From: IsraelP Subject: Genealogy #85 Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2015 15:43:26 +0300 Dear Cousins, With everything going on around us here in Israel, and particularly in Jerusalem, it can be difficult to stick with routine matters. That, of course, has nothing to do with why I did not send out a letter with New Years greetings a month ago. THAT was because I had my own backlog of things, some of which I can report on now. My book, "ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People" - www.endogamy-one-family.com , was launched successfully two months ago in Baltimore, with the first of eight lectures that I gave in the US. They were well-received, the only major disappointment being New York City where some 260 people registered and about two-thirds of them had something more pressing come up at the last minute. I was particularly pleased to see some of you, many for the first time. Additional talks abroad will depend on being able to organize them efficiently, in a way that covers expenses. I have two talks scheduled here in Israel - both in Hebrew - later in October. One on the 27th here in Jerusalem and one the following evening in Carmiel. At the end of October the price of the book in Israel will be adjusted to the level of the price abroad. For now it remains NIS 120, plus NIS 12 mailing for those who need it mailed. As I mentioned earlier, the book is about genetic genealogy but since most of my work in that field has been on the Pikholz families, that is where the examples in the book come from. So you can learn quite a bit about the family structure by reading it. Several of the chapters feature major breakthroughs in the family research and as additional people have tested (including the last surviving granddaughter of Breine Riss), we appear poised for additional exciting results. Some of those are beyond what we are supposed to be able to do with DNA. (Chapter Twelve) Just yesterday, I found a new match on my Y chromosome, perfect for 67 markers. This is the first such match we have that is not a known Pikholz descendant. The person who manages that kit is someone I know and she will find out more from the testor - who is her son-in-law's father. Also just yesterday, I heard from a fellow here in Israel who is doing Scharf research and who found a daughter of Samson Scharf and Bassie Rachel Pikholz (the IRENE family) whom we had never heard of. This is not a girl who died in childhood, but a woman who married and had at least four children. I expect to blog about that at the beginning of next week. Some weeks ago, I ran across a Pikholz-Wilder couple with the Pikholz woman being from Nemerow in Podolia. Nellie (Necha) Rochester from Kansas City and Pomona California is also from Nemerow and is about the same age, so they may well be sisters. Mollie Wilder (actually her mother was a Pikholz - her father is a Weinstein and she has a couple of brothers as well) was born in 1902 and has a living ninety year old daughter in North Carolina. I am talking to the granddaughter and we hope to get additional information soon - including a DNA test. Half a dozen Pikholz descendants have tested since the book ended, so I am already working on some new analyses. Needless to say, I am hoping for more people to test - some whom I have asked in the past and others whom I have not asked specifically. Chapter Seven of the book makes the case that even siblings have DNA that differs from one another and there are important discoveries there that I would not have found had my sisters not tested. You can't say "my cousin already tested so you don't need me." You also cannot expect an answer to the question "what exactly are you looking for with my test?" We have over fifty tests from Skalat Pikholz descendants and we are waiting on results from the fourteenth Rozdol Pikholz. Between those and other of my family members, I manage over eighty kits altogether. As a result, I get four-five emails a week from people who match thirty-forty or more of our kits and I do my best to help them out. Usually we can see some hints, but we keep running into the lack of surnames and the lack of records before 1800. People think this DNA business is some kind of magic. It is not. It's alot of hard work. But the more people test, the better our resources become. Some years ago, I made contact with a man in the US whose wife Marge is a descendant of a non-Jewish Pikholcz family from Hungary. They have been following our research and I finally met them in Phoenix. I have mentioned before that perhaps our family were tenant farmers or something on their land and when forced to take surnames, became Pikholz. Marge did a DNA test and of course matched none of us. She happened to mention that her family has a trait called a Mongolian Blue Spot which appears on babies on the lower back and disappears during childhood. One of our people also mentioned such a thing and I am curious if anyone else here is familiar with it. That will do for now. More as it happens on the blog - allmyforeparents.blogspot.com - and here from time to time. Israel P. -- End --