Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Who Is Your Ancestor #50?

This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver was an interesting exercise, even if I didn't come up with much concrete information.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible music, please!):

1.  Who is Ancestor #50 in your Ahnentafel list?  What were his birth date and place, his parents, death date and place, spouse's name, and marriage date and place.  How many children did he have, and which of his children do you descend from?
(Note: if you don't know your #50, then choose #25 or #12, or some other number).

2.  Share your information about #50 (or other) ancestor in your own blog post, write a comment on this blog post, or put it in a Substack post, Facebook Note, or some other social media system.  Please leave a comment on this post so others can find it.

Thank you to Lisa S. Gorrell for this week's SNGF challenge topic.

I don't routinely use Ahnentafel lists, so I had to look up how to figure out who #50 is on my list.  I used the reverse method #1 described on the Wikipedia page about Ahnentafels.  If I did it correctly, then #50 is my mother's father's father's mother's father, who is one of my 3rd-great-grandfathers.  It also means that the example using the method isn't accurate, because #1 is yourself.  But since Randy and other people who responded got 3rd-great-grandfather, I think I'm right.

So that means the person I should be writing about is:
mother Myra
grandfather Abraham
great-grandfather Moshe
great-great-grandmother Bela
3rd-great-grandfather UNKNOWN

I don't know Bela's maiden name or anything about her other than her given name.  I have her given name from my great-grandfather's death certificate.  I don't remember who the informant was for that, but it had to be one of his children, because his wife died 17 years before he did.  The older children may have known their grandparents, depending on when the grandparents died, because they were born in Kamenets Litovsk, where the family emigrated from.  So the name Bela might be correct.  My great-grandfather had a niece named Bela, so that lends some support to the name.

Even though I don't have any documented information about my 3rd-great-grandfather, I decided to write this about him to see what I could guess based on information I do have.

My great-grandparents Moshe and Mushe (Morris and Minnie in this country) named their first son Simcha, after Moshe's father.  I know that the second son, Herschel, was not named after Minnie's father, Gershon, or either of Minnie's grandfathers, Abraham or Ruven.  Maybe he was named after Moshe's grandfather, Bela's father.  I know that Moshe's sister Sore also named a son Herschel, so it's not an unreasonable hypothesis.  Moshe and Sore's grandfather was named Zvi, however, which is the Hebrew equivalent to Herschel, so their sons could have been named for him rather than their maternal grandfather.  But both men could have had the same name.  So now my 3rd-great-grandfather has a given name, even if it has a question mark after it.

I don't have a birth record for my granduncle Herschel, but the birth date he used in the United States is January 14, 1905.  So I can guess that my 3rd-great-grandfather had to have died before that date, because this part of my family followed the Ashkenazi Jewish minhag ("custom") of naming children after deceased ancestors.

To estimate 3rd-great-grandfather Herschel's birth year, I have to work from another hypothesized year.  I wrote recently about my great-great-grandfather Simcha Dovid Mekler, for whom I have no documented birth or death dates.  I estimated his birth year to be before about 1862 based on him being at least 21 when my great-grandfather Moshe was born.  Simcha Dovid was married to Bela, the daughter of 3rd-great-grandfather Herschel.  So if I say that Bela was two years younger than Simcha Dovid (just to pick a number), which would make her birth year before about 1864, and use the same logic that her father was at least 21 when she was born, that makes him born before about 1844.

I can estimate 3rd-great-grandfather Herschel's marriage to Bela's mother based on my estimate of Bela's birth year.  Since I made that before about 1864, the marriage year can be before about 1863.  As for whom Herschel married, the only other child I know of from Simcha Dovid and Bela's marriage was a daughter named Sore.  So maybe Bela's mother was named Sore.  I know that Simcha Dovid's mother's name was Esther, so Sore was not named after her.  On the other hand, Simcha Dovid had a sister and a niece named Sore, so the name was used in the Mekler family.

Because a common pattern seen in Ashkenazi Jewish families is that names skip one or two generations, it's possible that 3rd-great-grandfather Herschel's father was named Moshe.  Simcha Dovid's father was Zvi, as mentioned above, so my great-grandfather was not named after him.

Because the only location I have associated with my Mekler family is Kamenets Litovsk, Russia (now Kamyenyets, Belarus), my only guess for where 3rd-great-grandfather Herschel was born, married, and died is there.

I can put together the information from all of these hypotheses thusly:
Herschel (unknown family name), father possibly Moshe, mother unknown; born before about 1844 in Kamenets Litovsk, Russia; died before about January 14, 1905 in Kamenets Litovsk, Russia; married possibly Sore before about 1863 in Kamenets Litovsk, Russia.  I know of only one child, Bela, who is my great-great-grandmother.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: An Ancestor without Exact Birth and Death Dates and Places

I'm posting a little late for this past Saturday Night Genealogy Fun from Randy Seaver, but since this topic is practically perfect for Jewish research, I had to weigh in.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

1.  Do you have an ancestor with no defined birth and death dates or places?

2.  This week, please tell us about that ancestor and what clues you used to estimate birth and death dates and places.

3.  Share your ancestor and his estimated birth and death dates and places with us in your own blog post, by writing a comment on this blog post, or putting it in a Substack post, Facebook Note, or some other social media system.  Please leave a comment on this post so others can find it.

And here I go.

1.  Do I?  Hoo, boy!  I have at least a dozen just on my Meckler line!  But every single one of my Jewish lines has ancestors like that.

2.  The ancestor I decided to write about is my great-great-grandfather Simcha Dovid Mekler (before about 1862–before about November 16, 1903).  I have his name from the yizkor book about Kamenets Litovsk, former Russian Empire (now Kamyenyets, Belarus).  He was the father of my great-grandfather Moshe Mekler, who went by Morris and Max here in the United States and eventually spelled his last name as Mackler.

I have no original documents about Simcha Dovid Mekler from Europe.  I have his parents' names, Zvi Mekler and Esther, from the yizkor book and from a cousin who was born in Kamenets Litovsk.

I estimated Simcha Dovid's death date based on the birth date that my granduncle chose after he immigrated to the United States.  Simcha Mekler was my grandfather's oldest brother.  He used the name Sam in this country, and Mekler became Meeckler at some point.  He was named after his grandfather Simcha, and because my Ashkenazi Jewish family members followed the minhag ("custom") of naming their their children after deceased ancestors, that means Simcha Dovid had to have died before my granduncle was born.  But because he didn't know his exact date of birth and I have no documents for it, it's a rough estimate.  The birth date he used for his Social Security application was November 16, 1903, and it's all I have to work with.

I based my very rough estimate of a birth year for Simcha Dovid on the ages for my great-grandfather Morris in the records I have found for him, including his incoming passenger list and several censuses.  He apparently was born roughly around 1882.  I have no documents with an actual birth date, so it's another estimate (he didn't apply for Social Security, as far as I can tell).  I don't know if Morris had any older siblings, but I figure his father was probably at least 21 years old when he was born, so I backdated it to before 1862.

As for where Simcha Dovid might have been born or died, we have another guessing game.  In his will, Morris Mackler left a bequest for a new tombstone for his father's grave in the cemetery in Kamenets Litovsk.  Morris Mackler was said to have been born in Kamenets Litovsk himself.  So my guess is that Simcha Dovid died in Kamenets Litovsk.  Because I have no other location associated with him or Mekler family members, my guess is that he was also born there.

Maybe someday I will find documents relating to Kamenets Litovsk about my family members, but I'm not holding my breath.  The Nazis were extremely thorough in destroying almost all archival material about Jews in Grodno gubernia, so there's hardly anything left.  I do want to investigate what is there, just in case there's something about my family, but I need to save a bunch of money to have the research done.  So this is as far as I can get for now.

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Best Genealogy Day Ever

For this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver asked people to write about their best genealogy day ever:

1) What was you very "Best Genealogy Day Ever?"  It might be the day you solved a thorny research problem, or spent the day at a repository and came away with more records than you could imagine, or the day you met a cousin or visited an ancestral home.

2)  Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook or Google+ post.  Be sure to drop a comment to this post if you write your own blog post and link to it.

I agree with Randy, it's hard to pick only one day, especially since I've been researching for 40 years.  What was probably the very best day combined talking to a relative for the first time with solving a difficult research problem.  I learned that my great-great-grandmother's name was not Moore, as I had been led to believe when I started researching my family history, and that led to a lot more information.  But I actually wrote about that last year!

Rather than write about the same story, I thought about what might be my second-best genealogy day ever.  There were still a lot of contenders, but I decided on when I was contacted by a cousin I had never heard of, which led to meeting a whole new branch of my family.

My mother's family is Jewish, and to help try to make contact with possible cousins, I have posted all of the surnames in my family on JewishGen.org in the Family Finder database.  Every now and then I get a nibble, but rarely anything significant.

Then one day I received a message from a woman who thought she might be related to me on my Meckler line, because both of our families came from Kamenets Litovsk, Russia (now Kamyenyets, Belarus).  We went back and forth a few times with "Do you recognize this name?" before we discovered that we both had the same woman with an extremely unusual married name, then living in Israel, in our trees.  We figured the odds were in our favor at that point and that we had to be cousins.  And then she invited me to her 50th wedding anniversary in Winnipeg!

So off I went to Winnipeg that summer, and I think I met about a hundred cousins.  One of the cousins, who was actually born in Kamenets Litovsk, sat down with me and we figured out the most likely place where the connection between our two branches comes in the family tree.  I was particularly impressed when she was able to go back and forth between the Hebrew, Yiddish, and English sections of the yizkor book for Kamenets Litovsk and read all the information about family members that was there.

After I updated all of my information in Family Tree Maker, I shared the new version of the family tree with many of the cousins I had met.  I'm still in touch with most of them even now, eight years later.

Something that made this discovery very special is that the province Kamenets Litovsk was in, Grodno, has very few archival records remaining for the Jewish community (the Nazis were particularly thorough in that area in destroying historical records), so I had never expected to be able to find relatives on that side of my family.  To not only meet family members, but also to learn about earlier generations of my family, was a wonderful gift.  And all of it started with that first message.