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To be honest, on the one hand with 8000+\nrelatives gleaned from 35+ years of research, I’m not in that great a hurry to\nadd many more. Because of this, I’ve not really paid much attention to\nreviewing DNA results and seeing who might be a close relative. Except that\n“close” is a relative term. (No pun intended!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My two brothers and I have a slightly unusual\nsituation. My father was an only child, and my mother’s brother never married.\nHence we have one uncle, no aunts, and no first cousins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That said, (deep breath) my father’s mother\nwas one of seven children, all born in England. My father’s father was one of\nten children, all born in England. My mother’s mother was the youngest of nine,\nall born in Poland, but apart from the oldest who married in Poland, the other\neight all married in England and all nine had children in England. Finally,\nalthough my mother’s father had but one brother, the two of them had\ntwenty-three first cousins; yup, all born in England.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the one hand I’ve had a relatively easy\ntime researching all my English cousins, and why it is I have a very, very\nlarge, extended family, and much of my research has been focused in England.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the other hand, I know very little about\nmuch older branches who were in Poland and Lithuania, because the branches of\nmy family who left, did so between the 1840’s and 1880’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because of this luxury of spending a lot of\ntime researching my family in England (plus the odd branch in America), I’ve not\nreally given much thought to possible cousins who could be discovered from DNA\ntesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was quite a surprise when ‘Mitchell’\ncontacted me to say “hi, I’m your long-lost cousin.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Knowing his paternal birth grandfather’s full name allowed Mitchell to engage in some creative sleuthing. This led him to email me in January 2019:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Hello Jeremy, Although I had never heard of a family story of a child being born out of wedlock, this doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have happened. Yes, Harris Koenigsberg was my grandmother’s brother, and yes, he was in the fur trade. But first I thought I would search to see if there was anyone else who might fit the bill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I then carried out a search in FreeBMD for\nanyone whose first name began with “Har*”, the asterisk allows any\nname-ending, and a last name “Ko*igsber*”, which allows for any last name that begins\nwith either “Kon” or “Koen” or something else, which either\nends in “berg” or “berger”, for the period 1909 to 1940. It\nbrought up only four results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One was a woman, Harriet Koenigsberg. Two were\nfor a Harris Koenigsberg (a death [1921] and a marriage [1934]) and one was for a Harris H. Koenigsberger who married in 1936.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first three are members of my family.\nHarriet was my grandfather’s niece. The Harris Koenigsberg who died in 1921 was my great grandfather’s brother, and the other Harris Koenigsberg who married in 1934 was my grandfather’s brother and the supposed birth father of Douglas,\nborn five years earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Harris H. Koenigsberger was born in 1871,\nwhich means if he had fathered Douglas, he would have been 58 years old. Not\nimpossible, but unlikely. Harris Koenigsberg, on the other hand was born in\n1906, meaning he would have been just 23 years old, making him a much more\nlikely candidate as the birth father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Furthermore, Harris Koenigsberg was a furrier, whereas Harris Henry Koenigsberger was, according to the 1939 Register, a commission agent and importer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, I agree that using FreeBMD is not\nconclusive, and it’s possible there might have been another “Harry\nKoenigsberg” living in London around 1929. And yes, I did check other\ndatabases, such as the 1939 Register, which itself is not conclusive as the\nname might have been redacted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, having got this far, I was almost on the verge of getting very excited, (was it ‘my’ Harry?). There was, however, just one little fly in the ointment\u2014Mitchell doesn’t show up as a DNA match to me. You would think at 25% he would\u2014 could he not? On the other hand (sadly), maybe his birth grandmother was mixed up as to who the birth father might have been. It would seem strange though for a gentile woman to be in some sort of relationship with not one, but two Jewish men at the same time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n With a deep sigh and the realization I had to\nclear my family name, I embarked on a sleuthing expedition of my own. There was\nlittle to go on other than the birth mother recalling that the birth father had\nthe name Harris Koenigsberg. I pulled up ‘my’ Harris Koenigsberg and looked over\nall the information there was on him in my Ancestry tree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Working through his life and various\ndocuments, I got to the 1930 London telephone book. He was the only H.\nKoenigsberg. It was a triple-column page and as my eyes skimmed over the page I\nnoticed in the next column an entry that read “J. Konigsberg and Sons, fur\nbrokers.” Hmmm?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I began constructing a tree for this\nKonigsberg family. The Konigsberg family had seven children, the oldest being\nHarry Konigsberg, born in 1895. The family was in the fur business but in a\nsubtly different way to my family. My Koenigsbergs were manufacturers of fur\nclothing, whereas the Konigsberg family were fur brokers. The family all lived\nand worked in London except Harry, who lived in New York, but, as immigration\nrecords showed, he often traveled between the two countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Harry married Celia Gold in 1924 (age 29) in\nNew York. Sadly their first child, a son, born in 1926, lived but five days,\nand was buried in a Jewish cemetery in Queens, New York. The couple then had\nNaomi in London, born six months before Douglas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Typically, when Harry traveled to England, Celia never accompanied him. However, in October 1927, when Harry traveled to London, Celia followed, arriving on 22 June 1928.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks to an online conception calendar (one\nsimply plugs in the date of birth), it will show the most likely date for\nconception and, if you wish to be that specific, the most likely date when\n(ahem) intercourse would have taken place. (I have found it to be very\nuseful\u2014the program that is!). It’s part of a suite of programs put out by\nwww.calculator.net.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hence we see that Naomi’s likely conception\nwas 5 July 1928 (two weeks after Celia arrived in London) and she was born 5\nApril 1929. Douglas was born 21 October 1929, meaning his conception date was\naround 5 February 1929.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Putting it bluntly, Harry was not only\nmarried, but his wife was pregnant and about to give birth in two months time\nwhen he was also involved with another woman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I then continued researching the Konigsberg\nfamily to recent times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Naomi married in New York in 1951 and had\nthree sons. In mid-September I reached out to the oldest one, Geoffrey, a\nretired CPA (chartered public accountant) in New Jersey. I explained who I was\nand why I was writing to him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n His first response was:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u200b”I may be the Geoffrey Selby you are looking for. My mother’s\nname was Naomi \u200bKonigsberg. My maternal grandfather was named Harry and he was in the fur \u200b\u200bbusiness in London and New York City. My mother was born in London in 1929.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I wrote back explaining the whole \u201cmegillah\u201d\nHis terse response was:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u200b”It is hard for me to believe that my grandfather had a son out\nof wedlock. He \u200b\u200bwas ultra orthodox. If I was to agree to the DNA test, would you share the results \u200bwith me?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I told him of course I would. He never got\nback to me. A few days later I tried one more time with:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Have you had a chance to review and think about what I had sent you regarding \u200b\u200bMitchell\u2019s research? Also, I was wondering if you are in touch with any of your \u200b\u200bEnglish Konigsberg cousins?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A month later I got this from Debby,\nGeoffrey’s cousin, who lives in England. Her email was very \u201cinteresting\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u200b”I\u2019m replying to this on behalf of a family member who\u2019s\nforwarded your email to \u200bme. I\u2019ve spoken to some of our family, and it\u2019s unlikely we\u2019d do a DNA\ntest to see if \u200b\u200bwe\u2019re a match for the man you\u2019re talking about.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I wrote back to Debby:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u200b”It’s a little disheartening to read your response. Mitchell who\ncontacted me is bereft of \u200b\u200b\u200bany family further back than his father because he doesn\u2019t know who his father\u2019s father was. \u200bHe knows who the birth mother was because he was in contact with her some twenty years ago. \u200bNot knowing his father\u2019s lineage is probably hard to live with. I have to impress that what I \u200bhave surmised is but a conjecture. And yes a DNA test would probably tell us one way or the other.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n They never got back to me. I leave it to you,\nthe reader, to draw your own conclusions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Postscript<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had carried out the research for\n“Mitchell” during the early part of 2019. He had previously taken a\nDNA test with Ancestry.com (as I had) and because Mitchell was 25% Jewish, if he had been related to me, then a match of some sort really ought to have shown up\u2014but it didn’t. I began writing this up as a story for possible publication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mitchell made me the administrator of his\nAncestry.com DNA account and on Friday, January 24th, 2020, the final piece of the puzzle slipped into place. I received an email alert from Ancestry.com that “Stuart” had taken a DNA test and was related to Mitchell, in the 3rd-4th cousin range with 157 cm across nine segments. According to the microscopic three-person tree, Stuart was one of Harry’s three grandsons, living in America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, Stuart was Geoffrey’s brother, the\nother grandson I had contacted who couldn’t believe his grandfather had\nfathered Mitchell’s father. (Did all that make sense!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stuart may have unwittingly taken a DNA test\njust for fun (who knows), but it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that\nMitchell was not only related to the Konigsberg family, but was also Harry’s\ngrandson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My hunch and subsequent research had been confirmed by the DNA test result. What Mitchell will do with this, I don’t know. He may now go on with his life, possibly comforted by the fact that he now knows the full extent of his father’s paternal family and who they were. He may or may not contact them, but he does now have the information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As we have seen and no doubt read, DNA testing has now changed everything. What was once thought to be private, and perhaps a\nsecret that could be taken to the grave, can now be retrieved from the grave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sacramento, California, USA<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note: A slightly different version of this story was originally published in the February 2020 issue of ZichronNote, the journal of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogy Society (SFBAJGS)<\/a>. <\/em> Reprint permission granted.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Research Notes and Hints<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeremy Frankel, an experienced genealogist with an extensive family tree, responded to a message from a man who thought they might be related, a man who was searching for information regarding his\nbiological grandfather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeremy discovered several possible candidates for Mitchell\u2019s biological grandfather from a search on FreeBMD<\/a>, which is part of FreeUKgenealogy.com<\/a>. He used a \u201cwildcard search\u201d to achieve this, where symbols such as asterisks take the place of missing letters. This is a useful search technique when unsure about the exact spelling of a name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A search on Ancestry.com<\/a> brought Jeremy to the 1930 London Phone Book, and a listing for a Konigsberg family in the fur trade \u2014 the right surname and the right trade! Jeremy created a family tree based on this information and wrote letters to some of the descendants he located.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Using the tools at calculator.net<\/a>, <\/strong>Jeremy was able to determine the probable conception date of Mitchell\u2019s father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our Jewish ancestors were an endogamous population, which means that they tended to remain in relatively limited geographical areas and marry within their own Jewish communities. As a result, Jews today may share DNA with each other not only because they share a recent common ancestor but because they share many distant common ancestors. While the DNA test results from Ancestry.com<\/a> do not on their own prove the identity of Mitchell\u2019s grandfather, the DNA results in conjunction with the other information discovered by Jeremy do provide a strong case for Mitchell and Stuart to be descendants of the same grandfather.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWith a deep sigh and the realization I had to clear my family name, I embarked on a sleuthing expedition of my own. There was little to go on other than the birth mother recalling that the birth father had the name Harris Koenigsberg.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2322,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[62],"tags":[57],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":"","source_text":"","source_url":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2406"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2406"}],"version-history":[{"count":43,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2654,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2406\/revisions\/2654"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMy name is ‘Mitchell’ and I live in Perth, Western Australia. To be brief, my father was born out of wedlock in 1929 and was adopted by the XXXXX family. I found his birth mother in 1990 and she told me that my dad’s father was Harris Koenigsberg, whose family were furriers in London. Harris (or Harry as he was known to my grandmother) may be the youngest brother of Jane Koenigsberg. . .your father’s mother. . .being your [paternal] grandmother. I am just guessing at the moment that I have the right Harry Koenigsberg.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>
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