From: IsraelP Subject: Genealogy #3 oDate: Sun, 1 Aug 1999 18:00:03 +0300 Good morning to all of you. Pages from Yad VaShem I keep thinking that we are at the stage where new information will bring more answers than questions. The sixty-five new Pages of Testimony from Yad VaShem proved me wrong again. Some indeed were people we already know, but others are completely new individuals and family groups. I am trying to get it all integrated into our web site and data base and hope to have that completed before Rosh HaShanah. New Skalat records Jacob Laor passed on a set of death records from 1840's Skalat. I must admit that I haven't done anything with them yet. New and developing contacts We have located the Marenus family. So far information is partial, but they have some Pickholz memories that should help us fill in some blanks. The Orenstein line (who are somehow connected to the Marenus line) has gotten more interesting as well. Both the Yad VaShem material and a meeting I had here with a Skalater added more material there and there seems to be a line of that family here is Israel somewhere. We also have a Skalat line that goes from Rosa the teacher (see http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/skalat/p68.html) back to her great-grandfather. Here too, there may be one surviving family here in Israel. The Yad VaShem material also may have new contacts with the Argentine Pickholz family that traces to Podhajce. And we have some Pages that may be the family of Yeroham Fischel, the nephew of Rav Juda Gershon. etc etc. Developments on the web site I am trying to keep the web site as up-to-date as I can, as new information comes in. There are also three new features going on-line. One is a map of eastern Galicia, the second is our old Excel file, available for downloading in Excel. These two should be available in the next twenty-four hours. The third requires your help - and is one of the ways I want to make this OUR site, rather than MINE. I'd like to get some brief biographies (half a page to a page, maybe with a scanned picture) of our ancestors, written by those who knew them. Put them into a Word file and I'll html them for you. (Please consider this a personal invitation!) This feature will go online as soon as someone submits a bio. Miscellaneous I met with Miriam Reiner, a ninety-plus Pickholz from Skalat, last Wednesday and also with Shammai Segal, a non-Pickholz from Skalat. I also photographed all the Pickholz graves in Netanya, Holon and Bet Shemesh - over twenty altogether. (All our scans, by the way, are done by Nicole Chucrun - thank you very much.) I hope to have those photos on the site in about a week. Awhile ago, I got a lead on a carton containing records from a census of the Stryj-Rozdol area from 1811. Turns out that there was a fire in the archives in Vienna in 1927, so all that seems to be left is a summary. Anyone care to volunteer to send out a pile of standard letters to NY area cemeteries? FLASH - as I was preparing this letter, I received a letter from Sylvia Pickholz in Argentina. You may recall that a couple of months ago, we learned we had four unidentified Viennese Pickholz from whom the Nazis had confiscated substantial amounts of property. One of those four - Friedrich - I knew died in Dachau. I was looking for any of his family and for family of the others - Siegfried, Otto and Elise. Monica had seen Otto's name in the BA phone book years ago, but we found nothing now. Sylvia writes that she is the daughter of Otto and Elise and that Siegfried and Freidrich were her father's brothers. I hope to get a response in the mail to her in the next day or so. Israel P. -- End --