Aunt Shaindel was Lost -- and Found (A DNA Success Story)

Genetic genealogy is relatively new.  Basically, you send in a sample (cheek swab or saliva in a test kit) to a company, they sequence your DNA, and they then compare similarities in your DNA to others who have taken the test.  They then give you potential matches with a predicted relationship based on shared DNA.

Genetic genealogy with Ashkenazic Jews is known to be...interesting.  And frustrating.  Because Jews married within the Jewish community with little outside DNA being introduced, we're not a very genetically diverse community--we are what is called an endogamous population.  On the genetic genealogy front, this means that closeness of relationships is amplified.  In the general population, if someone is predicted to be your fourth cousin, they're probably your fourth cousin--or maybe your third or fifth.  In the Jewish community, you're probably related multiple ways, so you will share a surprising amount of DNA.  Your predicted fourth cousin may be a tenth cousin (and an eleventh cousin 3 different ways).  My parents are predicted to be fourth cousins, but I have documented their families on paper living quite far apart at least back to the early 1800s.  But in some way, I'm my own cousin.

So anyways, I have a ton of predicted third and fourth cousins.  And in general, I haven't managed to figure out the connection to most of them, since they're likely much further removed.  I was able to verify known relationships when known cousins have tested.  I also showed that I was not a princess switched at birth, since I genetically match close relatives on both my parents' sides.

My second cousin match

But then a prospective second cousin match popped up on familytreedna.  The match's name was completely unfamiliar to me.  I have a stock message that I send to the closer DNA matches with my family names and the towns that they lived in, so I send them to this guy Dave, asking if he saw a connection.  He quickly responded that his great grandmother's maiden name was Jenny Diamond.



My grandfather, Paul Diamond, was a Holocaust survivor.  His parents (Avraham Tzvi and Tzivia Suttleman Diamond) were killed by the Nazis, as were his siblings Kreina Diamond Mazurek (with her husband David and their young daughter Rivka) and Shlomo Diamond.  One brother (David) and one sister (Deborah) survived, and the three surviving siblings ended up in Baltimore (a story for another post).  My grandfather never was one to talk much about his experiences during the war.  I knew much more about what my grandmother went through.  I'd spoken to my grandfather in the early 1990s about his family, and he'd said that his father had siblings named Leibish, Shaindel, Rivka, Esther, and Basya--but that they had been lost.  I assumed this meant they had been killed in the war, so I didn't ask any more questions.  Growing up, when someone asked me if I was related to a particular Diamond, I generally answered that unless they were in my immediate family, probably not.  Could this Dave be related on the Diamond side?

I asked Dave if he knew where his great grandmother Jenny Diamond Dorfman was from or what her parents' names were.  He only knew that she was from Russia.  However, he also enclosed a transcript of a letter that Jenny's daughter Ida had written in 1980 that talked about leaving Russia.  She told how she had been living with her grandmother, uncle, mother, and little brother while her father worked in America.  Once her father earned money, he sent passage for the family.  Ida told about when they left Russia, leaving her grandmother in tears, to join her father.  She did not mention the town she was from, but she did mention the date that she arrived in America.  I quickly jumped onto Ancestry.com looked for the boat record.

 

Dorfman family boat record (lines 22-24), 1913

With the arrival date known, I quickly found the Dorfmans--Scheine, Chaje, and Hersh L (who became Jenny, Ida, and Harry in America).  I looked over at the birth town and got goosebumps.  They were from Biscupice, the same village where my grandfather had been born.  Biscupice was a small village in what is now Volhynia, Ukraine, just northeast of Horochiv.  So it looked like we were definitely related on the Diamond side!  But we still had to figure out the exact connection.  Could this Scheine be the Shaindel that my grandfather had mentioned?  Or was it just a family name?

Dave said that Jenny had died in Detroit.  I found that Detroit has an online Jewish Cemetery Index!  A quick search led to where Jenny was buried.  I put a request for her picture on findagrave, hoping that someone would be able to take a photo of the gravestone which would have her father's name.  The very next day, a volunteer had posted a photo.  When I saw it, the goosebumps returned.  It said that she was Shaindel daughter of Hillel.  Hillel Diamond was my great-great grandfather.  This was the Aunt Shaindel that my grandfather had mentioned 20+ years ago!  And the uncle and grandmother that Ida had mentioned living with were my great-grandfather Avraham and my great-great grandmother Hinda Diamond!  The hypothesis is that he knew she existed, and probably his parents wrote to her in America.  But a teenaged boy (as my grandfather was when the war started) probably just knew that they got letters from and sent letters to Aunt Shaindel in America.  But if he didn't know her married name or where she lived, she would have been lost to him.  So even after he came to America, he had no way to find Aunt Shaindel in America!

It turns out there are lots of relatives in Detroit.  Jenny had 6 children and 17 grandchildren.  Dave, the original DNA match, is one of her great grandchildren--which means that he's actually my third cousin.  DNA surprisingly reconnected a family that didn't realize were missing the other part.  Lost Aunt Shaindel has been found!

Jenny & Morris Dorfman

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