Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

MyHeritage is the site where I maintain my family tree information. I have one main tree for my family and my wife’s family along with a place-to-place study of the people who left the town of Mezhirichi in the Russian Empire in the early 1900’s to come to Winnipeg and their families. This tree now has 12,111 people in it.

I also have 6 other trees, for my brother-in-law (my wife’s sister’s husband), my niece, my wife’s stepfather, a good friend, a family tree of Mark Cuban from when I worked on him during a WikiTree challenge, and a Bible family tree. These other trees are all relatively small ranging from 190 to 804 people. My niece and friend’s trees could be much larger since they have some lines going back to the 1500s, but I’ve limited those trees to ancestors-only after the first 3 generations to avoid going crazy.

An Opportunity

For my other brother-in-law (my sister’s husband), I have his mother’s side included in my place-to-place study. But his father’s side has been mostly a mystery and there’s no living relatives that he knew of on his father’s side.

He told me his father Joseph Shpiegel (later Spiegel) came from Russia with his father’s uncle Alex Shpiegel. My brother-in-law remembers when he was young visiting his great-uncle at the old folks home in Winnipeg. Alex passed away in 1961 and is buried in a cemetery near Winnipeg.

I knew my brother-in-law’s father had 3 brothers and 2 sisters that went by the surname Kogenman, son of Oiser Kogenman. One older brother left Russia and went to St. Louis and married and had a daughter who died unmarried and childless. So that branch is gone. And we don’t know what happened to the other 4 siblings who stayed in Russia (now Ukraine).

So just for fun, I thought I’d try to find out more about this Alex Shpiegel.

Another Family Researcher

The first place I went was to my brother-in-law’s niece’s Ancestry site to see if she had anything I didn’t.  She had three important facts: 

1. The family was from the town of Pishchanka in Podolia.
2. Oiser Kogenman’s wife was Rifka Prosterman.
3. Joseph’s passenger record in 1924 which stated that he travelled across the ocean alone (at 14 years old!!!) to stay with his uncle Alex Shpiegel in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Researching Alex Shpiegel in Regina

I then looked to see what I could find about Alex’s life in Saskatchewan. I couldn’t find much, but what I found had a big surprise.

The 1916 Canadian Census shows Alex living on Ottawa Street in Regina, age 28, a junk peddler, immigrated from Russia in 1913.

It shows him having a wife, age 28, immigrated from Russia in 1914. Nobody ever knew that Alex was ever married!!

The name is indexed as “Lisa” but is hard to read and is likely something else, since Lisa is not a Jewish name given to Russian girls:

I was able to find her Passenger record:

This lists her name as “Leie”, i.e. Leah, which makes more sense. It also says she was married, so she and Alex must have got married in Russia. Alex came first to find a place and get a job and then sent for Leah to join him the next year.  Either Alex or Leah could be Joseph’s blood relative.

After that, I found the 1926 Canadian Census for Alex Shpiegel:   Item: Alex Spiegel - Library and Archives Canada (bac-lac.gc.ca)
This record lists his wife as Helen, which may be the English name she chose.  I searched around to see if I could find a death record or a headstone for a Leah/Helen Shpiegel/Spiegel, but I was unable to find anything. She just vanished after 1930.

Joseph lived with them from the age of 14 for about 10 years and even took the Shpiegel surname. But he never mentioned to his children that Alex had a wife. Maybe she and Alex split and she remarried and took on a new surname, which might be why I can’t find her.

Prosterman in Regina

While searching information about Alex Shpiegel and Leah/Helen in Regina, I also came across some family trees on MyHeritage of Prosterman in Regina.

Sam Prosterman and his wife Miriam and their 8 children came to Regina in 1904 from Pishchanka. Sam’s sister Faigeh Prosterman and her husband Nusan Finkelstein and their 10 children came to Regina in 1913 from Pishchanka.

Everything is starting to click. Joseph’s mother was Rifka Prosterman. She is not listed as one of the 18 children of Sam and Faigeh. And Leah/Helen and Alex Shpiegel are not in the trees either. Could they somehow be related.

Then I came across this newspaper article from 1928:

This was a 1928 Wedding Anniversary from the Prosterman family where much of the Regina Prosterman and Finkelstein families were invited. And who just happens to be invited to this event? None other than “Mr. and Mrs. Alex Spiegel”.

So how are they related?

Russian Records

After a bit of checking on JewishGen for a Leah Prosterman, I found just one record  and it was a birth record in the correct year in the correct place Podolia. The town of Balta is only 25 km from Pishchanka. I would think this is quite likely her.

Fun, fun, fun!

Unfortunately, it does not give Leah’s father’s name. But since Alex was known to be Joseph’s uncle, it makes sense that Leah Prosterman was Rifka Prosterman’s sister. Their father likely was a brother to Sam Prosterman and Faigeh Finkelstein.

Building the Tree on MyHeritage

With the assumption in hand that Sam, Faigeh and “Unknown male” Prosterman were 3 siblings, I moved on to the task of building their family tree.

I started with Joseph, added his parents Oiser Konegman and Rifka Posterman and Oiser’s siblings. I connected Leah/Helen as a sister to Rifka. Added their unknown father and connected him as a sibling to Sam and Faigeh.

Then I let MyHeritage’s magic do its work, and it came up with 542 record Matches from 33 sources, and 1,132 Smart Matches from 62 family trees. Those trees included 6 that were created by direct descendants of Sam or Faigah.

So now it was time to build a “Quick and Dirty” tree from all that information. I methodically went through all the MyHeritage hints, using newspaper articles and online obituaries of those who died within the past 25 years along with living people records for the USA to add some confirmation that the family trees were mostly correct.

About 4 days and 40 hours of reviewing matches later, I had my own tree assembled with 538 people.

My brother-in-law now has several hundred living relatives on his father’s side, mostly at the 3rd cousin level, that he previously never knew of.

Today, I released a new version of Behold. This has been a long time coming as I’ve been working on it off and on for the past number of years. I gave my last status report in February that had some thoughts as to where I’m taking Behold.

I wasn’t planning on releasing Version 2.0 of Behold until it was ready, and I’m still at least a few months away from that. But yesterday, a new user downloaded and tried Behold and asked me if the links in Behold’s exported html and rtf files were supposed to work. Yes, of course they were, but that was a known bug to me in the most recent Version 1.2.7. I already had the fix in my development version. Rather than fixing the bugs and releasing Version 1.2.8, I thought:

I’ll never get it perfect so I might as well release it.

Perfectionism is a leading cause of procrastination.

They say software developers should release early and release often.

So what the heck. This developmental version has been running smoothly for me for the past few months. I have been fixing any bugs I find as I encounter them. And there are enough changes and improvements … even though it’s not “finished” … that I thought it might be best to release it. 

Below I go through some of what’s changed in the new 1.99 beta version.

New Internal Data Structures

This is something you won’t see. But internally in Behold, I’ve removed all my custom data structures (including my wonderful B* tree that was incredibly fast). I’ve replaced them all with standard lookup tables, and changed all the record keys from text strings to integers. I started this when I was still thinking that Behold would become a full fledged editor knowing that this would allow a relatively easy switch to using a database so that the data could be more efficiently saved to a file and retrieved again.

Now that editing is no longer in my future plans, this still was a good move as it  made my structures relational and simplified their use internally. Behold’s data structures now should be able to handle any and all genealogy data in a generalized way.

Updated Windows Styling

Windows 10 has updated its standard dialogs such as the “File Open” and “File Save” which are much more useful than before. Behold now uses new Windows dialogs whenever possible.

GEDCOM Validation

Behold has always included a lot of checks that the GEDCOM being input is correct. This version adds comprehensive syntax checking to match the GEDCOM 5.5.1 specifications exactly (except for a few known errors in the spec). This will help indicate how precise the GEDCOM is and tell you exactly what is wrong with it.

Selection of People to Include

Previous versions allowed you to select which people to build the families around and whether you wanted all their relatives through marriage and whether you wanted everyone else as well. In addition to that, you can now filter out all living people, and select the number of generations of ancestors and descendants to include from each starting person. The Index of Names, Place Details, Source Details and all other information will be shown if they refer any of the people included.

Menu and Toolbar Items Updated

New functionality such as the selection of people and finding the next or previous data problem are available via the menu or toolbar or shortcuts.

GEDCOM Export

In the 1.99 beta Version, this is a first version of GEDCOM export. There is still a bit of refinement needed and testing I need to do before trusting it completely, and it will be the next thing I work on in the next few weeks. It is being designed to either:

1. Export “verbatum” GEDCOM,  i.e. with custom tags and structures known only to the program that originally created that GEDCOM,
   or
2. Export to “standard” GEDCOM, i.e. GEDCOM 5.5.1 following the GEDCOM 5.5.5 recommendations so that all the data will be accepted by almost every GEDCOM reading program.

The GEDCOM that will be exported will correspond to what Behold displays. You can filter the people you want, select fact types to include, etc.

Once I’ve finalized the export procedure (likely in Version 1.99.1), I’ll write a full blog post all about exporting GEDCOM.

Relationships

Every person will have ALL their relationships to each of the selected family people displayed for you. The current beta includes this now, but it is nowhere near final. It will be the next thing worked on after GEDCOM Export is completed.

Ancestral Surnames and Places

You’ll see placeholders for two new sections:

1. Ancestors by Surnames
2. Ancestral Place Details

I’m creating these unique reports because I need them for my own research. I’m sure many of you will find them to be useful references as well.

Lots Of Improvements and Fixes

Small but important things, such as slightly increasing the font size of titles and using a bold font for all surnames. And lots of tweaks to the display the data better.

For a complete list, see: Behold Version History

To see what’s coming by Version 2.0, including some DNA features that no other program has, see: Behold Future Plans

Note that the Help file and website will not be updated to reflect the new features once all the functionality for Version 2.0 is included.

So give it a try if you want:  Behold Download Page (beholdgenealogy.com)

Will I break it now?

Today on Facebook, Alex Krakovsky posted:

  Alex Krakovsky  34m ·

Yes, it’s true. FamilySearch started publishing Jewish metrical records from the Odesa archive. Something that all of us were waiting for many many many years.

So far they have published 81 books. 69 of them were never ever available online. 12 books from inventory 5 we published before.

I published all the references on Wikisource pages so you can now instantly access them with a blink of an eye.

I’m glad we came this far.

Here’s the list for your delight.

Fond 39

Inventory 2

https://uk.wikisource.org/…/%D0%90%D1%80%D1%85%D1…/39/2

No. Name Year Pages FamilySearch DGS number

1 . Birth 1875 174 115149335

1a . Birth 1846 29 115149391

1b. Marriage 1854 32 115149339

1v. Divorce 1854 15 115148873

1g. Death 1854 89 115149357

1d . Birth 1847 15 115149367

2 . Birth 1875 179 115148874

3 . Marriage 1875 68 115149358

4 . Divorce 1875 34 115149365

5 . Death 1875 149 115149379

6 . Death 1875 147 115148881

7. Birth 1876 217 115148882

8 . Birth 1876 236 115149369

9 . Marriage 1876 87 115148880

10 . Marriage 1876 87 115149397

11 . Divorce 1876 29 115149427

12 . Divorce 1876 28 115149429

13 . Death 1876 201 115148888

14 . Death 1876 201 115148878

15 . Birth 1877 205 115148879

16 . Birth 1877 204 115149395

17 . Marriage 1877 68 115149371

18 . Marriage 1877 68 115149363

19 . Divorce 1877 27 115149362

20 . Divorce 1877 27 115148886

21 . Death 1877 160 115148875

22 . Birth 1878 232 115149327

23 . Birth 1878 205 115148877

24 . Marriage 1878 112 115149337

25 . Divorce 1878 36 115149373

26 . Death 1878 185 115149361.

Inventory 3

https://uk.wikisource.org/…/%D0%90%D1%80%D1%85%D1…/39/3

No. Name Year Pages FamilySearch DGS number

1 . Death 1877 160 115149401

2 . Death 1878 172 115149405

3 . Death 1879 137 115149411

Inventory 4

https://uk.wikisource.org/…/%D0%90%D1%80%D1%85%D1…/39/4

No. Name Year Pages FamilySearch DGS number

1 . Birth 1879 226 115149409

2 . Born 1879 28 115149415

3 . Birth 1879 244 115148890

4 . Marriage 1879 134 115149417

5 . Divorce 1879 36 115148904

6 . Death 1879 168 115148891

7. Birth 1880 235 115149414

8 . Birth 1880 224 115148906

9 . Marriage 1880 110 115148894

10 . Marriage 1880 109 115149435

11 . Divorce 1880 33 115149437

12 . Birth 1880 33 115149453

14 . Death 1880 202 115148895

15 . Birth 1881 236 115149423

16 . Born 1881 27 115149322

17 . Birth 1881 236 115148897

19 . Marriage 1881 95 115148898

20 . Divorce 1881 28 115148901

21 . Death 1881 182 115149449

22 . Death 1881 182 115148893

23 . Born in 1882 235 115148899

24 . Born 1882 19 115148900

25 . Born 1882 17 115149451

26 . Marriage 1882 133 115149444

27 . Divorce 1882 29 115148902

28 . Divorce 1882 29 115148903

29 . Death 1882 177 115149446

30 . Birth 1883 226 115148896

31 . Birth 1883 226 115148889

32 . Born 1883 21 115149406

33 . Born 1883 21 115149431

34 . Marriage 1883 93 115149433

36 . Divorce 1883 23 115149421

37 . Divorce 1883 24 115148905

38 . Death 1883 180 115149440

Inventory 5

https://uk.wikisource.org/…/%D0%90%D1%80%D1%85%D1…/39/5

No. Name Year Pages FamilySearch DGS number

3 . Birth 1884 237 115148907

9. Death 1884 193 115149351

10. Death 1884 193 115148864

11. Birth 1885 232 115149466

13. Birth 1885 246 115148908

14. Divorce 1885 22 115149326

15. Divorce 1885 23 115149345

16. Marriage 1885 95 115148911

19. Death 1885 214 115149458

25. Death 1886 199 115149464

26. Birth 1886 249 115148910

27. Birth 1887 278 115149461

My father’s stepfather, Louis Kessler and his first wife Sarah Katkow is my one research line that is my biggest brick wall.  Louis’ father was Tsvi Joseph and Sarah’s maiden name was in one document written as Katkow and her parents’ names were Jidel (Yehudah) and Chana Rivka.

They emigrated from the Russian Empire to Saskatchewan, Canada in the early 1900s and I presume were already married when they came since I cannot find any Saskatchewan marriage record for them.

They had no children and I don’t know of any living relatives they might have had, so there is no one to DNA test.

It wasn’t until 3 years ago during the WikiTree Challenge, that I was able to determine that they were from Odessa.

The 1911 Canada Census indicates that Louis may have been born in May 1878 and Sarah in April 1876. The records from the above include those years!!

So now it’s time for a bit of elbow grease and to manually start going through those records and put my Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG) course on Researching Russian Genealogy Records to good use.

I’ll be going through the birth records in and around the years 1876 and 1878 looking for the handwritten version of these names:

Wish me luck.