Hello WikiTreers!
WikiTree Challenge #23 for Mark Cuban is now complete. It was a challenging week spent looking through Jewish records from Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. The difficulty made it satisfying each time we found an ancestor.
Challenge participants added a total of 529 family members to his branches! There were 16 direct ancestors added, 34 nuclear relatives of ancestors, and 479 additional relatives within seven degrees. Connections to the global tree were made on five of the eight great-grandparents' lines. This made researchers up to eight degrees closer to Mark! They did such an outstanding job that Mark's connections at seven degrees now totals 741.
Altogether more than 23 WikiTreers made 892 edits to his family profiles. Many did research, while others worked on profile narratives, looked up articles, added categories, made peripheral connections, translated documents, and contributed in other ways. You can watch the Highlights LiveCast to see more in-depth information about the challenge week.
MVP: Celia Marsh
Top Bounty Hunter: Donna Baumann
Team Captain: Thomas Koehnline
All contributors ● Scoring explanation ● Research resources
Here are some highlights from our discoveries:
- Josef (Chabinski) Cuban (1903-1938), the brother of Mark's grandfather Morris, was part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. He was killed in action in Spain on 28 July 1938.
- Mark's grandfather Morris Cuban was caught selling butter for 95 cents a pound in 1946. At the time butter prices were fixed by the US government. He was fined $100 and given a six-month suspended sentence.
- In 1954, Morris Cuban found a grenade while sweeping the sidewalk in front of his house. Neither he nor any of his neighbors wanted to deal with it, nor did the police when they were called. They notified detectives and one who "knows about grenades" was sent to deal with it. He found it was empty and took it away.
- Mark's great grandmother's sister-in-law Bella (Mittleman) Alpern had gone to visit her parents in Novoselits in the Russian Empire in the summer of 1914. Two days after she arrived World War I started. She was forced to spend the next 21 months there, fearful of traveling across the Atlantic Ocean while German U-boats were sinking ships.
- Mark's matrilineal great-grandmother was Tsivia (Ziv) Grunes (1867-1942), born in Darbėnai in what was the Russian Empire but now is Lithuania. Records from Lithuania have allowed us to piece together more of her family through Tsivia's father Euzel Ziv, her grandfather Leiba Ziv, great-grandfather Eliash Ziv, and great-great-grandfather Israel Ziv, the latter being born about 1750 likely in the town of Plungė, which is about 20 miles east of Darbėnai.
- Movsha Freintel (abt.1825-aft.1892), Mark's second great-grandfather, was an innkeeper in Darbėnai, Russian Empire. Movsha was in a list of residents who suffered from a fire in October 1882 that resulted in 40 buildings being burnt down. There are 84 records of individuals who suffered in that fire.
