To: @PIKHOLZ.PML Subject: Genealogy #26 Reply-to: zach4v6@actcom.co.il Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 20:25:17 +0300 This evening we begin here in Israel to mark Memorial Day for fallen soldiers, so I thought it would be an appropriate time to tell you that a few days ago we learned that another Pickholz descendant fell in the line of duty, back in 1962. His name is Shelomo Birnboim and his father Menahem was the son of Israel Pickholz, of a family we have not yet identified. All three fallen soldiers from among the Pickholz descendants can be seen on the family web site. We have had quite a lot of progress in the last few days with material from the AGAD archives in Warsaw. The big search we did for Zbarazh records is complete and we are ordering a number of records. The JRI indexing project for Skalat is complete and we have ordered a number of death and marriage records and will be ordering some of the 69 birth records for 1884-1899. (For budgetary reasons, we shall not be ordering all of them and I hope we will not miss much. In the case of the death records, we have only ordered the records of those who died as adults - for the same reason.) The JRI project to index East Galicia is moving along slowly, not as well as we might like. Of the towns I am responsible for, we have funded Zurawno completely, Zbarazh and Zalsoce about 50%, Rozdol about a third and even less for Skole and Komarno. We received forty-four birth records that we ordered for Skalat for the period 1859-1883, bringing us to a total of ninety during that period in this one town. Here too, we had some debate about whether is was really necesary to leave no stone unturned. I am pleased we got them all, because we have found some very important information that we could not have predicted. This has enabled us to identify the wife of Eliezer (ELIEZER family) as a Pikholz from the MOTIE family, leaving us to speculate whether Eliezer himself was a Pikholz or not. We are now fairly sure that the four families LAOR, GETZEL, TONKA and RITA are all descended from Nachman Pikholz (1795-1865) and we are working on filling in those details. There is also a small family of Perlmutters descended from the same man. There is a good chance that all those families are in fact Leviim, which raises some interesting possibilities for the rest of us Skalaters. We are now considering whether to follow up by searching the older Lwow archives or the post-1900 USC archives in Warsaw. On the Rozdol side, I met with Francis Moritz of Paris (and his mother and sister, who live here) - descendants of the Pickholz who lived in Turka. We have now decided that we will accept the evidence we have as conclusive and put Francis' great-grandfather (born 1865) as a son of Pinchas and Rachel of Rozdol. (No, I have not yet updated the web site on this - nor on the 44 Skalat births.) I learned recently that the Skalat memorial in the Holon cemetery has two scrolls with names of Holocaust victims inside. I now have copies of those paper scrolls and am trying to figure the best way to display them online. I don't expect there is much new information there, as there are fewer names there than in Pages of Testimony at Yad VaShem. Maybe nine hundred, although many of them say "and family." Finally, Ellis Island. As many of you know from the media, Ellis Island has gone online with immigration records and documents. I decided to avoid the traffic and wait a few weeks, but Rita had a look and came up with about thirty Pikholz and Pickholz entries. Some of them are people and dates we know. Some are people we know with new or conflicting dates. Some are completely off the wall, leaving us to wonder not only where these cousins came from, but where they disappeared to after arriving. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of this new resource and when the traffic dies down, I hope to have a closer look. Anyone who wants Ellis Island as a complete project, following the paper trail in the US, is welcome to it. That will do for now. More as it happens. Israel P. -- End --