We’re now on Week 17 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge, and the topic is DNA. My mostly WASPy (WASPish?) genealogy is relatively easy to trace. My husband’s 100% Ashkenazi ancestry, on the other hand, is incredibly challenging. Most Jews who ended up in the former Soviet Union after the war didn’t pass their family history down to the younger generations. In fact, when we ask his 98-year-old grandmother, Berta, questions about life before and during WWII, she’s always happy to answer, but at the same time she’s genuinely surprised by our curiosity. Few Russian Jews talk about the past, and without an oral history, you don’t have much. Records are either difficult to find or non-existent. Everything I’ve read and learned about Jewish genealogy says to find your ancestors’ shtetls to locate records. Awesome. Alex’s maternal side of the family was from Ukraine, and though his grandmother knows exactly where she is from – Gadyach in the Poltava region - nearly all records from that area were destroyed during WWII. We turned to DNA. Alex tested a couple years ago. He has thousands of matches, but making concrete connections has been a struggle – especially since we initially had no way of knowing which side the connections fell on. Were they related to his mother, father, or both? Despite all his teasing about my completely inbred French-Canadian side, endogamy is an issue in Jewish genealogy. Fortunately, Alex’s mother and grandmother both agreed to test.
His mother tested first, and the closest match to come up after Alex and our daughter was a man in his 80s named Boris S. They shared 2.9% DNA over 9 segments, and MyHeritage gave their most probable relationship as second cousins. I contacted the person in charge of his kit, who turned out to be his son-in-law, and asked my usual spiel of questions about shared surnames and locations. He promised to contact Boris, and the next day I had an answer. Boris’s maternal family was also from the Poltava region of Ukraine, though from a different town, Khorol. Even better, he did recognize the surname Braslavsky. Boris’s mother’s cousin was Boris Braslavsky, who lived in Leningrad. He remembers visiting him a few times. We also had a Boris Braslavsky on my mother-in-law’s maternal side. Boris Braslavsky was her granduncle – Berta’s uncle. He was one of Berta’s few family members to survive the war. After exchanging enough information with Boris S. to confirm this was the same Boris Braslavsky (it’s not an uncommon name and Leningrad/St. Petersburg is a huge city) I tried to figure out the connection.
I made a chart to visualize everything. The known connection was the first cousin relationship between Boris’s mother, Ester Boguslavsky and Berta’s uncle, Boris Braslavsky. Because Ester was first cousins with Boris Braslavsky, that meant she was also first cousins with Berta’s father, Leyba “Lev” Braslavsky. I used Lev’s name in the chart, and came up with this:
If Boris’s memory was correct, then this meant he and Berta were second cousins - not Boris and my mother-in-law. The common ancestor had to be a Boguslavsky or a Pavlotsky – neither of which we had on our tree, so yay for new names! I was immediately able to eliminate Berta’s grandfather, Meer Braslavsky as the genetic match as he didn’t share either of those surnames. That meant Berta’s grandmother, Khaya was a Boguslavsky or a Pavlotsky. We asked my mother-in-law and Berta if they recognized any of the names on Boris S’s tree, and they didn’t. Without a maiden surname or a patronymic for Khaya, my investigation stalled out.
Several months passed, during which time Berta took her DNA test and we received the results. As I suspected, she was an even closer DNA match with Boris S – 5.1% across 16 segments! I was so excited when I shared this news with Alex… and I received a blank stare. I guess he didn’t realize that was a significant amount of DNA. Once I put it into perspective, he got it. His grandmother shares 13.3% of her DNA with our daughter, her great-grandchild, so 5.1% was a lot of shared DNA, even when taking endogamy into account. I was even more convinced the chart I created was correct, and they were second cousins, but I was still no closer to discovering how.
Then a few weeks ago I was messaging with another DNA connection of Berta’s whom I’ve been in contact with for a couple years now. She also has ancestors from Gadyach, and although we haven’t been able to 100% confirm their relationship, we have a strong, plausible theory we keep revisiting. She mentioned the 1923 Gadyach census – apparently one of the only pieces of documentation that remains from that area. For whatever reason, it was filed in a different region and survived WWII. She showed me where to access it on FamilySearch, and then graciously did most of the work of going through it, as she reads Russian and I don’t. And oh my God – what a job! I owe her! This isn’t like the US census. Each individual family member has their own census card, and there’s seemingly no rhyme or reason to how they’re sorted. It’s as though someone decided to play 52 Pick Up, only instead of 52 cards, there are literally thousands, all written in really terrible Cyrillic script. At this point, I had nearly forgotten about Berta’s connection with Boris S. I was immersed in the 1923 census, focused on finding birth years and identifying the relationships for everyone in a big photo I have of the Braslavsky family (labeled only with first names) and trying to see if the Braslavsky census cards would finally connect our Braslavaskys and Bolotinskys to our Gadyach DNA match. We gained a lot more information, but the 1923 census cards also deepened the mystery of that connection, which is a long story for another time. Maybe by the time I tell it, I’ll have all the answers!
Anyway, the census cards gave us a ton of information, including patronymics. Because both of Berta’s grandparents were on the census, I now knew the first names of their parents, and could go back one additional generation on the tree. Meer Braslavsky’s full name was Meer Yankel Berkovich Braslavsky, so his father was Yankel Berko Braslavsky. Khaya’s full name was Khaya Girshevna Braslavskaya, so now we knew her father’s first name was Girsh. I added both names to my tree, pleased, but slightly disappointed I didn’t know Girsh’s surname/Khaya’s maiden name. And that’s when I had my big “duh” moment, slapped myself in the head, and decided to revisit Berta’s DNA connection to Boris S. and his family tree on Geni.
And there was the answer. Girsh Pavlotsky was Boris S and Berta’s common ancestor. Khaya’s full name was Khaya Girshevna Pavlotskaya.
Only a week before this discovery, we visited Berta. Alex acted as translator as I asked her a bunch of questions about her Braslavsky and Bolotinsky relatives. Who survived the war? Which children from the picture her eyes were now too bad to see belonged to which parents? What were her aunts’ married names? Could she share any information about her grandparents? She answered all my questions, then turned and asked me something. Had I learned anything I could tell her about her family? I felt terrible that I hadn’t. I told her that her Gadyach DNA match and I were working so hard to find answers for her, but I had nothing new to share. When Alex later called Berta and told her we had something to share with her – her grandmother’s name, the names of two of her grandaunts, and the name of her great-grandfather, I listened with absolute pleasure. I grew up knowing all four of my grandparents, and knowing their full names, as well as the full names of all eight of my great-grandparents. It felt really good to give Berta something I always took for granted as information everyone knew – her grandmother’s name.
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