From: Israel P To: @PIKHOLZ.PML Subject: Genealogy 55 Reply-to: IsraelP@pikholz.org Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2006 23:26:38 +0200 Dear Pikholz Cousins, Mazal tov to Dov and Tammy Pickholtz (IF4 and IF1 families) on the birth of their third daughter, Meira Devorah. Mazal tov to Avi and Esti Drot (PITTSBURGH family) on the birth of a daughter Tair Miriam. Condolences to the family of Benny Ilan who passed away after a lengthy illness at age seventy-five. Benny was born in Vienna and his father, Yitzhak Pickholz, was born in Rozdol - his father from the IF1 family and his mother from the IF2 family. Condolences to the family of Chana Pickholz, widow of Shaul Pickholz of the Pinchas/Rachel family, who passed away at age eighty-five. A new addition to out website http://www.pikholz.org is a search function which searches the web site. Try it out. As I have mentioned from time to time, we have done quite a bit of work with the Ellis Island database, which shows arrivals in New York during the period 1892-1924, including access to passenger lists. Many of those lists appear on the website and are accessible at http://www.pikholz.org/Pioneers/Pioneers.html . I haven't said much about the Hamburg site, which provides information on those who sailed from Hamburg. We use it more judiciously as they charge for significant information, but we have had some success even from the free information in the index. About three months ago, I paid their fee for information on three passengers whom we hadn't been able to identify from their index. One of the three turned out to be Max Pickholtz, the brother of Dora Marenus and Beatrice Rosenbaum. Max was travelling with his mother Chana. That accounts for all the members of that family who came to the US, aside from the mysterious brother Joseph. The second Hamburg record is thirty year old Tobias Pickholz of Rozdol who sailed in 1906. We have only one Tobias (=Tewie) from Rozdol and he was born 1875, so the age fits. We have his birth record. His parents are David-Wolf Pickholz and Feige Leah Dorf, who was David's second wife. Aside from Tewie, they had four daughters - two died in childhood and we know nothing about the other two aside from the birth records. Tewie/Tobias was married to a woman named Miriam and they had one son we know of - David-Zeev, born July 1906, shortly before Tobias went to the US. It appears that Tobias did not remain in the US, as David lived in Lwow ands was a dissident and Prisoner of Zion in the 1950's before he was permitted to come to Israel in 1966, with his wife Leah Shub. They are buried in Petah Tiqva. They seem to have had a daughter, but I never found her. After much effort, I found the Ellis island copy of Tobias' 1906 passenger list, which is torn. He appears in the Ellis Island index only as "...alz," which is why we didn't see him before. The third Hamburg record is for Gedalie Pikholz who arrived in NY in 1907 at age twenty-two. He was born in Kaczanowka, so he is almost surely a son of Moshe-Hersch Pikholz and Frymcie Gruberg, though we have not seen any record of his birth. Nor do we find him anyplace else, save this passenger list. Now we come to one of our big stories. If you have actually been reading these summaries, you will recall that we have spent quite a lot of time looking for the family of Joseph Pickholtz (DORA family) and his wife Katie Smith, of Philadelphia. Joseph (b. 1881 in Skalat) and Katie were both dead by 1909, leaving four children. Samuel was born in 1901 and the last we know of him is the 1910 census where he is living with Katie's parents. Sister Selma and brother Leonard are also there, but by 1920, they are in orphanages. Selma shows up once more, in the NY city directory in 1934. Another sister Ida, marries a David Brown in 1922, has a son Marvin soon after and dies not long after that. Over the past few years, we have chased all kinds of leads, to no avail. Not long ago, Steve reminded me that there was a reference to the name Pickford in Ida's file, so we tried to find them as Pickford. Truth is, I only did that to humor Steve, as I was quite sure this was a wild goose chase. Leonard Pickford, son of Joseph Pickholtz and Katie Smith lived in Houston Texas and died there in 1998 at age ninety-two. I have had several exchanges of letters with with his widow. Although they were married for over thirty years, she knew little of his family. They had no children. Samuel Pickford, the older brother, stayed in Philadelphia and married a woman nine years older than himself, therefore added precisely five years to his own age. (I had previously searched Social Security for Samuel of any surname who was born 23 Feb 1901, but because he changed the year, I never found him.) Samuel died in 1995, officially at age ninety-nine but actually only ninety-four. He is buried in Montefiore Cemetery in Philadelphia, as is his wife. Also there is their son Marvin (1919-2004) and another son Edward (1915-1966), but since Samuel was really born 1901, I suspect that Edward is the wife's son from someone else. Marvin has no stone. But he has a son (in Delaware?) whom we have not yet located. Today we learned from Edward's 1966 obituary that there was also a sister, Leona Seltzer, and that Edward had two daughters. We will be following that up shortly. We have not found further trace of Selma, though her sister-in-law thinks she married and lived in New York. We do have a photo of Leonard at age seventy-seven and I have shown it to some of you. Dora Marenus' grandson says that Leonard looks like him and his father (a first cousin) and Beatrice Rosenbaum's great-grandson says he looks like Max Pickholtz, Leonard's uncle. Two of my sisters say he looks a bit like my father's brother, but they would be no closer than third cousins. What that does tell me is that when I did the whole analysis of the picture of Jacob Pickholtz - the schoolboy in London in 1901 - I may have jumped to conclusions about how close he is to my own family. He could just as well be part of the DORA family or others. This also reminds me that a couple of years ago, I tried to organize a webpage of photographs of older generation Pikholz descendants - those born before 1900. I got precious few responses from you, so let me try again now. Only let's say anyone born before WWI. (At the Conference, there is a session on Face Recognition Technology, given by the CEO of MyHeritage.com. Maybe I'll learn something useful there.) A few weeks ago, I was looking something up for someone else in the Galician Kollel records from the town of Mosticka and I found a Binyamin Pickholz. I don't know if this is a "new" person or someone we have met before. Binyamin is not a common Pikholz name. Mosticka is on the road between Lwow and Przemysl, so this is likely a Rozdol descendant. I mentioned last time that new records have been released for forty-one towns in East Galicia, including Skalat, but not Rozdol. Some of those should be available a few weeks after the Conference and someone who has seen the Skalat records has told me that there are a number of Pikholz births there for the years 1902-05. Other towns of interest to us with new records are Zbarazh, Boryslaw, Drohovycz and Mikulince all of which are fully funded, so can be made available as soon as indexing is complete. Towns of interest that will take longer because the indexing is not yet funded include Kopicienice, Skole, Stryj, Zydaczow and Tarnopol. These later records are sometimes much harder to work with as the people are not as reliably identifiable. For instance, we know that Wolf Perlmutter and Bassie Pikholz of Skalat had a son Leiser, but that does not mean that if we find Leiser Perlmutter having children that he is their son. In fact, there are two Leiser Perlmutter having children in Skalat around 1900. Finally, what may be a small victory for the good guys. Several years ago, the International Commission on Holocaust era Insurance Claims forced the European insurance companies to publish lists of people who had polices before the Holocaust - policies that were never paid. One of those policies was issued by Generali to Chaim Mendel Pickholz and we have had no idea who this is. Mendel is an uncommon Pikholz name and Chaim may have been added later and not have been part of the original name. The only other information we had is that the policy was issued in Czortkow, where we knew of no Pikholz families. I tried several strategies to get ICHEIC to tell us more about who this man was, including reminding them that their mission was specifically to facilitate payment of these policies. The deadline for filing claims has long since passed, but I keep filing appeals, just to keep the case open. The new Skalat records include a 1902 birth of Chaim Mendel Pickholz, son of Josef Pickholz of Kaczanowka and Berta Schwebel of Czortkow. This has to be the right man. We know who the family is, but we know of only one person who survived the Holocaust - a brother who was born in 1906 and who went to the US well before the war. He died in 1977 with no children. But his wife is alive. She is ninety-five years old and is being taken care of by a nephew. Thusfar we know that Generali's object is to avoid paying money. And the ICHEIC's object seems to be to collect their own fat salaries and to make everyone play by their silly rules. It will be interesting to see who wins this battle. I have a few more items, but they can wait. More as it happens. Israel P.