Hi, this is Mindy Selvett, and I'm joining you here with Thomas, and we are going to be talking about the Wikitree Challenge, number 17 of the year, really exciting for Scott Tarot. So, Thomas, do you want to tell us a little bit about how that we kicked off? Well, it was a difficult week to get started on because, of course, a lot of our regular challenge members don't have a great deal of experience with Ashkenazi Jewish Research, especially in the former Russian Empire. We've had a few guests over the past year and a half who have had Jewish roots, but not in this particular area, which is the area around Ukraine and Belarus, which is notoriously difficult compared to some other geographical regions. So, there was a combination of not being familiar with records and also the language barrier, which we've had to deal with many times before. So, in some ways, it was a slower start than usual, but we did have a lot of people working and still had a lot of great success that we weren't fully expecting at the beginning of the week. Yeah. And that was my problem, as I always like to participate to some extent, but I had the issues that you're talking about. It's very specific research, which I had no experience at all in that specific research. And so it was really hard for me to get in and help people or do other things. And then I just want to go ahead and show, and then I'm going to have Thomas show you the better view, but I'm going to share my screen to show the tree. And, you know, and of course, one of the things was the languages. So, you know, we had several languages. And OK, and so here we see this is what the branches look like for his tree. So if you don't speak or read those languages, you're kind of at a loss. Now, most of them did translate to English, which helped a lot. But. Do you want do you have yours up where you can share it so you can show a version up? I don't know if it's actually much better or not, because it varied a few times during the during the week. But let me. It just seemed like there were a few things with mine. It just didn't want to translate, no matter what. OK, I'll just share my entire screen, I guess. If that works, well, let me do that. No, it's not letting me do that. OK. Interesting. I will pull up. I'll pull it up on translate just because it'll make life easier. I haven't tried to show my screen using this format before. I don't think it has as many options as, say, a Zoom meeting. Yeah.  Oh, yeah, I'll let you do that. It might take me a second. Sorry. Yeah. You know, and just to show you, for the researchers that were experienced, this is kind of what, you know, they were working with. Some of them were just printing the branches out, that part of the tree out, and that way they could write it in to list it off so that they could see it in the different languages. And, you know, you saw the the Jewish names, of course, that indicated the the father's first name and then what it would have been in English. Once they did move to the United States. OK, I do have my version up now. OK, let's try it. So some of these did not translate directly as well. Like we get a few of them, that's a daughter of rather than the usual patronym. So, of course, in the Yiddish Hebrew naming system, all that the then or bat prefix means child of given father. And so it's your basic patronymic system. But as we go through, we can see most of the names translated all right with the exception of one of the Tzarkovs. And we can thankfully view most of the profiles fairly well. But the lucky thing when we're dealing with Yiddish specifically is that it is an actual alphabet unlike Hebrew. And so it can be much more easily transcribed. And most of the Hebrew names we're dealing with are standard names from religious texts. So there weren't too difficult to find if we didn't have an active translator as well. Now, before we look at specific profiles, Thomas, what can you tell us about the surnames for the Jewish people that we have researched? So surnames, well, in the Jewish tradition, people did not really have surnames, which is true of people all over the world. In most places in the world, surnames were created so that the government could impose taxes on specific families and trace property. That's definitely true. In the case of Ashkenazi Jews, the Russian government and other governments that they lived under wanted away in order to trace them. And so there are various origins that can come up. Most Ashkenazi Jewish surnames are of Russian, Yiddish, or Hebrew origin. There will be occasionally some exceptions to that rule. And they serve many of the same functions as surnames in other parts of the world that we've looked at. A lot of the surnames we looked at in Scott's family were toponyms referring to specific villages or towns that they might have had ties to several generations back. And some of them might be more decorative or other descriptive surnames. But so for the most part, they didn't start popping up until early 19th century is when they started being imposed in some areas. It varies region to region. And so we had a couple lines of Scott's family that we were able to trace back to when they probably were not, when they probably didn't have surnames at the time the profiles were born. However, all the records that we found were still listing surnames because they were all after those were imposed. Right, and I think the difficulties, I'm gonna share my screen once more. The difficulties that you guys all faced were that much more impressive that you did actually get a number of direct ancestors back in Connections Mead. So this, for example, is showing 10 generation of the Myers, the direct line of male descendants. And just the fact that you were able to find those and prove those relationships is pretty incredible. Now, it's very uncommon. In my experience, most Ashkenazi Jewish families that I've worked on, you can't trace much earlier than I'd say 1840, maybe a little bit earlier. Getting into the 18th century is incredibly difficult for most regions, even those with more records. And so the fact we were able to do that can be attributed very directly to the fact that we had some researchers, a couple who are from Russia and have direct knowledge of those records that many of us don't, and some who had very specific expertise in Jewish research as well. Right, and that's an awesome segue into who was the earliest ancestor found because maybe now people will really, really get the weight of how amazing this was that you guys found Yehuda. Is it Toravatsky? He was born about 1761, so definitely 18th century. He was the earliest. He was the only one that was that old or that early on the tree. And we know that he had a son, Myer. Now, of course, there wasn't a whole lot else that we could find specifically on him, but we do know the region. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about the region he came from? So we know that he came from the area of Ovaruch, which is a town, I believe that is currently in Ukraine. The whole Toravatsky line is entirely in different areas of Ukraine. However, they did move around a bit. And thankfully due to some of these specific census records we pulled up, which I know you'll get into in a second, we managed to identify the specific location. And we started the week knowing that there were people with the surname Toravatsky in Ovaruch, but we had no idea how they were related to Scott. And the further we got in the week, the more of those connections we managed to make. Elaine in the chat just mentioned that Ovaruch is 97 miles northwest of Kyiv, which can help place it a bit on a map. And we've been looking into, Elaine also mentioned there was a Hasidic group of people related to the family, Toravsky, which might be a variant of the surname Toravsky, Toravatsky, we were looking into that. We didn't find any direct ties, but it might be something to look further into. And I know one of our researchers was also saying that she was hoping we might have YDNA for the family because there are only a small handful of haplogroups that are found within Ashkenazi Jewish populations and having YDNA testing for those families can greatly improve the ability to research those lines and confirm relationships. Right, and she's pointing out courtesy of Jewish Dyn and of course, even with the other challenge work we did last year for the Jewish ancestors, that site is an amazing site to be able to use. And then just going back to Yehuda briefly, now he would have only been about 32 years old when that area was annexed by the Russian Empire. So, I mean, he was living during a time that made history. Yeah, oh, absolutely. And this was a very important time period with regards to the Jewish population in particular with the partition of Poland was shortly thereafter that I believe Catherine the Great created the Pale of Settlement, which is the region where the vast majority. Oh, hello Karen, welcome. So the Pale of Settlement was the area where the vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews and the Russian Empire were moved into through a variety of means. They were specific liberties, they were permitted if they were living there that they didn't have elsewhere. And so the vast majority ended up moving there, which ended up not being the best place in terms of conditions and general treatment of the population in the decades. Now, you know, from that same region of course is Meyer and this was one, you know, just to show that once again, the people that were experienced in working on this just did such an incredible job of finding records for, you know, a set of people that it's really difficult to find anything. And so this here is a census for that family. And, you know, he was born about 1793. So it's not like, you know, he was a really recent person and we were able to get a census for it. You know, he was somebody that was living also at the end of the 18th century. And so that's just pretty incredible what you guys were able to find. Yeah, no, we had one researcher in particular who's from Russia who helped us track down not only that record, but a record from the 1897 Russian census of which was believed years ago to have been almost completely destroyed, but of which fragments keep popping up not to similar to our 1890 census here in the U.S. And so that was very remarkable that he managed to find that. Yeah, and it looks like the 1897 census. I'm not sure if that's a profile you're talking about, but this one does have it on there. Yeah. And a leaser, right. You know, was somebody, you know, born in the 19th century. So of course it makes it at least a little bit better to find some amount of records. But here you can see, you know, that the researcher was able to actually get the marriage, the spouse information, five of the children. You know, I mean, that may have been as only five children, I don't know. And that, you know, coveted 1897 Russian census to show, you know, his family dynamics. Yeah, that's amazing. Absolutely. And I also want to mention, we don't want to get into the complicated mess that is naming conventions right now because that has been a very long discussion this whole week. But most of the records we were dealing with were typically in Russian because that was the language of the government. However, you'll see that most of the profiles we tried to put in Yiddish because that was the vernacular of the people we were actually researching. And that just goes to our general standard of using their conventions. So Karen, how did you find the leak to be? Oh, yes, I had quite a great time. I, of course, I don't read any Russian. So I was concentrating on the Americans. And I really enjoyed working through the Chicago newspapers. First, both Homer, T.L. and I were looking at the Turo records. And I had a great time looking at some of the lateral lines, the in-laws and found a whole other Turo family that was completely unrelated from Belarus and enjoyed adding some of those folks as well, learning a bit about the community, the neighborhoods on the near west side they lived in and then up to the north side later in mid-century. Yeah, and y'all put together a very nice space page with transcriptions of, I think, all the articles you were able to find with the Turo last name. Oh, that's right, yeah. Yeah, and those types of things are helpful. And even when you're doing stuff like where you talked about for the Jewish records, well, Russian, that were documented by the Russians. But if you do find one surname in a specific location, it's really great if you have the time to stop and document all of those without same surname so that hopefully, later on, if you do find more connections, you'll already have the links to those records. I love our space pages of WikiTree. Homer says the newspapers have become his favorite source, which is something I read to quite a bit. Yeah, he's been the bomb at that. He'll go through the branches when we're doing the WikiTree challenge. And you don't have to research. I mean, there's so many other things you can do to help people out throughout the week and that's one of them is looking at newspaper articles. So he's really great at going and looking up the people so that we can find out oddities and different things that kind of make people stand out. And of course, just like with any other culture, you're going to have people that are only in the news because they were a little bit naughty. So they were either really important or they did something that was a little bit scandalous. And so they made the newspaper. But those are all still things. I mean, we don't cast judgment on what our ancestors or anybody else's ancestors did. You have to keep in mind the times that they lived in but also the environment and the community around them. And one of those people, a course that we had found this week was for Dr. Isidore Turoff. And it was actually just kind of interesting. He did a lot of things for the community and at the time that the scandal happened, he was actually heading a mental hospital. But we're talking about an institution that had 2,600 people in it. So we don't know how things were going. Were they running low on money? Were they understaffed? Did they get a new person in? That was a caretaker that just didn't understand why the policies were set. And so what wound up happening is that a number of people that the family hadn't come and collected the remains for or made plans for were buried out in a cemetery and they didn't mark the headstones. So then what happened, of course, was later on as some of these family members came forward and said, hey, I wanna know where grandma is. And they were like, well, I have no idea. And they did actually start a formal investigation on it. Now, in the passing of time with that, the Dr. Turov, he wound up not working for the mental hospital again. But they must have found that he wasn't at fault or he didn't do anything special. Oh, they certainly must have. Because if you look at who made the accusations, it was the gubernatorial opponent of the governor who clearly should have resigned, but was near death at home. And that even in the article, they said, it's not that we have absolutely no idea where these people are. You know, that they've been being buried in rows. So the caretaker is not here right now. And I'm sure he can just, you know, look at his list of burials and count back five graves and that'll be grandma. But that's not the story that newspaper chose to run with, you know, because it doesn't sell papers as much as they have no idea where grandma is. And she had to call her congressman and, you know, we demand an investigation. Well, you know, isn't that happening right now where the people hollering, we demand an investigation are usually the political opponents of the people they're talking about. You know, and he did go on to still do substantial work and hold important positions. So, I mean, he worked with juveniles. He did other work. He was a speaker and, you know, he wound up continuing his good work. And so once again, you know, it wasn't necessarily that he had done something specifically wrong himself.  Right, right. And if there was no funding, you know, if they were, I mean, they were losing almost 10% of their patients to death in a year, you know. So that was clearly not where they wanted to earmark their funding was making sure everyone had a beautiful tombstone for folks whose remains went unclaimed, you know. And it was about a quarter of their burials. It looked like that didn't have anyone to step up and, you know, make final arrangements for the patients. And who else, Thomas, do you think was particularly interesting this week? I know we had a number of, you know, really great, interesting finds. Yeah, no, I enjoyed looking through them. We had a few that had to do with in-laws who were involved in the military. I think Karen was working on some of those. Do you want to mention them? I would if I, in between our previous live cast this morning had a flat tire in the middle sitting at the coffee shop on my spare, thinking about what kind of tires I wouldn't buy. But yeah, it's true. We definitely saw people that served in World War I, World War II, you know, and of course, we had folks that served, came back and then had to register for the draft again. I did have, there was one interesting find that I, there was a name that struck me as being of interest and it might just, it might be a fairly common name, but I still have to remark on it as I did during both of our, both of our wrap up calls. And this was one of the things that Homer pulled up while working on the various newspaper articles. I'm gonna throw this on the screen real quickly because there was an incident in which a fellow who was, I believe, involved in the garage industry ended up being brutally beaten and killed. And one of Scott's in-laws relatives was called in to testify against the suspect in the incident. And I don't remember all of the details, we can go over them in a second. But the reason why I found it fascinating, I'm just gonna throw the profile up here, it's because the victim of this event was a fellow named Mikkel Marinos Vied from Denmark. And I have researched another Vied family from Denmark that settled in the Chicago area. And that was the great grandfather of Betty White, who died this past year. Her original surname was Vied and was a Danish family that settled in Chicago. And I can't help but be curious that there might be some information. So at some point I'm going to see if I can work through this family and look into it. I don't know if it's the same area or not. But anyway, you go down and you read about it. And it says that he was a garage operator for 17 years and he was receiving death threats because apparently there was a huge wave of violence in the garage industry in Chicago in the late 1930s. And yeah, no, his wife was- And I think there was a lot of violence around those times in many groups though in Chicago. Absolutely, this was the height of organized crime. I had a great grandfather who was enlisted as a chauffeur for the mayor's secretary. He would, sorry, this is a side note, but I have to mention it because he would drive the secretary to the train station and drive him off at the train and then have to beat the train all the way to Michigan so that he'd pick him up at the other side so that he could meet with big Bill Thompson and various mob bosses. All in the train. So they're home up in Michigan. Yeah, they also had summer homes in my own hometown in Hobart, Indiana, where my class reunion was held at the Supervisors Club, which was a notorious meeting place for Capone and others and folks on the more corrupt side of the labor movement. Yeah, go ahead. That's okay, I was just gonna say you and I were talking before the stream and you had another interesting- Oh yes, this was found by one of our researchers. I don't know exactly when, but it came up during the wrap-up call and we didn't have a chance to add it to the interesting finds. We're not entirely, so there are relatives of the Zyrkov family that were absolutely certain are related to Scott's Zyrkov family, same region, same last name, a few repeated names. They definitely follow the right pattern, but we're not certain exactly where the connection is. But there was a passenger listing found for three of the Zyrkovs who also came to the U.S. in which just a few names down the passenger list, you can see Greta Garbo right there. New 47 living in New York at the time. It was apparently on the exact same boat as these cousins of Scott's. Oh, that's great. Yeah, well, it was funny for you all. Yep, funny little coincidence. Yeah, I found a Chicago story just last night. It was a fellow named Jacob Mufson, let's see, one of the first husbands of Francis Rower. This is way out in the seventh degree, but he was owned newsstands in Chicago up until probably almost the time of his death. But as a boy, he was a newsboy calling out headlines and papers. And he was calling out murder in whatever. It would be interesting to read the previous day from the day of his arrest. So he's calling out, read out this murder and a police officer tells him to stop yelling. And he thinks the man means stop yelling about murder in the middle of the street.  And so he switches and he just starts yelling evening paper, evening papers, get the trivia and get the other papers he's selling. And the police officer is just, well, that's it. I told you once now you're pinched, take some, arrest some, take some to jail.   Nope, no phone call for you. Spends the night in jail and the next morning, the judge is like, this is ridiculous. This guy's clearly overstepped his bounds. And by the way, isn't that the guy who five years ago, director reporter in the face who was at the scene of a fire who was actually trying to not be in his role as reporter but in his role as a member of a South Chicago protective patrol. And he says, here's my card right here. I'm here on behalf of the protective patrol.  So fun times in Chicago. Yeah, really. Now I do want to show one other thing. I should have shown this, we are talking about space pages, but of course, you know, once again, we love space, we do it our space and collaborating and talking, you know, working together on these things and helping each other out. And so this is a page that one of our researchers, Rachel had done. It's not funny, zoom in a whole lot. There we go. As far as reference for names that were found on these tombstones, you know? And I mean, she says it's not meant to be a comprehensive resource, but this was amazing that she took the time to do this and put this there where everybody else could look at it. And, you know, you can see that it gave you a really nice variety of names. Yeah, no. And Rachel deserves a lot of credit for this week because she's been doing Ashkenazi Jewish research for a very long time. We're all very, very grateful that she was able to share some of her expertise with us. But we were talking about Jewish surnames earlier and she was, early on in the week, it came up. She was suggesting books and resources and all that. I've been making use of the library that I'm currently in. So we have a dictionary of Jewish surnames from the Russian Empire, which is this very big, large book that is filled with all the surnames we were researching and helped us determine how exactly some of them might have been spelled. I know we have a, there's one, okay. Scott's maternal line, the earliest name we have is for a great, great grandmother who is listed on a death certificate as having had the surname Vanthrof or Van Dorf, rather, which is also a surname that was taken by one of her grandchildren as an anglicized form. And that sounds very Dutch, but using the book, we managed to find the surname Vanthrof, which is from the same region, which we think it was what it was originally. And they just slightly changed the spelling. Oh yeah, see Elaine's asking about who, if it was who I was talking about, it would be fun to look up him in the book because the surname is Mufson, M-U-F-F-S-O-N. And he's actually Mufson one on Wigatry. And he is, I put him in his birthplace as Lithuania because of the way his birthplace was spelled. I use the Jewish Gen Town Finder. And when I put in the S-A-U-L-A-L-E, it was a very different spelling of a hometown in present day Lithuania, in the Vilna area. Yeah, the Jewish Gen Town Finder is a really incredible tool I found. Yes, yes, and it was Pat Lunitz who really turned me on to that and reminded me that that was there another with Rachel and some of our other extremely helpful expert volunteers. I loved when someone said, how do you read that? And Patrick said, well, after thousands of pages of Hebrew and Yiddish, it starts to get a feel for it. Looking through the book, I'm guessing Mufson might have been the original version, in which case it appears to be related to Moshe, so another page of the surname. Okay, so like a son of Moses. Yeah. I love this book so much. Yes. It's really, and it's hard when you only have one or two resources, the JRI Poland site or whatever book you have on your shelf or a book you might have on your shelf. But once again, that really goes to show how great the collaboration was because people could come in and ask for a translation off of a tombstone picture or something else and everybody just worked together to get us to this common goal of adding ancestors. And I do wanna go ahead and show some of the scoring on this just to show the people that participated. And we did have 19 plus people. And I always say plus because there are always people that come in and do stuff like translations or cheer people on or add categories or whatever that don't necessarily show up on these statistics. Here we have 19 people, but there were probably more than that that actually worked on it. And for our top five, we had Homer Thiel, we had Donna Bowman, Rachel of course that we've talked about, she was incredible. We had Kathy Nava and we had Heather Jenkinson. So some of the familiar names that we've had all along but a couple of new ones in there and that's always nice to see. And you can see that some of them were really adding quite a few profiles. And so here we go back to, it's just incredible that records were found for as many people as there were. And this is showing there were 13 direct ancestors added, 25 first relatives and nuclear relatives, a sibling, a child, a parent as a nuclear relative. And then for other ones up to seven degrees, 215 people. So this is going to enable other people with the same background to hopefully make cousin connections that they wouldn't have made if you guys wouldn't have done such a great job of adding all these profiles in this. Right, it's such a great momentum when we start to build, because folks will say, oh, this is the site that Eastern European people should be on. But when you look at that, the knowledge and the generosity and the hard work and I think of all the volunteers like myself, like Homer and Deb and Catherine who are new to Jewish research who have no fluency in Slavic languages or Hebrew Yiddish and all the relatives they've added, I really feel like it builds momentum in our community to say, oh no, Wikichu is the place to be, especially if you have Jewish family in Chicago, if you're looking for good help, obviously it would be a mistake not to be active on Jewish Jen and using ViewMade and all of their great tools there. But it really makes for such a vibrant site. And like you said, each cousin that comes along starts from such a better place. Yeah, 100%. And I do wanna mention that even though there were some times during the week where it seemed like the scores at least were going somewhat slower than usual because of course, limited records and all of that. As Donna just said before, they don't show the true work because it took so much research to get even one additional ancestor. And I think just looking through the Discord chat is excellent proof that we were all fairly active throughout the entire week. There was a lot of discussion going on and it was really wonderful that folks who had less experience in this area or who like myself have no knowledge of Russian whatsoever. I only know some Yiddish, but it was really wonderful to be able to just be on there and have that active almost in real time conversation with all the other researchers. Yeah, and we love that live chat. And then one of the nice things, of course, with WikiTree, and not everybody prefers to use Discord as a platform to chat, but that is our live chat. So there are people in there around the clock because of course we're a global site so there's people all over the place. But if you're watching and you don't participate in the challenge, you can still go in at any week and see what people are chatting about. You may just be interested in, oh, I wanna see how the Jewish research went this week or the German, how the people are collaborating with German profiles. You don't need to be a participant to go into the current challenge channel. You can just go in and say hi or great job or just sit there and read through it and see what everybody's talking about. And there is just once again that incredible collaboration and people working together. And if you get stuck on one spot, you can get several people to come look at the family and see if maybe that relationship is right. If it's, you know, there's something they're missing, it's great to have that. And like Elaine remarked that she's just been in touch with a relative of one of our previous focus guests. You build these great connections with folks. I mean, I still hear from Jane Krakowski's aunt from 30 Rock, from back when AJ Jacobs was doing research into her family for People Magazine. You know, you build these really fun connections where you find like, yeah, I'm not going out to lunch with Jane Krakowski, but if I'm having questions about the Quebec part of her family, I'm gonna talk to her. Yeah, and I wanna mention, we've mentioned Rachel and Pat, and we should also mention August Kuznetsov, who was also very, very helpful with Russian research. And he was the one responsible for pulling up that 1897 census. Oh, that's great. Absolutely remarkable. Yeah, that's just been great. And you know, you did, your team did really great, Tom, I did not mention, I don't think at the start that Thomas was our captain for the week. He was incredible. He was in there, you know, talking with people all throughout the week and getting those motivating emails done. And, you know, thank you very, very much for all the work you did for the challenge people that speak. I was very, very excited and glad that I was able to do it. And, you know, it's good timing thanks to the three-day weekend to actually had time to get some of the work done. It helped, right? Yeah. Now, there was one I didn't mention earlier and, you know, this was a profile, it was one of those Zerkhoff profiles. He was born late 1800s. And one of the things we do try and look for is if we can find an occupation that's unique. And, you know, Max was at one point, he was living in Cook County, Illinois. So he was in the United States. He worked as a tobacco salesman for a while but later he worked as a sausage root. And, you know, not only is this a very specific, unique occupation, but the other reason I'm bringing it up is because I had, you know, talked to Scott a little bit. We were talking about the similarities between the Ashkenazi Jewish people and the Sephardic Jews. And, you know, which is what I'm more used to researching.   And, you know, these ancestors could be, at the very least, expelled from their homeland and sent away from all their family and their friends and their job, you know. And at the worst, we don't even wanna think about it. You know, it could have been much, much worse. But where the sausages come into play is, of course, with the Jewish people, they have certain days of fasting. And they also have days that they don't eat meat.  And that's pretty much what the Portuguese sausage was made out of. And so what they would do in Portugal is they would make a bread sausage. And, you know, so then they're utilizing a less expensive ingredient that they aren't gonna have to waste. And, you know, they'd make these bread sausages and they'd hang it up in their kitchen window for a little bit. So the neighbors all thought they were having sausage for the night or dinner. And, you know, and it is a kind of a coin amusing story, but it's also horrifying, if you think about it, that they even had to go through all of this trouble to make people believe that they were not Jewish.  It's all Roman Catholic. And it's only been really recently that records have come to light where they had these smaller groups of other faiths.  And, you know, now that's allowed. So now those records are starting to come forth. And luckily some of these, you know, different groups did go ahead and keep records of it or, you know, we wouldn't know. But there were even people that changed their names and whatnot so that, you know, it would conform with what other people expected them to be named. That was one thing we... I do wanna mention Homer. I was laughing because he says there are 442 mentions of sausage root in Chicago newspapers. That's great. There was one thing I did find interesting that we didn't get into as much as we did on previous challenges during which there was some Jewish research was that we didn't spend much time researching potential Holocaust victims in the family. And, you know, that was because we were extremely focused on just trying to expand all the lines as much as possible, that it didn't come up to the same degree that it has in the past. Yeah, we were struggling with all these earlier records, but of course it's... Yeah, we did cover those last year for our Jewish research, but of course those are heart-rending, you know, those. I mean, it just stops you in your tracks when you start reading those. And, you know, the only nice thing that I can say about them is that it does give you a way to look at some of the information on the families because when they did do the comprehensive interviews, especially with people that had been in these camps, you know, they were able to talk about their family relations and they could tell you the names of their aunts and uncles and parents and siblings and whatnot. Sometimes they had a lot of information on what their names and, you know, birthdays and stuff were, but everything else, every other part of it was just so profoundly tragic. It just, it was hard. It was really hard. Right, we're here. We were much more looking at folks who had come through New York, more like Statue of Liberty times or coming down from Montreal on the train. That was interesting. I didn't realize there was such a migration into the U.S. by railroad out of Montreal. Now, my Austrian relatives came to the U.S. through the train, through the port of Saint Marie or something like that up in Michigan and the train line ended in Alabama. And so because of that reason, they ended up going to Alabama. Wow. That's the only reason. Kept going. That's crazy. Yep. Yeah, and so many cousins left that we could investigate, you know, that people were coming to meet and you have to wonder, you know, how many were biological cousins and how often did it just sound better? That like, sound like you have a plan. You know, I know a friend who was not permitted to cross into Canada just 10 years ago, you know, as a young man because he just didn't really sound like he had a plan. He didn't have like a firm return date, you know, a firm person he was going to see. He was just very go with the flow kind of fellow. And they said, no, maybe you should just stay where you are. And I really love those types of serendipitous, you know, moments that you find. I mean, it's like Archie Griffin, we had him this year as a guest. And, you know, his family wouldn't even wound up where they are in Ohio if the car hadn't broke down. So they were heading to a completely different state, you know, and the car broke down and some other things happened. And they were like, you know what, I think the people here need us more than where we were going, we'll just stay. Yeah. Of course, he was a famous football player and, you know, he wouldn't even have been in Ohio. So, and you don't know if he would have been him even because, you know, if his grandparents or whoever for any of these ancestors had moved on to a different location, you know, their kids would have met up with somebody else. And yeah, it just really shows that, you know, it's just one little event can really change a family history. Oh yeah, absolutely. Now, that was the thing with most of Scott's lines, it was very easy to find, you know, these relatives that are, yeah, if we can't figure out how they're related, at the very least we know they're almost definitely from the exact same village as the rest of the family. Right, and even, you know, 60 years later, they would be buried in the townland society, you know, that's the cemetery they would choose as a cemetery, the fellow I was working on from Mazur, from Belou's. And, you know, Thomas, this might be a good time to ask this question while we're talking about it. Now, I just totally lost my train of thought. Oh no. Oh no. I don't know what I was gonna say, I totally lost my train of thought there, seriously. Oh, well, I had a late arriving murder story I had finds in the discord and said, this is why we haven't heard from Chris Ferriolo all week, it's because we don't have any Italians, nothing's happening in Quebec and no one's getting murdered. And so I solved all that with one person and the ninth degree was a fellow, you know, someone from New York had married Mary Lou Pesta and her grandfather went missing in October of 1916 and his wife's half-brothers said, well, he's gone, you know, maybe you should move to Montreal, I moved to big city, you could get married again. And 27 years later, after Luigi himself had moved on to La Salle, I think La Salle left St. Hubert, they were just trying to put a water tank in the basement of his former farmhouse and they ran into a skeleton. And then it had a scar on the forehead and they went, you know, Carmine had been hit on it with an axe on the forehead in Italy before he came to Canada. And based on that and his yellow leather boots, they said, yeah, that's Carmine's remains and sent the brother-in-law to trial and I think he was acquitted on appeal just like a month before he was meant to be hung for the murder. They appealed and said, this is all circumstantial and you haven't established any motive and, you know, anybody could have put him in Luigi's basement and so he was released. And then Thomas, I do remember what the question was now. Okay. Yay, because Scott and I, I'm not in my usual workspace, if anybody knows, so we're just making do right now. Had talked about the endogamy and why that is specific very much so to the Jewish families and maybe you wanna go ahead and speak a little bit more on that. Well, so yeah, within Jewish communities, there was the, well, first of all, a lot of Jewish communities were majorly isolated from their Gentile neighbors in many areas of the Russian Empire, some of them in particular. There were areas where that was not the case in larger, more industrial cities. There would tend to be more interaction, but for the most place, it was assumed that people were going to intermarry and stay within their own community. And especially when you have these little stettles, the little Jewish villages that were attached to different communities and all that. You know, when you have larger families all coming out, they're all going to be just from these tiny little towns and still try to marry within the people that they do. And so we did get a few instances of that within Scott's family. If I remember correctly, we had a, you mentioned Max Zerkoff before the brother of Scott's great-grandmother. I don't think it's listed currently on the profile, but he was actually married to the sister of Scott's great-grandmother Anna Rosran. And so it's, you have these recurring patterns of different members of the same families marrying each other. I know I have a friend whose family is from not the same area, but not too far out who had a, his great-great-grandparents had one whose sister was married to the nephew of the other because there was enough of an age gap there that that made sense. And there are all sorts of patterns like that within. Right, and you know, in any kind of research and culture, you're going to have some amount of, you're going to have endogamy somewhere on the tree anyways. You're going to have some pedigree collapse. And especially in small isolated communities and you know, here in Kentucky, there are some small areas like that that that is what you see a lot of. And it gets really, really hard sometimes to untangle those family lines. But you know, with the Jewish people specifically, they were staying within their faith. And so they didn't really have any choice, you know, even if they could get out to other locations, they just didn't have as many choices because they needed to stay within that, you know, that part of their faith. And I thought it was cute that Scott was sharing with us that, you know, when he got his DNA results back, of course, he's like 99% Ashkenazi Jewish. And his wife was only 97%. So he was teasing her and calling her a half breed.  It really is the only major ethnic group where it is not at all unlikely for someone to pop up as 100% purely because of all that. And that was one thing I know he said that there was a story about his grandparents being like fifth cousins, which we weren't able to prove beyond any doubt. But again, from the same village, you know, that's not at all unlikely. It's probably completely true. And there, that was the other thing we said. He wanted to know more about his grandfather and the Charevetsky line because there, you know, his father didn't have the closest relationship with the rest of his family. And that was one thing that was absolutely wonderful that that was the line we managed to have such a great degree of expansion on. So that was very exciting. I know he's gonna be really, really excited about that. Yeah. You know, when we started out, for the challenge, of course, we always start out with the first great grandparents. And so, you know, the tree has worked out to the great grandparents and that is where we start for the challenge. Everybody after that works out from there. So, you know, those generations were already done and he had said, we already have the tree farther for him that he even had in his own records. So he was already, you know, really interested in finding how much more further that could go.  And that, I mean, the reason why we had that information from the beginning can all be attributed primarily to gravestones. That's the wonderful thing about Jewish gravestones is that they often have a lot more information than the rest of those that we researched or not. Yeah.   Even if you didn't have any other record of who the father was, you had that, you had that name. Yeah. You actually just reminded me of something else that I forgot to mention before, which was that we, one of the other impressive things about being able to find that 1897 census fragment was that we managed to disprove the name on Scott's grandfather's gravestone. Because we had multiple siblings of his who had gravestones that listed their father as Leiser, variant of Eleazar. And on his gravestone, he's listed as Yudel ben David. And first of all, Yudel, typically not the name that would be listed on a gravestone, because it's not Hebrew, it's a diminutive form of Yehuda. And second of all, David, we have nothing else indicating his father was David. And of course, he was living in California where none of the rest of his family had gone with him. It's quite possible whoever ordered the gravestone just had no idea what they were talking about. But it was absolutely incredible that we managed to do that. And you will just leave that spot empty on the stone. You've got to put something there. Yeah, exactly. Otherwise, what will people think? Thomas, do you happen to have one of those handy a picture maybe that you could let me show us? I think I have, I might actually have Yudel's right here. I'll open it up and let me share my screen here. This is our page for Julius Tarot. And if we pull open, can you see the gravestone now? I can't tell if it's showing. Yes, it error. No, you're not viewing the red tab. Sorry, I'll fix that. Still getting used to the setup. There we go. This is the gravestone for Scott's father. And it just says here lies Yudel then David, which again, we managed to disprove the name. But that's a good example of what it looks like in the other typical Jewish markers. And that it just says died on this date in the Jewish calendar, which I am not good at reading because I can't read it. But there's usually a lot of information there that often isn't included, especially the father's name. But also sometimes if a gravestone just lists the year that a person died, it'll give you the specific day that they died. Sometimes it'll tell you their relationships. Here it says beloved father in English. Other ones will list all the different relationships they had. Some of them will also list the mother. That's kind of rare, but every once in a while you'll run into that. And so it's really useful to be able to go in and translate. Thank you for that. And I think we're gonna go ahead and start wrapping this up now. I wanna thank you once again for leading the week, Thomas, you are amazing at it and for joining us here and Karen also for joining us and helping the viewers learn just a little bit more, know a little bit more about the Russian Jewish culture. It was a very fascinating week to say the least. And for anybody that hasn't followed along this week, you can go to wikitree.com and you will see where we have the results of that and the various links to see the tracking and what not yourself. Yeah, I agree. Thank you, Donald. It was another one of our captains since he's been using the first time captain this week. It's an important role and he definitely stepped right up and filled it. So we appreciate that. And we will see you guys for the next challenge next week, which will be for Olivia Newton-John. And before you close off the call, I do wanna ask, am I right in thinking that there's going to be more Jewish research during that week? Isn't there a? Oh, yes. I can see. Yes. Yeah. We're gonna try to... We're gonna try to recruit Rachel again and hopefully she'll be able to join us because German and Austrian Jewish research, not my area. Well, hopefully we can. Thank you guys for coming and watching us. Don't forget to like the video and we'll see you next week. See you soon.


We have this LED desk lamp here. We're going to take it out of the box We have our owner's manual That's part of the unit here. We have our power cord and we have the base This is real simple Anyone can do it Take your light Push it until it clicks and it's done When I unwrap our plug, here's where you plug your power cord into Now we're going to plug this into the receptacle and go over some of the features Okay, we've got this set up. Now let's check out the light functions. To turn it on you just Touch that power button and it comes on. It doesn't click.  Just let go Over here you can put Pencils, pens, paint brushes, makeup brushes for doing your makeup in the center We have a 5 volt 1 amp USB charger. You plug that in Plug your device in Flip your switch on and it's charging on the front You pull that little device up right there. That's what's going to hold your phone. You raise this up and on the back You have your little locking mechanism You pull that up and it will latch And just like that and you're ready to use your phone stand now You can easily rest your phone on the phone stand Either way. This is also a wireless charging dock For most if not all of your wireless charging needs


Boston had changed. What once had been a vibrant city full of optimism and a piece of cake attitude for the war of the rebellion in turn gray. Countless beggars missing limbs, no doubt veterans, littered the streets. Posters depicting Uncle Sam, Columbian, a colored man, and woman, marching in unison, encouraged all citizens to join the effort. Some others depicted Columbia herself holding a rifle in one hand and a ballot in the other, encouraging women to sign up for service in exchange for the right to vote. Jay grumbled under a breath, cursing the fat cats which would no doubt deny her the ability to cast her vote for having served as a man before the recruitment of women. But what was more prevalent than any other poster was one's advertising mysterious new company which had risen to provenance following the advent of the war. Various different posters and a rainbow of colors depicted men in uniform with bizarre contraptions replacing their limbs. They were advertised as the pinnacle of craftsmanship and alchemy, an odd mixture to be sure, but she sneered at the thought of how much money Anderson must be making and gazed at her stump as she continued down the filthy streets of Boston. An hours march later she stood across the street from her home. Jay sighed a bittersweet relief as she ran across the dirt road. Her heavy boots thudded against the creaky wooden steps as she bound with excitement. Her knapsack hit the porch and she reached for the doorknob. The smile which had briefly lived on her face faded upon the realization that the lock had been removed. Nick, she called out to her brother in the false masculine tenor voice she had trained herself to speak in. Dread pulled in her minus. Her only hand trembled at the doorknob. There was no answer. Not even the familiar barking of their dog. Had they left her? Couldn't be. She had received a letter from him a few weeks ago and he'd promised he'd be ready for her arrival. Hesitantly, Jay turned the knob and the door slowly creaked open. The faint outline of a man was visible in the kitchen. He sat with his feet up on the table. Ah, Justine Everwood. Please, come on in. The man beckoned her over his unfamiliar accent sitting his shiver down her spine. Justine? She almost slipped back into her natural voice. No, I'm Jay. You must be confusing me with my sister. She died a few years back. No, I know exactly who you are. Now please, come on in. The voice was confident in itself, menacing yet polite.  Who are you? That is not important at this moment, Ms. Everwood. The man leaned back, removing his feet from the table. He appeared to shovel for a moment as she weirdly approached. By the time she took her seat across from him, the gas lantern on the table was eliminating the stranger. His head was completely shaved and his expression was unenthused. There were several scars visible along his face and he was built like a lumber worker. What do you want from me? Where's my brother? Oh, that is not important at this moment, Ms. Everwood. Please take a seat. Good, now Ms. Everwood. I'm with the Union government and if you're here to arrest me for joining the army with a fake identity, just do it already. Jay spat defiantly, not bothering to mask her voice any further. The man wheezed with laughter for almost a minute, which felt like an eternity to her. She would have been mad, but confusion had overtaken her senses.  The army is full of idiots, so I'm not surprised you fooled them as long as you did.  I'm here to talk to you about the 680-second Calvary. She tensed up, color washing away from her face. You should consider yourself lucky. You're one of five people who have survived them so far, but the first one to be able to speak after the fact, the man leaned forward, holding his hands on the table. I need to know everything you know about the 680-second. They shared another silence for what felt like an eternity. Jay had tried her best to suppress any thoughts of that fateful day, but she had failed. The memories of the screams, spilling scarlet, stomping, and slashing sabers would haunt her to her last breath. Were it not for the likelihood of her brother being in danger, she would not have even agreed to recount the tale. It was about a month ago. I remember my unit and I were marching to reinforce the forces at Spotsylvania, but we got ambushed by them. Most of us had thought they were just a myth to scare new recruits.  You can't see their faces up. Come on, that's crazy. The man nodded. Yeah, so it first came up from behind hill, and I swear it was sunny until they showed up. There was this smoke, kind of like a coal train smoke, but it kind of made me sick. It spooked all the horses we had, and it made it look like heaven was about to come crashing down on us, and then they charged. Jay grew silent. The man nodded again, waiting patiently. Sorry, I... She removed her cap, placing it on the table, and ran her hand through her short hair. Okay, I'm okay.  I've never heard anything like it. The man lived their first barrage while we were still getting ready to defend ourselves. I got hit in the arm, and I collapsed from the pain, and I didn't see much of anything else. But I felt it when that arm got trampled. Jay reached for an empty sleeve, tugging at it idly. And what happened then? I passed out. I don't know how long I was out for, but I got picked up by the army of the Potomac, and the doctor was a kind soul. She had one of those prosthetic faces. I don't remember much about the days after I just spent most of them asleep.  Very well. The man leaned back, folding his arms and observing as Jay struggled to keep herself together. Just two, maybe three more questions. Would you be able to identify the 682nd Calvary from a distance if given the opportunity? I will never forget what I saw, and given the chance to stop them, would you? I'd be lying if I said I was a diehard loyal to the Union. I'm not out for revenge. I'm not trying to fight for any ideals. I joined because my brother and I needed to make a living. I couldn't find a job, and he's slow. This was a yes or no question. Would I be compensated, as one would for any job? How much? More than your discharge pay.  Yes. The man turned around, reaching behind him to grab a sleek brown box. It was decorated with an eagle, and the letters AP were painted on it in royal gold. He gently placed it on the table, then lifted the lid to reveal a prosthetic right arm. It was made of refined steel, bearing runes and inscriptions on it in red ink, elegantly painted in gorgeous patterns. There was even a very comfortable velvety cushion to place between her stump and the cold metal of the device. Put this on so we can shake hands. The name is Agent Lombardi. Welcome to the Union's Investigation Unit, Ms. Everwood. And I forgot to mention, we'll be taking care of your brother, so you don't need to worry about that either. Jay stared at the arm, then at Lombardi. And where is Nick? At headquarters, probably eating lunch. He produced a pocket watch, flicking it open and checking the time. Come on now. We don't want to keep him waiting.