It started with a suggestion made years ago – Why don’t you give it a try? – from Michael, a charter member of my kiddush club. If I remember correctly, he was out of work at the time, and to occupy himself, began researching his family history. He was quite successful, finding all sorts of cousins and who-knows-who-they-are’s waiting to be grafted onto a Family Tree. And not just for show; he has been in contact with bunches of them. Of course, if you’re doing something that’s fun and you consider it worthwhile, you’re going to share the news the same way you share a wee dram – gladly and often.

I approached the matter with more than a modicum of skepticism. Most of us don’t have the information at our fingertips that we need to get started; it requires a certain amount of research. And where do you start? By asking your relatives what they remember about their relatives. And for me that was the HUGE stumbling block, something I had come to realize long before, when I began considering the reliability of the family ‘legends’ I had been told when we were growing up. The great-grandmother who slipped in the bathtub at the ripe old age of 103 and survived for months on end in a coma before she consented to leave this world. (Whose mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother was she anyway?) Or my father’s father, who is supposed to have slept on his carpenter’s bench on the Lower East Side to save enough money to bring over his wife and their first child. Except that, as best as I can figure out, the couple both arrived in 1886, and Aunt Mae was born two years later. Or how is it that my mother’s parents, both demonstrably German-speaking Jews, were living in Latvia before heading to the Land of Wealth and Promise?

All I was trying to do was make sense of what I had believed to be true. Couldn’t I trust what my parents and their siblings had told me? I had come face-to-face with a paradox. By the time I was old enough to think about asking questions, there was no one to ask. Either the ‘askees’ were no longer with us or too old to be considered reliable witnesses.

I had little enough information to begin with, and if it wasn’t accurate, how could I even start doing any research? Nonetheless, with Michael’s assistance, I went to MyHeritage.com and started putting in whatever information I did have. There was nothing to lose. I could open a starter account with them free of charge. There was a limit to how many folks I could put on my ‘tree,’ and I couldn’t match the information I had with what other people had discovered, which is the best way to get information, but you gotta start somewhere.

What made any of it possible were, 1) once I put my mind to it, I realized I had more information than I thought I did; 2) Barbara’s cousin once-removed, Beverly, supplied me with lots of info on their side of the family; 3) there’s more and more stuff available on-line, assuming you know now to access it. Long story, short, I wound up with 200 people on my Family Tree (which is close to what MyHeritage.com would allow on their for free service.) And there I left it, having other ways to occupy my attention. How easy it is to forget, especially if you have invested minimal time and effort and not one cent of your own money.

And then it was put up or shut up. MyHeritage.com gave me an ultimatum: pay them for their services or have my carefully stored information cast into the black hole of internet space, lost forever like a treasure chest on the dark side of the moon. OK, so it was ‘minimal time and effort,’ but it was, after all, worth something. So I have to fork over some money. Maybe that would encourage me to increase my involvement. Who knows what I might come up with? It didn’t hurt that there are a bunch of genealogists I could call on for advice and encouragement. Ron has been looking into his ancestry for decades. Jeremy, who is Ron and Esther’s son-in-law, has been doing major league research, with more than 20,000 folks on his tree, which probably proves he is related to Benjamin Franklin and Genghis Khan. Our friend Moshe has made contact with folks he never knew about, and Carol had so many people on her Tree that it required pruning. Well I’m a piker compared to these esteemed friends, but that shouldn’t stop me from trying. I was only a credit card away.

Once you’ve paid them the ransom they require, MyHeritage.com is all smiles; they’re your BFF. You start getting Smart Matches left and right for you to consider. Let’s say your grandfather had a brother named ‘Sam Schwartz.’ The website’s algorithms get to work and notify you that there’s a guy with the same name and similar details on somebody else’s Family Tree, and it might be the same person, so check it out. You do so, and, sure enough, your Sam Schwartz and their Sam Schwartz are one and the same Sam Schwartz. (Similar birth and death information, as are the parents’ names.) But the other Tree has information you don’t have, like the name of Sam’s wife. So it lets you add Bertha to your Tree. Then two days later, you get a Smart Match for Bertha, listing her parents and three of her siblings. So you add them as well, because why not? Then Chaim, one of Bertha’s brother, pops up with information about his wife. You see where this is going.

Within a fairly short period of time, my skinny sapling of a Family Tree has grown from 200 names to over 550. Great! Except that almost none of the additions are my blood relatives. Since I started out with mostly information about Barbara’s extended family, it should be no surprise that most of what I’m finding out is about her side, now grown exponentially. Even the stuff about my side isn’t really. My late first cousin Evelyn married Murray, and now I have tons of information about his mother’s extended family. Or the information I have about my late cousin Hank’s first wife’s family. All of this information is now on my Tree because I never thought about where to draw the line in the sand.

Since nobody I’m actually related to by blood seems to be doing any genealogical research to share with me, there was only one thing to do. Take a DNA test. That should be simple. (I’ve got this great slogan for any company doing DNA tests: ‘You’re only a swab away.’) But it wasn’t. (Are you surprised? Remember the theme of one of my previous posts about trying to purchase a few bagels.) For reasons that are not clear, the folks at MyHeritage.com have decided that people living in Israel, for reasons of ‘privacy,’ may not do DNA tests, although their competitor, Ancestry.com, has no such issue. Now, am I going to let these folks, whom I thought were my BFF, tell me what I can and cannot do? No, I am not. There are many ways to ‘bust out of jail,’ the simplest one being getting a DNA kit sent to someone in The States. Which is what I did, having the kit mailed to brother Frank in the Berkshires, who duly mailed it to friend Sal in Passaic, to be brought back to Israel in his suitcase. Taking the test – rubbing a swab inside your cheek – is a lot simpler and less painful than the do-it-yourself COVID tests that we were all taking not so long ago. Pack up the swabs, send it to an address in The States, and wait four weeks for the results.

Meanwhile, I had all these Smart Matches to consider. And looking at the information therein, I was reminded of my first days at the Jewish non-profit where I was hired to deal with their database. A number of times I was given contradictory information to enter. I had no choice but to run to my boss, who looked at the two pieces of paper and said, ‘This one is correct.’ OK. By the third or fourth such incident, I had to ask, ‘How do you know which one is right?’ Simple. ‘I just look at the signatures.’ Howie knew whom he was dealing with. Certain people were just more reliable purveyors of information than others. I learned quickly.

Much of the information I was matching were carbon copies of each other. But not always. Some of the discrepancies were understandable, backfilling information for someone who was born in the 1890’s, when there’s no documentation and the borders of certain countries in Europe kept shifting with the season. (1897 in Lithuania vs. 1895 in Poland) But you have half of a family listed as ‘Fastovsky’ and the other half ‘Foss.’ (I guess they couldn’t agree.) Some of the confusion seems to be the result of the data-enterer valiantly doing battle with the MyHeritage.com interface and losing the fight. Did Great Uncle Hymie come to The States in 1911, 1913, or 1915? If you’re not sure, put down all three. (Maybe he went back and forth?) Of course, if you’re looking for the name of Sol Schwartz’s spouse, and someone had entered ‘Sol Schwartz’ as his own spouse, well then, there’s no hope. Because I’m trained to look, I would notice the mistakes. Sometimes, I would ignore them. (For our purposes, it doesn’t matter when Great Uncle Hymie showed up.) Of course, I couldn’t fix the mistake in the other party’s Tree. (Sol would be married to Sol for all eternity.) There were rare occasions when I just scratched my head, not knowing what to do. Did Lily Rubin die at 35 or live into her 70’s? (HOWIE, I need help here.) I could always contact the administrator of both Trees, but that might make matters worse. The all-time winner was when someone’s husband was added to my Tree. The information contained was that the man was buried in 1980 and died in 1984. Think about that for a moment.

I also noticed that I was being offered over a thousand Record Matches. No idea what that’s about, so let’s check it out. Here I wasn’t dealing with other people’s Family Trees, which we have discovered are not as reliable as one would want. Now I’m being shown matches from all kinds of official sources, which should prove to be more reliable: the U.S. censuses from 1900 to 1950, Social Security information, yearbooks, newspaper clippings, naturalization records, draft registrations, indexes of marriage licenses, death certificates, you name it. Just for fun, let’s look and see if there is a record of our own marriage in NYC. There it is. Frederick Casden and Barbara Cole, Jan. 7, 1978. Except we were married exactly one year later. I ought to know; I was there. Oh well.

About a month later, I finally got an email with a summary of my DNA results. That’s odd; they’re saying I’m about 45% Ashkenazic Jew with hints of Italian, Nordic, Sephardic DNA and a soupçon of ‘other.’ (By comparison, Barbara’s sister, Lois took a DNA test a few years ago and came back 95% Ashkenazic.) I didn’t know what to make of this result, except to scratch my head in bewilderment. But I intended to plunge on, to locate people with a smattering of similar DNA, which would make them, in some convoluted way, related to me. Sure enough, I started to get a list of DNA matches from MyHeritage.com., but when I clicked on the link, ‘Review DNA match,’ it wouldn’t open. All I was being shown was that a match from the Bernstein Family Tree has a shared DNA of 1.6%, meaning that somebody out there might be a fourth cousin-once removed to me, and a match from the Schwartz Family Tree, on which somebody somewhere was a Jacobson. I did try to contact the site manager for two likely matches, but to date no responses.

It was obvious that the site was determined to keep me away from the information I needed. (What do you think, Ron? Answer:You need to install a VPN.) Well, yeah; that way the nosey parkers at MyHeritage won’t know where I am. That’ll larn ‘em. Sure enough, having done that, the virtual portals opened on command, and I could actually get a gander at who might be related to me. But what did I gain, you ask, from my subterfuge? Nothing I was being offered was especially promising. Unless you hit the jackpot, you’re not going to get much information if the person related to you was your great-grandfathers’ second cousin.

But Ron had another useful idea. You need to download your full DNA information in MyHeritage and upload it to GedMatch. Who? What? That site is, in effect, a clearing house with 1.4 million customers. There are lots of sites offering DNA tests, but the results don’t necessarily talk to each other.  So what you do is upload your DNA raw data to Gedmatch, and maybe you’ll come up with something. Or maybe you won’t, but, with 1.4 million strands of DNA just waiting to connect with mine, it’s certainly worth a shot. There’s gotta be someone out there closer than a fourth cousin-once-removed to give me some information – although I’m not expecting anything as sensational as what one friend discovered, that he had a half-sibling that nobody knew about.  (Seems his father had a dalliance…..)

Let me get started. Google ‘gedmatch.com,’ open an account (it’s free!), and read the instructions about uploading from MyHeritage. So far, so good. Go back to MyHeritage and try to download the DNA data that I now have access to, thanks to my VPN. It’s not working. What’s the matter? ‘Your ethnicity results are currently being generated. Please check back here tomorrow to see the updated results.’ I’m a reasonable guy, and I’m not in a rush. So I checked back ‘tomorrow.’ And the next day. And the next day. Is it possible that the war in Gaza is slowing down the algorithm? Not likely, but who knows. This is getting harder than ordering three bagels.

To be continued….