GENEALOGY

I have a great interest in genealogy, as this part of the website shows.

Family Trees:

In this section, I summarize what I know about my biological ancestry, then I summarize Karen’s ancestry, which is quite different from mine, and then list the writing and speaking that I have done in this area.

I start with my immediate family.

Ancestry.com DNA’s “Ethnicity Estimate” for me is “100% European Jewish”. This is 100% accurate. Like most Jews, I cannot take my lineage back very far in any ancestral direction, but on three of my four grandparents’s sides, all but the Usiskin side, I can take my lineage back further than most Jews can. Following those three sides is a listing of relevant publications, all self-published and distributed to some or all of the people on the named tree.

ALL MY ANCESTRY KNOWN TO ME

Hillel was likely born around 1845. The name Usiskin is from the small Usisa or Usysa river in today’s Belarus that flows through Gorodok north of Vitebsk. Schnaer Zalman of Lyady was the founder of the Lubavich (Habad) Hasid sect of Judaism, and this given name indicates that my grandfather was from a Hasid family. He apparently left that family when of age and moved to Riga,

Mordecai was born around 1775, Velvel around 1805. The name haShochet may never have been taken by Mordecai. It refers to a meat slaughterer which was his profession. The name Tsukerman means “sugar man” and means that the family may have dealt in candies and other sweets. In Polish, the name might be Cukierman. A common English variant is Zukerman or Zuckerman. The name Marinker is a nickname from the crossroads called Malynka (with the “l” pronounced like “r”) that still exists today where Velvel ran an inn.