To: @PIKHOLZ.PML Subject: Genealogy #21 - AGAD records Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 18:18:08 +0200 Mazal tov to Michael and Donna Pickholtz on the birth of Zachary John two and a half weeks ago. The family recently moved from Texas to New York. Mazal tov to Rivki and Rabbi Yerachmiel Pickholtz on the birth of a son Tuesday. Like the player in the sports trades, he will be named later. The family recently moved from Skokie to Buffalo Grove Illinois. (Proud grandfather is accepting mazal tov at zach4v6@actcom.co.il.) Most of what I told you in the sneak prevue of the records we just received from AGAD in Warsaw was in fact correct, but there are corrections and additional infor- mation, so I shall tell it from scratch. We received forty-eight birth records and ten death records from Rozdol (actually fifty-one and eleven, with the "hidden" ones) and eighteen birth records from Skalat, which turned out to be more like thirty, with everything included. Four of the Skalat records are PICK, but they may be Pikholz descendants. We also received several from a search that Jacob organized for Zbarazh. The Skalat and Zbarazh searches were joined by other researchers, who paid $100 for each surname they were searching, in addition to the $10 for each record. All the Zbarazh and Skalat researchers save one have paid for their shares, so in that aspect we were quite successful, both in covering search costs and in acquiring more records. (The search costs are for good for several more searches, over the coming months.) Our own costs for the Pikholz records themselves is nearly eight hundred dollars, of which about a quarter has been covered by contributions or promised contributions from some of you. Checks can be sent to Jacob Laor, Arazim 11, Kefar Sava 44456, made out to "Naczelna Dyrekcja Archiwow Panstwowych." Now that I have made my pitch, we can get to the fun part. The Zbarazh records gave important information on the families LAOR and IRENE. In the case of LAOR, now we have the names at the top of the family as Aryeh Leib and Cirl, as well as two previously unknown daughters of this couple. The name Aryeh Leib here hints at connections to several other families, particularly RITA. In the case of IRENE, we have a new generation on top of what we previously knew and perhaps another on top of that one. We also have a change in lifespan and a basis for predicting a close relationship with BARNEY and with a Vienna family or eight that was murdered by the Nazis. A visual summary of the Rozdol and Skalat records is available on the web site (http://www.geocities.com/pikholz) by choosing "European archives." (A reminder that you can also read previous mailings there.) The eleven Rozdol death records included four children, whom we already knew what there was to know. (Actually, there is also cause of death if anyone is interested.) One of the others is a married-in woman named Rachel (~1813-1868) whom we do not recognize. Of the remaining six, three are sons of Izak and Feige and one is the wife of one of them. We have a small problem with the Izak-Feige family, which is that there may be two couples with these names at the same time and until we sort that out, we cannot combine all these three family (plus a fourth we knew before and a fifth that is probably another son of the same couple). However, in order to make it clear who goes with whom, I am changing the names of two families (HERSCHLEIB-->IF1 and SR/NACHMAN-->IF2) and creating two more (IF3 and IF4) to reflect our knowledge that all of them are children of Izak and Feige. The other two death records are Israel Yoel and Aron, sons of the Pinchas who may be the father of all the Rozdolers. We have now learned that his wife was Sara Rifka. Israel Yoel (~1807-1882) is the father of Rav Juda Gershon. I expect that we will find that Izak (or Feige) is also the child of Pinchas and Sara Rifka. The Rozdol birth records are for 1880-1896, picking up where the previous set left off. The PINCHAS/RACHEL family (and I suspect this Pinchas is the son of Izak & Feige) has eleven granchildren in this group of records: Five children to David Samuel, four to Avraham, one to Sara Oberlander and one to Beile Fuchs. Beile Fuchs had not been previously identified with this family, so putting here here allows us to eliminate the family we called LEVIIM as a separate entity. We also learned some about David Samuel's wife's family. Hersch Leib of IF1 (formerly HERSCHLEIB) had a daughter named Ciwje Libe, who was born some months after he himself died at age forty-five. He also had eleven grandchildren in this group. Four to Pinkas and his wife Witie Beile, three to Soloman and his wife Alta Mindel and four to son Abraham. We learned some interesting things about Alta Mindel's family and I have passed that on to her descendants among you. Abraham was married to Ester Pikholz of the IF2 family, so their four children are Pikholz on both sides. One more definite descendant in each of the "new" families IF3 and IF4. Five children to YITZHAK and Frimet, four of whom died within a short time. (The surviving son is Berisch.) My own theory is that Yitzhak himself is either the grandson of Israel Yoel via his son "M" or is descended from the IF4 family. Perhaps we will find a death certificate for him later, which will clear this up. We also learned that his in-laws, the Gelbs, lived in Jerusalem for a time, but returned to Komarno. We have six children of Josef Pikholz and Szeindel Sauerberg. There is no question that Josef is either a son or a grandson of Israel Yoel's son "M," but I have not yet located anyone in this family who survived the Holocaust, save a grandson who died in Haifa in 1982, with no children. It is known that he had living cousins when he died and we are trying to identify them via the attorney who handled his will. We also have two more children for David Wolf Pikholz, as well as six for another Josef who may be David Wolf's son. Here too, we have not identified anyone living. David Wolf had a grandson by the same name who died in Israel in 1986, with no children we know of. (Rumor is there was a daughter, but his grave doesn't say "father" and the burial society lists no next of kin.) We have no idea who David Wolf's parents are, so cannot connect this family group to anyone else yet. That leaves seven others whom we don't know much about. The Skalat records are less revealing. Where the Rozdol records provide mostly solutions (for a change!), the Skalat records are still producing questions. Skalat records in this batch are for 1881-1890. We have six new siblings for BARNEY, with no idea what happened to any of them. Also another brother for DORA Marenus and Max Pickholtz of the New Jersey family. Here too we have quite a few siblings of whom we have no trace. We have two more from the LAOR family, which makes it pretty clear that Zygmunt (the one with the Roman Catholic mother, who was in General Anders' Polish exile army and died in Teheran in 1942) Pikholz is a cousin of Jacob Laor's mother. We have a record for a known daughter of the ORENSTEIN family, where Pikholz seem to marry each other as a matter of course. We have another son, Markus Leiser and a daughter Taube, of Leibish and Rachel, a family we first ran into in the May records. Rachel is a Qualer (this time spelled Kwaler) from Zalosce, where my grandfather was born. Here too, we have no trace of this family today. Considering the names of these two children, my first instinct is to say that Leibish is the son of an early Skalat couple called Motie and Taube, but that may not be the case. Leibish's wife Rachel was the daughter of Motie, which may explain the "Markus" independently. Speaking of my grandfather, we have a Skalat birth of Markus to Yachiel Pikholz and Ettel Pikholz. Ettel is of the Mati family and Yachiel may be the uncle of my grandfather that no one except my father had ever heard of. We have two more children and one (maybe two) grandchildren of Kopil (=Yaakov) Pikholz and Ester Rosenstrauch. This reminds me of the GRIMAYLOW family, where we also have a Yaakov married to a Rosenstrauch descendant. But the GRIMAYLOW family I have spoken to do not know them. And we have five grandchildren via four daughters of Berl, from the ROSA family. We know of no one in this family who survived the Holocaust. There is a BICK married to a Kaczor with two children and a PIK married to a Schapiro, also with two children. No idea if these are shortened Pikholz or not. And two other Skalat births we don't know anything about, except to say that we saw one of the couples once in the May records. One of the problems with these skalat records is that for several years, no father is listed for any birth and we are left to extrapolate from siblings and use other clues. Now go back and reread paragraph #5. And that concludes the summary of the records. About half belong to families with which we have some contact, but not necessarily families who are interested in participating. I hope that those of you who are participating will keep that in mind. Of course this summary is just what my mother calls a stopping place. The web site has to be updated to take it all in. give me a couple of weeks on that. And one other family. Some members of the STEVE family participated in the Skalat project representing their great- grandmother's Bernstein family. Based on US immigration information, we expected that whole family to show up in these Skalat birth records under Bernstein, if not Pikholz. The summary we recieved from Warsaw had all the right names, in the right years, but it turned out they were all the wrong ones. Sometimes you come up empty handed, even when it looks like the prospects are excellent. It's never a "sure thing." The company I work for is sending people for early retire- ment and one of those going is Nicole Shucrun. Why do you care? Because Nicole takes our pictures home and scans them for us. However we solve this in the future, it won't be this easy again, so anyone with cemetery photos or access to the ones we need, please lets get going, because we don't have alot of time to use this avenue. More as it happens. Israel P.