About us
Outline
The main goal of this project is to find or confirm relationships between the Liebes and Lebus families about the world.
As results unfold, both from the paper trail and from DNA, we might want to check other relationships: there were numerous marriages among relatively few families. (Also see below, mtDNA).
Which LIEBES families are related?
What does the Paper Trail tell us?
The “Paper Trail” includes any reliable written records or texts. These include civil or community records including census records and name adoptions, cemetary records and gravestones, address directories, school records – the list is endless.
As mentioned in the “Background”, there are several Liebes branches. The outline below is limited to those having living descendants to the knowledge of the Group Administrator (N.H.). I shall start with the Kempen/Kępno branch which is the one I know best. I have posted my family tree on JewishGen in their FTJP application.
Jewish records for Kempen, Prussia (now Kępno, Poland) for 1825-1847 (with gaps) have been filmed by the Mormons (Latter Day Saints or LDS). They have been indexed and the indexes are now available online at JRI-Poland. During this timespan there are births in three Liebes families whose heads of households are Schlamme Hirschel, Joachim Hirschel and Jacob Loebel. These are also the three inhabitants of Kempen who officially adopted the family name Liebes in 1834.
A 4thLiebes appears in the records: Wollf Liebes, whose daughters Rebeka and Röschen respectively married Mendel Feibelsohn in 1837 and Leiser Sternberg in 1845. Why didn't Wollf also adopt the name officially? Maybe he only had daughters in Kempen and didn't think it was worth the cost. Recent research by Jim Bennett shows that Wollf was the father of Abraham Liebes of Rawitsch (see below).
Several Liebes families were living in Breslau, Schlesien (now Wroclaw, Sląsk, Poland) in the late 19thand early 20thcenturies. For some a connection is established with the Kempen families, for others not.
My great grandfather Max Liebes, a grandson of Jacob of Kempen, moved to Berlin at the end of the 19thcentury, and looking him up in the Berlin directories (available online), I found a number of other Liebes's: Josef Wolf, Samuel, Berthold and Leopold, who turned out to be brothers all born in Ostrowo (Ostrów Wielkopolski) between 1845 and 1858; their father Moritz was probably a son of Wollf Liebes of Kempen. Wollf Liebes died in Kempen in December 1844. Josef Wolf Liebes, son of Moritz Liebes and Dorothea Pilz, was born in Ostrowo in January 1845.
Also living in Berlin was Heinrich who turned out to be a grandson of Salomon of Kempen.
Several of Max's siblings settled in Latin America (El Salvador and Guatemala) where many of their descendants are still living. Some descendants moved later to the US or Canada.
Descendants of Abraham Liebes of Rawitsch: Several of Abraham's offspring, all born in Rawitsch, Prussia, in the mid 19th century, settled in San Francisco as young adults. The English Lebus family, who are descendants of Salomon Liebes of Kempen, know they are related to this San Francisco Liebes branch.
Several given names occur repeatedly among the "Prussian" families: Samuel, Max, Moritz, Leopold, George, Herman, Carl. This might be an expression of the fashion of the times, or of a link among all these families.
Another well documented Liebes family is the Alsace-Lorraine branch, at least the part from Alsace proper since civil records for French departments Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin became searchable online in 2010. Although this family appears to have been Catholic since before the French Revolution, a link with the Prussian families cannot be ruled out. Particularly intriguing is the fact that the name was spelled Libes until a certain Frantz Anton (or François Antoine) Liebes, who was the first in this family to read and write, had a note added to one of his marriage certificates saying his name had been spelled incorrectly on his birth certificate, and he signed in German Altschrift which was not in common use in Alsace at the time. So he must have been in contact with a Prussian Liebes family, for long enough to learn to write.
There was also a Liebes family living in Lemberg, Austro-Hungarian Empire (later Lvov, now Lviv, Ukraine) in the late 19th century. This part of what was formerly Poland came under Austrian rule from the first partition of Poland (1772) till the end of the 1st World War. I thought at first they were not related, because apparently a name change from Minczeles to Liebes had occurred late in the 19th century. But in fact it looks as though this was not a true name change, but was a shift from the wife's maiden name (Minczeles) to the husband's name (Liebes) when the couple was finally recognized as man and wife. (Religious marriages were not recognized, so children born to a couple who had not had a civil wedding were often labelled "illegitimate" and registered under the mother's name.) So in fact it is still worth checking whether they are related.
These are not the only Liebes lines under the sun. However, it might be a good idea to sort these first as top priority.
(Still under construction. References will be added later.)
What can DNA tell us?
Y-DNA test
The primary goal of this project is to detect and/or confirm existence of relationships among LIEBES / LEBUS (or variants) families, when these relationships cannot be confirmed by available civil records. Results so far have demonstrated that DNA is very good at confirming the existence of a relationship suspected from the paper trail; it performs less well in determining the number of generations to the common ancestor.
Ideally, one male LIEBES or LEBUS descendant of each branch is needed to test for Y chromosome DNA, which is passed largely unaltered from father to son. Differences between two males' Y-DNA gives some information on the number of generations to the most recent common ancestor. As we are looking at relatively recent generations (about 6th-10th), the 37 marker test is the most appropriate. An upgrade to the 67 marker test might be needed later to refine relationships but is not top priority. (Take a look at the FAQ, “Test results: Y-DNA Short Tandem Repeat (STR)” for more about levels of testing). It does not look as though the new 111-marker test can give much more information.
Family Finder test
In some branches no living father-to-son descendant is available for testing. To check relationships for these branches, the only available test is the Family Finder test, which looks at nearly a million sites on the 22 other (so-called autosomal) chromosomes. Because genes are reshuffled at each generation, matches decay rapidly going back in time. So this test can only (hopefully) confirm existence of some relationship. It cannot tell where the relationship lies, and a negative result between two individuals may mean they are not related, or maybe that reshuffling has obscured their relationship.
Consequently, some Y-DNA contributors might also need to upgrade, at some point in the future, to the Family Finder test.
How are spouses related?
Among the Group Administrator's LIEBES ancestors and related families, several family names occur repeatedly among spouses' maiden names: SCHLESINGER, GUTTMANN, FREUND. Hopefully, other recurrent spouses' maiden names will be added as the project evolves.
Were these individuals related? The ideal test here is the mtDNA test, which analyses mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child. If we know of A and B MaidenName, we need to look for a matrilinear descendant of each; the individual testing may be a male, if his mother was a matrilinear descendant of A or B. If the result is positive, A and B were probably sisters. A negative result does not mean the two individuals were not related: they inherited their name from their father and their mtDNA from their mother. If they were cousins, i.e. if their fathers were brothers, mtDNA will not find their relatonship. So mtDNA should only be tested if all else fails.
To complement the mtDNA test, the Family Finder test might be needed.