Today, I corresponded with 3 women I’ve never met:
1) One was a 23andMe match to my mother who is searching for her birth parents.
2) One was a 23andMe match to my mother whose father emigrated from Pultusk, Poland, after WWII. Pultusk, of course, is where my mother’s father was born.
3) One was someone I’d corresponded with before, whom I first encountered on Ancestry.com. She is not related to me, but she is a 3rd cousin of 1st cousins of mine.
My mother’s father’s family was from Pultusk, Poland, a little bit north of Warsaw. In Polish, it’s spelled Pułtusk, with that special “L” in the middle. I have been examining original birth, marriage, and death records from that area, and I kept encountering references to village names, which I didn’t understand, since they were also referencing Pułtusk. I have finally made some sense out of it.
It turns out that Pułtusk is also the name of a county. Pułtusk County has its county seat in the city of Pułtusk. In Poland, counties (districts) are divided into administrative divisions (subdistricts) called gminas. There are 7 gminas in Pułtusk. The gmina of interest to me is Gmina Gzy.
Gmina Gzy is a rural district to the west of Pultusk city. Its population is only around 4000, but it contains about 50 villages, average population 80 per village. At least 3 of those villages are featured in the records related to my family. Zalesie-Grzymały was the home village of Isaac Joskowicz (my great grandfather) when he got married in 1884. I have seen a couple other names from that gmina in other records, and I expect to see more as I examine additional records more closely.
So what does this mean, apart from getting the right town names? For one, it means that my family was not from the “big city” of Pultusk, as I previously had believed, but from tiny rural shtetls to the west. I don’t have historical population information about those villages at the times they lived there, but for now I am assuming that they were similar, that my ancestors worked on farms or other rural tasks. It’s a little more insight into my family history.
In 1887, Dora Joseph was born in Romania. She was the sister of my father’s mother. She came to America in the early 1900s where she married another Romanian emigrant, Jacob Goldberg. Dora and Jacob had no children.
In 1923, my father was born as Louis Sepersky. When Aunt Dora came to see her new nephew, she told her sister, “He doesn’t look like a Louis. He’s a Leonard.” From that time forth, my father was Leonard.
In 1940, Marya Jacobs nee Zarywacz passed away at the age of 75. She was my great grandmother, my maternal grandfather’s mother. She was born in Poland, but came to America with my grandfather and another son in 1920, joining her husband and all of their living children. At the time of her death, she was living in my grandparents’ house, and died suddenly in the dentist’s chair. Mary and Isaac had 12 children, 9 of whom came to America.
In 1892, Dora Finegold was born in Poland, In 1911 she married my maternal grandfather’s brother, Julius Jacobs. Jules and Dora went on to have 9 children, 2 of whom are still living. She lived in Philadelphia after immigrating, living to the age of 86.
In 1956, Jackie Jacobs passed away at the age of 21 from spinal meningitis. He was the son of my maternal grandfather’s youngest brother, Max Jacobs. He had briefly been in the Navy before he fell ill.
In 1994, Abraham Wagner, known as Al Wagner, passed away at the age of 78. He was the only son of 5 children of Freday Wagner nee Jacobs, a sister of my maternal grandfather, David Jacobs. He and his wife, Rose nee Janofsky, had 3 children, about whom I know very little. I know of spouses for each and one granddaughter and one great granddaughter.
In 1989, Frances Strauss died at the age of 73 in a fire. She was the daughter Rose Strauss nee Jacobs, sister of my maternal grandfather, David, making Frances my 1st cousin once removed. She never married or had children.
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date marks the anniversary on the Jewish calendar of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, but of course it represents so much more. The Holocaust directly impacted my family in ways that I know and do not know.
My mother’s mother’s brother, Chaim Weisskopf, lived in Germany with his wife and 3 children in the early 1940s. They knew they were in danger and wanted to at least get the children out of the country. They were in touch with the French Hidden Jewish Children program, but that program only accepted children in a narrow age range. The oldest son was too old, the daughter was too young. They accepted the middle child, Werner Weisskopf, and they managed to get him to America in 1942, where he was raised by my mother’s parents as a son. As far as we know, the rest of the family was killed.
My father’s father’s family, Sepersky, was from Kletsk in modern Belarus. They left around 1900. The Jewish population of Kletsk was killed in the early 1940s by the Nazis. This page lists several people named Sepersky who were killed at that time. Perhaps they were cousins?
|
Name
|
Year of Birth
|
Place of Residence
 |
Source
|
Fate based on this source
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ceperski,Aron | Kleck, Poland | Page of Testimony | Murdered | |
| Tzeperski,Aron | Kleck Area, Poland | List of persecuted pe … | Murdered | |
| Tzeperski,Leyba | Kleck Area, Poland | List of persecuted pe … | Murdered | |
| Tzeperski,Avsey | 1910 | Kleck Area, Poland | List of persecuted pe … | Murdered |
| Tzeperski,Yesel | 1902 | Kleck Area, Poland | List of persecuted pe … | Murdered |
| Ceperski,Yehoshua | Kleck, Poland | Page of Testimony | Murdered | |
| Ceperski,Ester | Kleck, Poland | Page of Testimony | Murdered |
I know that the Holocaust affected my other ancestral towns of Pultusk, Poland, and Brody, Ukraine, possibly killing other unknown cousins. It’s difficult to research any town in Eastern Europe without encountering a phrase like, “most of the Jewish community was wiped out by the Nazis in the 1940s”. So, while today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, I am forced to remember it most days I research my family. This is the least appealing aspect of my genealogical journey.
In addition to traditional historical records searches and word of mouth, I am attempting to use DNA analysis in my genealogical research. I have had my DNA analyzed by 23andMe and Ancestry. I have also submitted my 23andMe raw data to Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) and GEDmatch. FTDNA does their own DNA testing, including much more extensive tests, but they also allow raw data from other services to be added to their database for purposes of matching with others. GEDmatch does not offer testing, but they accept raw data from other testing services also for matching.
Thus far, my DNA analysis experience has been intriguing and frustrating. I have discovered no new confirmed relatives, but the matching services have matched segments of my DNA with thousands of other people. I have learned a lot about how chromosomes are passed from generation to generation and how they change along the way. But Ashkenazi DNA offers special challenges, generating vast numbers of false positives. Perhaps I’ll make a separate post about why that is at some point.
For now, I am continuing to study my matches and develop new techniques to further analyze them. My goal is to find a legitimate match with someone I don’t know who can be verified as a new relative, perhaps still back in Europe. My hope would be that such a new relative would have information about some wing of the family that I have not been able to learn about via traditional means.
Spear-Jacobs Genealogy 
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