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| Grodecka Street in Lwow (L'viv, Ukraine), the street where my great-grandfather Bernard was born. |
My Grandpa Alfred passed down a particular pride in our family background, in being "Galitzianers" — Galician Jews from the Eastern European region of Galicia. This area is now part of western Ukraine, but as my family and many other Galitzianer families tell it, the regional borders would frequently shift and your town would be passed between Austria, Poland, and Russia. My great-grandparents' hometown of Lemberg, Austria-Hungary became Lwow, Poland, then Lvov, USSR, and finally L'viv, Ukraine.
My other blog covers the full story of this branch of my family tree, the Fingerhut family, but it took 20 years to collect this information. The first historical record I ever found was my great-grandparents' 1906 passenger list from Ellis Island, then I tracked down their U.S. census entries and death records. By the mid-2000s JewishGen and JRI-Poland started to index Lemberg birth records and I found my great-grandparents and some of their siblings.
Then in the mid-2010s, JRI-Poland expanded access to Galician 20th-century records and I found the 1911 civil marriage record of my great-great-grandparents, Majer Izak Fingerhut and Fani (Tafel) Fingerhut. The anti-Semitic Austro-Hungarian officials did not recognize religious Jewish marriages, and so my ancestors had to get "married" more than 40 years after they started their family, probably to legitimize their children. The marriage record listed the name of my 3rd-great-grandparents, which allowed me to use Gesher Galicia's indexes of 19th-century Lemberg records. Before long, I had the names of ancestors who had lived in the 18th century, and some of them even lived through the collapse of the Kingdom of Poland in 1772, which brought Polish self-rule to an end for nearly 150 years.
Now in 2019, AncestryDNA and GEDmatch brought three genetic insights into my Grandpa's family:
1) New distant Fingerhut relatives
I noticed on GEDmatch that I matched up with a lot of users whose tests were managed by the same person. This man, Jeff, is intense about his genetic genealogy, convincing both his parents and relatives on his maternal and paternal sides to take DNA tests and then upload the results. Jeff's hard work gave me the rare privilege of determining which precise part of his family tree could be linked to mine.
Jeff is nearly 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, so it's no surprise that we share a number of DNA segments, on Chromosomes 2, 15, 16, and 22. The matching segments on Chromosomes 2, 15, and 16 come from Jeff's father's side, where there is no clear overlap in surnames or geography. I guess these are due to endogamy, reflecting the small founding population of Ashkenazi Jews.
Jeff's mother's side is a different matter — there are two stories I gleaned from our matching DNA on Chromosome 22.
His mother, R., and her two first cousins, G. and T., share a similar portion of Chromosome 22 with me. Here's the numbers, followed by the centiMorgans:
1) R. shares the portion from 46,900,462 to 48,968,070 with me. (8.0 cM)
2) G. shares the portion from 46,905,533 to 49,004,395 with me. (8.2 cM)
3) T. shares the portion from 47,096,950 to 49,068,081 with me. (8.4 cM)
So this little nugget of a segment is shared by three grandchildren of Harry Barasch (1878-1950) and Tuma Fingerhut (1880-1975), two Galitzianer immigrants who settled in New York. I can't be 100% sure, but given that Jeff and I both have Fingerhut ancestors, it makes sense that our mutual ancestors are on the Fingerhut line.
Tuma Fingerhut Barasch's earliest known ancestor is her grandfather, Chaim David Fingerhut, who lived in the 1860s in the town of Radziechow [now Radekhiv, Ukraine], 42 miles northeast of Lemberg [L'viv]. Unfortunately, Jeff and I have not yet found documentation linking his Fingerhuts with my Lemberg Fingerhut line, which stretches back to my 4th-great-grandfather Naphtaly Fingerhut (c.1778-1818).
Currently, Jeff and I believe our common ancestor was the father of Naphtaly Fingerhut, a Jewish man who was probably forced to take the surname Fingerhut by Austrian officials around 1787. Jeff's mother and I would be 5th-great-grandchildren of this unknown ancestor, and the tiny DNA segment we share is the right amount for such a distant relationship.
Given that the cousins R., G., and T. share the same portion of DNA as me, I'm pretty confident that this is an example of "triangulation," which in genetic genealogy means three or more people descended from the same ancestors who share the same overlapping segment of DNA.
In short, it's nice to know I have a particular part of my Chromosome 22 that is "Galitzianer DNA!"
2) Not all overlapping DNA is triangulation
When I first compared my DNA with Jeff's relatives, I saw that another two shared my portion of Chromosome 22:
1) D. shares the portion from 48,392,711 to 49,677,816 with me. (8.4 cM)
2) S. shares the portion from 48,560,111 to 49,677,816 with me. (7.3 cM)
However, D. and S. did not share this same portion of DNA with R., G., and T. Yet all five people shared part of the same section with me!
I was very confused but then Jeff clarified it. R. is Jeff's mother, G. and T. are her maternal cousins, and D. and S. are her paternal cousins. This explains why G. and T. and D. and S. did not share similar DNA on Chromosome 22.
How could all five people match my portion of Chromosome 22? I assume that R., G., and T. share the section of Chromosome 22 from my mother, and from our mutual Fingerhut ancestors.
D. and S. share a slightly overlapping part of my Chromosome 22 from my father. Perhaps my father and these two share a very distant ancestor, but it's more likely that the small matching DNA segment is similar by coincidence.
My genetic connection with R., G., and T. is an example of Identity By Descent (IBD), a match reflecting common ancestry.
My genetic connection with D. and S. is probably an example of Identity By State (IBS), of DNA segments that match by chance.
3) Confirming Kikenis cousins?
I took another look at my AncestryDNA matches, and concentrated on matches who share three or fewer segments with me. I figure that the fewer segments would be of greater length, making them more likely to be inherited from common ancestors rather than accumulated DNA from an endogamous gene pool.
To my delight, I struck gold: W. shares 32 cM on 3 segments. He only listed his parents on his family tree, but I recognized his mother as a granddaughter of my Grandpa's aunt Freide Fingerhut and uncle Izak Kikenis!
W.'s half-brother L. reached out to me a few years ago, because he recognized his family names on my blog. Ultimately, we lacked sufficient documents to absolutely prove that his Kikenis family and my Fingerhut family were related.
When I took the DNA test, I was disappointed that L. was not among my matches. But W. is not only a DNA match with me, but also with my Grandpa's nephew Al!
W. and I are probably third cousins. We share 32 cM on 3 segments. Third cousins can share 0 - 217 cM, with an average of 74 cM (per Shared cM Project).
W. and Al are probably second cousins, once removed. They share 29 cM on 5 segments. Second cousins, once removed can share 0 - 316 cM, with an average of 123 cM.
The cM amounts that Al and I share with W. seem low, but they are within the realm of possibility.
With all these genetic insights, my Grandpa's tiny Galitzianer family has become much larger. I learned family histories of immigration to the United States, Israel, and Argentina. I learned names of Holocaust victims and Holocaust survivors who endured most extreme horrors. I got to know the lives of parents, children, rabbis, and many other relatives from all walks of life. Also, I have connected with kind people who share my passion to preserve, amplify and share our knowledge of our Galitzianer past.
Questions? Comments? Write me at ruedafingerhut [at] gmail.com.
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