Who Dat?

          Do do do do. Do do do do. In case you don’t recognize it the previous lines are the theme song from “The Twilight Zone”. You probably haven’t heard it in a while unless you’ve been binge watching it during the pandemic or possibly watching the first season of “The Good Wife” where it was the ringtone for Alicia’s mother in law.
           Imagine if you will that you have just joined a Facebook group dedicated to Old Jewish Photographs of the World and the very first post you look at has pictures of your grandmother, your great grandmother and their families. It really freaks you out because you don’t know who the person who posted the pictures. This is exactly what happened to me and Judee..

          A year ago, somebody posted this picture of a woman next to a gravestone on a site and when I saw it I immediately said that it looked like my great grandmother, Tsiril Kaganovich. The real shocker was that the name on the gravestone was Kaganovich. I contacted the person who posted it and she said it belonged to her 99 year old uncle and she would ask him about it. Since then she has disappeared off the face of the earth. I placed that picture and these three other family pictures on the Jewish photo site to get some input from other people and Judee was similarly surprised. Her Grandmother, Fanny and my grandmother Tillie were sisters which makes us second cousins. I still haven’t determined if the women in the photo is Tsiril or another relative or is even a family member. What are your thoughts? Does the woman in the first photo look like any of the women in the other three photos?

           These kinds of situations always seem to crop up in the course of genealogical research. I have documented evidence that my grandfather, Louis Levine was from Traby in Belarus. DNA matches have led me to at least 3 other people with ties to that region and the right names in their family trees but I have not yet been able to procure the documents that verify the connections.
            DNA matching is an unexact science.There are instances where I match highly with somebody but my sister is only a marginal match, and vice versa. Endogamy is the main culprit among Ashkenazi Jews. I read somewhere that all Ashkenazi Jews can be traced back to only about 300 people. And because Jews tend to stay together in small groups it wasn’t unusual for cousins to marry each other thus creating the illusion that we are related to each other. Perhaps this is why DNA analysis says I’m a match with my old neighbor’s grandson, a bike riding friend, and some guy in England. It could also explain how Arlene is a match with another old neighbor, my bike riding friend’s sister, and my brother-in-law, Frank. She also matches with my cousin Dan in Minnesota but if I submit the data to him, his report will make my head spin faster than it is right now. I don’t have all of the answers but in the course of researching my family history I sometimes feel that I have entered another dimension. Do, do ,do ,do. Do,do, do, do.