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A Noble Pursuit
I
Geneaolgy research isn’t for all, yet finding
relatives is fabulous.
am a genealogy agnostic.
set up a family tree on a website called
Doing genealogical research can
Geni, so we added our family information.
become an all-consuming passion.
A few years later, out of the blue, I was
Some of those who do it exhibit almost
contacted through Geni by a young man
cult-like intensity.
in Israel who turned out to be a second
I tried it, and it just didn’t take.
cousin once removed. He had
When I retired a little more than
found my maiden name on the
four years ago, I thought it might
family tree.
be fun to see if I could increase my
His great-grandmother and
knowledge of my forebears, which
my grandfather were siblings. My
was scant at best. So I registered
grandfather and a brother left
on a couple of the big genealogi-
Minsk for Philadelphia in the early
cal research websites, JewishGen
1900s; another brother and three
(www.jewishgen.com) and
sisters stayed behind. My grand-
Barbara Lewis
Ancestry (www.ancestry.com).
father never talked about them,
Both sites are treasure troves of
so I never knew this branch of the
resources for those serious about
family existed.
finding their personal history. On the other
In the 1990s, my new-found cousin,
hand, there’s so much there that browsing
his parents and grandparents moved to
can be overwhelming. One link leads to
Israel. I sent him some old photos, taken
another, which leads to yet another, and
in Russia, I got from my grandparents. I
you can pretty easily get lost in the con-
didn’t know who was in the photos, but
tent.
he did. One photo of four people included
A common problem for Jewish geneal-
my grandparents and my cousin’s great-
ogy researchers is that it can be difficult to
grandmother. It’s the only photo I have of
know which name to research.
my grandparents as young adults.
Most of us have parents, grandparents
Did this experience make me a genealo-
or great-grandparents who came here
gy convert? It did not. But I have enormous
from Europe, where their surnames were
admiration for people who do expend the
often written in Yiddish, Russian or another time and energy to research their family
alphabet that doesn’t automatically trans-
histories — and I’m glad my Israeli second
late to Latin characters. And many short-
cousin once removed is one of them.
ened or Anglicized their names when they
reached America.
For me, having unusual family names
was both a blessing and a curse. If I had
been a Cohen or a Goldberg, I would have
easily found thousands of matches — but
it would have been difficult to sift through
them to find actual relatives.
The only people I’ve ever encountered
with my father’s family name — Naidoff
— or my mother’s family name — Gansar
— have been known relatives. On the
genealogy sites, I had to list every conceiv-
able spelling of those names: Naidovich,
Naidovitch, Gansarsky, Gansarski, Gancar.
None of my early efforts on the geneal-
ogy websites unearthed new family mem-
bers, and I soon lost interest because I felt
I didn’t have enough time to devote to the
Barbara Lewis’ grandparents Anna
project.
Barshai and Yosef Nsidovitch, left,
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GENEAOLGY JACKPOT
Meanwhile, one of my husband’s cousins
16 November 3 • 2016
with her grandfather’s sister, Mera
Naidovitch, right. She doesn’t who the
other woman is.
Tree DNA website seemed like a good way
to start sorting through the material. But it
reads like a college biology text and I found
my eyes glazing over.
Leah Bisel, a retired teacher from West
Bloomfield, experienced similar frustration.
“I’ve been doing genealogical research for
37 years and have a huge database of people
related to me, but I’d give anything to find
someone through DNA,”
she said. “I am very dis-
appointed and frustrated
because I find it so hard
to understand.”
But Bisel did find
something interest-
ing. She submitted her
brother’s DNA sample
Leah Bisel
and one of his matches
was Bennett Greenspan,
the Family Tree DNA
founder. Greenspan told her that her brother
had Sephardi ancestry.
Bisel says she was floored; their grandfa-
ther had come from Ukraine.
Greenspan explained that when the Jews
left Spain in the late 1400s, they traveled
everywhere, not just to Northern Africa.
Some undoubtedly headed north and east
to Ukraine. She’s excited
about the pre-Inquisition
Spanish connection, but
says research on this trail
is very difficult without a
Spanish surname.
Larry Horwitz, a
retired public policy exec-
utive from Southfield,
Larry Horwitz
did a DNA test through
23 and Me. Several third
and fourth cousins have
contacted him, he said, and they’re trying to
figure out just how they’re related.
My own test turned up thousands of
names of people who could be anything
from a “second to fourth cousin” to “remote
cousin.”
Greenspan was convinced some people at
the top of my match list had to be related,
even though none listed any of my family
names, because we shared so much DNA. I
contacted a few of them through the website
but received no responses.
CLASSICAL AND MODERN
Joshua Goldberg of Detroit, a business
consultant at Quicken Loans, has been con-
ducting genealogical research since he was a
teenager. Active in the community, he serves
on multiple boards and is a vice president of
NEXTGen Detroit. He said DNA testing can
be used to challenge assumptions that arise
in traditional modes of research.
He ran his first DNA test nine years
ago on his maternal grandfather, Leonard
Baruch. “Baruch” is typically a Sephardi
surname, and Goldberg wanted to see if
Y-DNA would indicate his Baruch line was
Sephardi. The results pointed to Ashkenazi
Family Tree DNA kit
lineage.
Goldberg’s father’s father’s father’s family
came from Pilvishok, Lithuania. Years ago,
he found another Goldberg family from
Pilvishok, and he had reason to hypothesize
the two family’s progenitors were brothers.
Y-DNA tests, however, indicated no such
match.
“The way surnames were obtained, even
two people with the same name from the
same shtetl might not be closely related,” he
said.
Meanwhile, autosomal DNA testing has
yielded multiple promising leads for him
to explore when time allows. He says what
makes them promising is having prior tra-
ditional research to use in conjunction with
the emerging science.
Goldberg lectures on genealogical top-
ics, and his best advice is for people to both
DNA-test their oldest relatives and also ask
them critical questions, such as ancestral
maiden names and cities of origin. He
believes DNA results will become more
fruitful as time goes on.
“The more people who get tested, the
more connections will be found, plus the
technology continues to improve and we’re
getting much more granular,” he said.
Living in a Downtown high-rise,
Goldberg compares his setting to his
research.
“One of the many exciting things happen-
ing in Detroit right now is beautiful, historic
architecture being supplemented with mod-
ern, cutting-edge technology and connectiv-
ity,” he said. “It’s a combination that creates
even more opportunity, and the modern
technology of DNA being used in classical
genealogy has the same effect.”
Barbara Zabitz of Oak Park has a gentle
warning for people thinking about DNA
testing: You may uncover some unpleasant
family history.
Maybe a grandfather left a family behind
when he came to America and never told
anyone about those children. Maybe a teen-
aged mom gave her child up for adoption.
Maybe a child was conceived through rape
or an adulterous affair.
It’s possible to find a branch of the family
tree you never knew existed, she said, and
your other relatives may not be thrilled to
learn about it.
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