From: IsraelP Subject: Genealogy #76 Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:36:17 +0200 Dear Cousins, I have stopped mentioning all the births, deaths and marriages in these summaries, but I do not want to skip over the passing of the oldest of the Pikholz descendants - Sol Holt, who died about six weeks ago in his 102nd year. We had been in occasional snail-mail contact until a few years ago. His parents are Sam Pikholz and Fannie Rosenblum, of the Brezdowicz family. Condolences to his two daughters, his grandchildren and other family members. The Israel Genealogical Society has a new database of name changes for the period 8 October 1948-18 November 1979, which supplements the database for names changes during the British Mandate. I did a quick search on Pickholz and found two people I do not know. One is Elisheva Pickholz of Jerusalem who changed her name to Elisheva Reiter in 1950. (We have no Reiter anywhere in our database.) The other is Yehudit Pickholz living somewhere near Tel-Aviv, who changed her name to Yehudit Ilani in 1973. This database is new and I have just begun looking into it, so we may have others whose names were not Pickholz.. The database shows all requests for name changes - surname or given name. Women's names changed due to marriage were included from 1962, but I do not see my sisters there, so this aspect is clearly incomplete. It is Hebrew-only and does not require IGS membership or registration. A very incomplete database of passenger arrivals in Argentina includes one Pinchas Pickholz, age 30, who arrived in December 1928. The best candidate for this in Pinchas the son of Zusman Pickholz of Podhajce, who was born in 1902, but his family members - some of who were indeed in Argentina - have no knowledge of his having visited there. Pinchas of Podhajce was killed in the Holocaust. Someone doing Horenstein research has a Rachel Horenstein married to a "Dr. Pickholtz" but with no other information. This Rachel was killed in the Holocaust, at which time she was married to someone else. Rachel's father was born in 1885 in Kiev and her mother was from non-Galician Poland. This does not give us much to work with. For the Tel-Aviv area Hebrew speakers among you, I will be presenting the lecture I gave at the Washington DC Conference, in Givatayim on 10 June. Drop me a note if you want specific details. The examples in the talk are from the Pikholz Project. My genealogy blog - http://allmyforeparents.blogspot.com - has become a weekly event and everyone is invited to read, join and comment. Occasionally it touches upon specific Pikholz issues. As you know, one of the purposes of the Pikholz Project website is to attract the attention of Pikholz descendants we do not know and these show up from time to time. About nine months ago, I received an email from a young woman named Joanna in Warsaw who told me that her late grandfather Julian was the son of a Polish woman and an older Jewish man named Pikholtz, whose first name she did not know. Based on the information she gave me - his occupation and the town where she lived (not far from Skalat) - it was easy to identify this Jewish man and I put Joanna in touch with his great-grandson here in Israel. There is nothing to document this relationship, as Julian's documents do not include his father's name, but "everyone knew he was Jewish." The obvious way to confirm the story would be a Y-chromosome test, which works on the male line. Unfortunately, although Julian has a living son and grandsons, there is no male line on the Jewish side so no comparison can be made. However, since we are talking about a fairly close relationship, there are DNA tests which can be done that can demonstrate degrees of cousinhood to a satisfactory level of certainty and the great-grandson here is pursuing that with Julian's son, who is Joanna's uncle. In the course of our discussing this, we began considering (again) the question of Y-chromosome tests on the Skalat-area Pikholz families to see if we can connect some of the nearly twenty families whom we assume to be related. The problem is, we have only eight families who have males lines that lead to living people, usually with only one or two adult living descendants. As luck would have it, most are not among the family members who have expressed real interest in the family history, so they will have to be convinced. Of the eight, we have the new one in Poland, three in the US and four here in Israel. And one of those four speaks only Russian. There are also several people whom I would like to have tested on the mother's side, each in a line where the earliest known Pikholz is a woman. (My own family comes in that category and there is, in fact, a living female- line descendant.) This could be a very interesting project, though I do not yet know how we are going to finance it. Wish us luck. My newest blog post discusses this in greater. Have a look please. A future blog post will discuss the Rozdol families in a similar context. So let me close by wishing all of you the best for this Passover holiday and may you and your families enjoy a happy, kosher and meaningful holiday of redemption. Israel P. -- End --