Revealing hidden roots

Local DNA research has global implications

For the past seven years, Sam Silverman and Richard Coren have devoted their leisure time to finding their roots. The men are descendents of the Korenbaum family, which originally lived in towns such as Wlodowa and Malorita along the Bug River in what was once Poland and is now Belarus. Some Korenbaums emigrated to the United States, while others scattered to Israel, France, Belgium, Germany, and Canada. With the help of DNA research, Internet and library investigations, and cold calls to people with the Korenbaum surname, they rediscovered a family torn apart by emigration, war, and the Holocaust.

"If you look at the list of people killed in the Holocaust you will find Korenbaums from Malorita," said Silverman, an 82-year-old Lexington resident whose mother was a Korenbaum. "A number of Korenbaums are listed there."

DNA research has garnered a lot of attention for African-Americans who, because of the history of slavery, had no way of knowing their countries of origin. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. helped popularize its use with his "African American Lives" specials on PBS, which used DNA testing and genealogy to find the origins of celebrities such as Chris Rock and Oprah Winfrey. Genetic research compa nies such as African Ancestry and Gates's own African DNA have generated interest from blacks eager to discover their origins.

But some academics have complained that it's difficult for African-Americans to use only DNA to pinpoint the particular community they come from in Africa. This is because haplotypes, the DNA profile that provides a particular genetic stamp, can occur across different ethnic groups. By the end of this year, Bruce Jackson, a professor of biotechnology and forensic DNA science at MassBay Community College in Wellesley Hills, hopes to create a model that could help African-Americans successfully discover their own lineages. He'll do so by tracing the migration patterns of the haplotypes of people proven to be Korenbaums. Since the Korenbaums represent a small sampling of people proven to be related, it is easier to make a model for research.

"If we can begin to accurately link historical events to haplotype distribution, we can ultimately get a handle on who moved where and, more importantly, when and why," Jackson, who also works as a co-director of the African-American Roots Project at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, said in an e-mail. "Once this is better understood, we can then begin to clearly investigate the origins of blacks of the Americas and Caribbean to their groups of origin in Africa. Until we can do this, any company claiming that they can genetically match a black person of this hemisphere to their group(s) of origin in Africa is simply conducting a questionable business whose claims fly in the face of scientific reason."

Jackson's interest in creating this model dovetailed with Silverman's and Coren's efforts to reunite the Korenbaums, who hadn't met as a group since around 1927 when the family gathered in Lincoln Park in Lincoln, R.I. Five years ago, more than 125 Korenbaums met in Smithfield, R.I., from as far away as California. Silverman also invited Jackson, a longtime friend. Jackson and a graduate assistant took 45 genetic samples from people representing various family branches. His first step was to make sure that the relationships Silverman and Coren suspected were real.

At his MassBay Community College lab, Jackson and his forensics students examined the Y chromosomes of the DNA samples and concluded that the Korenbaums were related. The results showed that the male family members were Kohanim, the Jewish priests who are direct descendents of Moses's brother Aaron. Jackson and his team discovered that the family members weren't Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern European origin, as Silverman had suspected. The Korenbaum family immigrated to the Poland/Belarus area from northern Iraq. The results also proved that Vladimir Korenbaum, a man living in Vladivostok, Russia, whom Coren discovered on the ancestry website JewishGen.org, was related to the Korenbaums gathered in Rhode Island.

This year Jackson will compare the Korenbaum DNA to Latin American and Caribbean residents in an effort to prove that Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition accompanied Christopher Columbus on his voyage to America. He and his students will also examine the specific ties between Korenbaum genes and people in the Middle East.

According to Coren, the name Korenbaum comes from the German word "korn," which means "corn" and the German word "baum," or "tree." The oldest name in the family tree Coren created is Hyman Korenbaum, who was born in 1784. Jewish families were forced to take last names around the end of the 18th century, said Coren. Before then, he said, they were known as "Richard, son of Sam, or Barbara, daughter of Sam."

The lack of last names will prevent Coren from delving further into history. "I have friends who are Scotch and English," Coren said. "They can do their family history to the 1200s. Our family, I can't go back further than 1784."

Korenbaums began arriving in the United States in 1905, starting with Coren's great-grandfather Hymen Corenbaum. "He started spelling the name with a C rather than a K," said Coren. "We're the only branch of the family that spells it with a C." Coren's grandfather Barney Coren, shortened the name in the 1920s, said Coren, "because of anti-Semitism. He was having trouble getting a job."

About 25 other Korenbaums followed Hyman to the United States, all settling in Rhode Island or New York, where the vast majority of the family still lives today. Coren said many Jews left Poland at that time because of religious persecution. Silverman's mother, Chai Gitel Korenbaum, arrived in 1920 to join her husband, who had emigrated six years earlier. Korenbaum descendents can now be found in 28 states, fanning out from the Northeast corridor to Texas, Wyoming, Nevada, Hawaii, and Tennessee.

Coren believes that various branches of the family lost contact with one another around 1950. He and Silverman relocated people through research and phone calls. They discovered Sarah Montard, a survivor of Auschwitz who now lives in Paris, where she moved after World War II. Silverman was recently contacted by a French cousin whose grandmother was a Korenbaum. The man's grandparents didn't survive World War II.

"They were picked up and sent to Auschwitz and killed," said Silverman. The father and aunt of the newly found male cousin only survived because they were staying at a friend's house.

Silverman simply typed the name Korenbaum into an Internet search engine to find family members. Coren's research was more intensive. He perused ship manifest records to find out when Korenbaums arrived in the United States. He verified birth and death dates by going to Jewish cemeteries such as Lincoln Park Cemetery, in Warwick, R.I., where his grandmother, grandfather,, great-grandmother, and great-grandfather are buried.

Coren also made cold calls to contacts given to him by other Korenbaum descendents.

"Ninety percent of the people in the family tree, I didn't know," Coren said. "I started with one phone number from one branch. I called up and said who I am and what I am doing. They talked to me, they gave me their birth dates and death dates, they gave me the number of the next branch. I was able to work my way through the whole family."

The effort is now less arduous thanks to the knowledge gained by DNA research.

"It's an easier sell when I talk to people on the phone," said Coren, "to convince them that they are a member of the family."