This discovery was only possible by the willingness of my mother and sister to spit into a tube for 23andMe. That allowed me to identify which DNA matching segments were from my maternal chromosomes.
It also helped that many of you cousins did the same autosomal DNA test and shared the results so I could see where in the genome we match. If they tested on Ancestry, which only gives the total amount of shared DNA, they uploaded their Ancestry DNA to Gedmatch (it's free), which displays the actual matching segments.
Thanks to all these available clues, I can usually tell if my mother's DNA match is from her mother's or father's side. In some cases, I can even identify which of her grandparents handed down a given DNA segment.
Getting to this level of "DNA Painting" (sorting the genome by ancestor) allowed me to better evaluate DNA matches with four of Mom's presumptive 3rd Cousins.
Linda and Robin and their 1st Cousins Janet and Susan are all descended from a David Reiss (born 1853), who raised his family in Buhusi, Romania. Our ancestor Leah Rachel Reiss, later known in Des Moines, Iowa, as Leah Rachel Leon (born 1840), also grew up in Buhusi, along with her brothers David (born 1836) and Alter. Both David Reisses named a son "Wolf," suggesting a common ancestor by that name.
Ashkenazi Jews are believed to descend from a small number of people who lived about a thousand years ago. As a result, any two such Jews could share some DNA. Thanks to my "DNA painting," I could filter out matching segments that came down through my other maternal grandparent.
One of the remaining segments is near the high end of Chromosome 1, where my mother matches with Susan Reiss Roscoe. Also matching that segment are Barbara Gibian Heinrich and her 3rd Cousin Elyse Lipkin-Katz. Their common ancestors, from the Schaeffer and Wolensky families, were not from Buhusi, or even from Romania, but from a shtetl called Lunno, in the northwest part of present-day Belarus.
Yet another person matching our DNA in this region is Leo Kliot, a 90-year old Holocaust survivor from Dzisna in northern Belarus who now lives in Montreal. While we do not have a known cousin of his to confirm how we are related, his mother Esther Kulvarsky came from Pieski, a village very close to Lunno.
Ashkenazi Jews only began to arrive in Buhusi in the 1820s, meaning Leah Rachel Reiss's parents were born somewhere else. The DNA evidence says they most likely came from somewhere near Lunno and Pieski. In the days of the Russian Empire, those villages were part of Grodno Guberniya (province). In terms of Yiddish culture, they would be classified as "Litvak" (Lithuanian) Jews, whose territory ran far beyond today's Lithuanian borders.
Newly-arrived Jews living among the Romanians would eventually develop their own cultural features. Romanian Jews who moved to Israel, especially after the Holocaust, had to contend with distinct and not-always-flattering stereotypes. But when Leah Rachel's son Solomon Leon arrived in Des Moines in 1882, the cultural gulf between him and the Litvak majority may not have been so wide. Solomon wasted no time marrying a Litvak woman, and fifteen years later became a factional leader in the local Hebrew Republican Club.
Discoveries like this require as many clues as possible, both in terms of DNA and old-fashioned documentation. If you have done a DNA test, consider downloading the DNA file and uploading it for free to Gedmatch, which has many free tools. Here are the instructions:
If you have not done such a test yet, I am happy to answer your questions before you order a test kit.
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