - 6.25% for each (obviously, this is approximate).
4) If you don't know all 16 of your great-great-grandparents, then do it for the last full generation you have.
5) Write your own blog post, or make a comment on Facebook or in this post.
I followed Randy's advice and grabbed my info from a RM4 Ahnentafel list:
1. Avraham Benjamin KIELCZEWSKI: b.? m.? died bef 1 Jun 1918. POLAND
2. Zywa Golda KRUG: b.? m.? died bef 1 Jun 1918. POLAND
3. Haim Shmuel KALMANIEWSKI: b.? m.? d.? POLAND
4. ???: b.? m.? d.? POLAND
5. Shlomo SMORGONSKI: born abt 1836. m.? d.? POLAND
6. Hanna Minka ?: b.? m.? d.? POLAND
7. Jacob SEGALCHIK: b.? m.? d.? POLAND
8. Ita ?: b.? m.? d.? POLAND
9. Jacob Yitzhak DOMBEK: b.? m.? d.? POLAND
10. Sarah Rachel KARPIK: born abt 1861 in Sterdyn, Sokolow, Lublin, Poland. m.? died abt 1941 in Sterdyn, Sokolow, Lublin, Poland. POLAND
11. Avram KREPLAK: b.? married 1874 in Kosow Lacki, Poland. d.? POLAND
12. Dobe JABLONKA: b.? married 1874 in Kosow Lacki, Poland. d.? POLAND
13. Aaron ZINBERG: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE
14. Sarah ?: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE
15. Joseph BENDITOVICH: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE
16. Miriam ?: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE
Hmmm. I have a lot of work to do. For starters, I know I have looked for all of these ancestors on JewishGen, but those databases are far from being complete. My next task should be to get some microfilm from the LDS, but how is that really going to help me? I can't read Russian or Polish or Latin or whatever language any of these records will be in. If they even exist.
At least I can pretty firmly say that I am 75%/25% Polish-Russian, which I have known pretty much all my life. And as I have written here before, the next generation after this one had a 75%/25% split for those who perished in the Holocaust. Yes, the entire Polish side. It's a good thing my grandfather fled to Russia.
So, does anyone have suggestions how I should go about filling in all these question marks?
When my parents arrived for a visit a couple of weeks ago, my mother told me an amazing story about a good friend of hers that was reported in the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Aharonot (latest news). I asked for permission to tell the story, because I think it is truly fascinating and wanted to share it with as many people as possible.
The article was printed on July 8th, 2009 in the "24 Hours" section of the paper. The cover of the section has a big family picture with the title of this post as the headline. It then says "One day, at the age of 83, Meir Bachar found out that he has seven brothers and sisters of which he had never heard about before, and they knew nothing about him. How did it happen? His father, Ben-Zion, had a relationship during his marriage with his wife's sister. The result? An impossible reunion."
How about that for an intriguing headline? I won't translate the whole article or go through all the details, but here's the main story.
Meir "Maxi" Bachar witnesses Kristallnacht in Vienna on November 9th, 1938. His fair hair and blue eyes helped him blend in with the angry mob who rampaged through the Jewish quarters, looting, burning and destroying 95 synagogues in the Austrian capital. Maxi left for Israel shortly after at the age of 14 and a half and 71 years later he was on his way back to meet a family he never knew.
It all started with an email that his daughter got one day from her cousin in London, England, telling her about a letter they got from Vienna claiming that Maxi has a brother in Amsterdam and two sister in Vienna - all children of Ben-Zion Bachar and his aunt Malka "Miriam" Lindenaur, the sister of his mother Frida. All this was very confusing because the family had only known of one sister, Suzy Morris, that had lived and then passed away in London. Nobody had heard about other family members before.
Turns out that another cousin found amongst her late father's possessions a folder that had a note with Malka Lindenaur's name on it along with her seven children. One of those names was her 82 year old mother's. And she also recognized another name of a woman who was supposedly a distant friend of her mother's. This cousin dug deep into the Vienna archives and realized that her mother was adopted along with her six siblings and they were all the children of Ben-Zion Bachar and Malka. Only three of the seven were still alive.
Almost a year later Maxi flew to Amsterdam to meet his brother Herman Kolomoyer. Their birth certificates show that they were born in the same house to two sisters who were involved with the same man. The father's identity was purposefully omitted from Herman's birth certificate as well as the other 6 illegitimate children. Even though he fathered 7 children with Malka, he refused to have any relationship with them and sent them one by one to orphanages for adoption. From his legal wife he only had two children, Maxi and Suzy.
Like the rest of the children, Herman was sent to an orphanage at the age of 2 and was supposed to be sent to a family in South Africa, but the war broke out and he was placed with a Christian Dutch family instead. Even though his birth certificate noted that his mother was Jewish and Herman found out about it at a young age, he hid this detail from the rest of his family and later on from his daughters as well. The two sisters in Vienna also had no idea that they came from a Jewish family and had lived their entire lives as Christians.
It turns out that growing up in Vienna, the family was poor and lived in a two room apartment. In one were Ben-Zion and his wife Frida, in the other was Frida's sister Malka and the children slept in the kitchen. The father was a gambler and a drunk who abused his children and did not provide for them. Maxi remembers looking for his father in card clubs and bars in order to get some money for food. He does not have fond memories of his father at all.
In 1938 his father was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp and Maxi was spared because of his mother's pleading. His sister was later sent to London and in 1940 he left for Israel with other Jewish children on a long trip through Yugoslavia, Saloniki, Turkey, Beirut and Damascus. At the age of 17 he joined the British Army. According to some testimony, his mother, Frida, and her sister, Malka, both perished in the Holocaust, but in 1945 while serving in Italy he found out that his father had survived and remarried. So he went to see him in Vienna.
In 1959 his father's new wife called to let him know that he was very sick. Overcoming his tough childhood memories and dislike of his father, Maxi stayed by hi bedside for three months. During all this time, Ben-Zion never said a word about all the orphaned siblings that were given up for adoption. Surprisingly he has no recollection of any of the children his aunt had with his father, even though most of them were born after him. Maxi has no way to explain why his mother stayed with his father or why her sister kept living with them all those years.
I think this is a fascinating story. Since the mothers of all these children were sisters, this keeps the gene pool intact. Would a DNA test be able to prove that there were different mothers or would they look like real siblings? My own great-grandfather, Avraham Smorgonski, married two sisters, Ester and Henia Segalchik. But that was only after Ester passed away and not behind her back.
There were clues everywhere. But I have been distracted and disorganized lately and could not really focus on the task at hand. But suddenly something clicked and I am happy to say that I have found a couple of missing branches of my tree. And not too distant either. Let me explain.
I have been unhappily reading the book Defiance (more on that in a later post) about the Bielski Partisan group and thinking back to a piece I read by Yakov Segalchik called The Eternal Testament: Memoirs of a Partisan. In that piece are a lot of links to my family and the shtetl of Dolhinov. And since my great-grandmother was Ester Segalchik, I knew there has to be a solid link somehow. Then I found an entry in an online guest book which lead me to believe that Yakov was a first cousin of my grand-uncle, Shlomo Shamgar. Which means he was a first cousin of my grandmother. Which means that his father is one of the 3 brothers of my Ester. But which one?
I contacted the people in the guest book and ended up with a phone number to the daughter of Yakov. Today I made the call. It's kind of awkward trying to explain why a complete stranger is calling you and asking questions about your parents and grandparents who are long gone. Especially since that stranger seems to know a lot about you. But she was delightful and very helpful and with her help I had a few other pieces to the puzzle.
Then I remembered that my own cousin from Israel, while traveling in Argentina, ran into another Segalchik from Israel. Only much later when they had both returned from their travels did my uncle tell his daughter that they might be related. And indeed we are. And not only that, but his name is Amir, like mine (and even spelled the same way). He is my third cousin. We are both 2nd-great-grandsons of Jacob and Ita Segalchik.
I asked my cousin to put me in touch with him and she told me he was on Facebook but also gave me an email address and a promise to help out if I needed it. Which got me thinking - have I searched for this branch on Facebook yet? And what am I waiting for? After a quick search I found another brother. I sent him a message and the reply was very positive. Yes, his grandfather was Shmuel Segalchik and he was from Dolhinov as well. And another phone number.
I called that number as well today and his mother was very excited to speak with me and gave me a quick run down of the family. We came to the conclusion that the brother in question was Joseph Segalchik. Both his sons named one of their own sons after him. Named after the grandfather they never knew.
So I decided to do some digging in the Yad Vashem - Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names and I found the Segalchik sister as well. Her name was Leah Dina "Ladusha" Segalchik. And she married Joseph Meir Lenkin. Their son Nachum Lenkin had filled several pages of testimony. That name rang a bell so I decided to call and ask my father if he remembered this man who was my grandmother's first cousin.
Sure he remembers him. And his son. They lived next door to my grandparents for many years! In Israel, in the apartment I remember on Truman Street in Ramat-Gan. They lived at Truman 7 and my father and his family lived at Truman 9. And they came to family functions. My father thinks the son even came to my Bar Mitzvah! Why has he not told me about them before? Have they been hiding in plain sight and we just missed them?
So I have another email address and another phone call to make tomorrow. My father got me those details today after he spoke to the son directly. In the meantime I have been going over pages of testimony and rebuilding the tree based on that information. And I also added everyone to our Geni tree and invited everyone to join and fill in the gaps.
This is very exciting!
