Albert Einstein, my 3rd cousin twice removed
Albert Einstein was my Grandpa Harry’s 3rd Cousin.
It has been a complete surprise to find out how large of a family my Grandpa Harry left behind when he came to the New World, both figuratively and literally. What I thought was the smallest of my four branches through each of my grandparents, turns out likely to be the largest.
Recently I was corresponding with a genealogist named Roger Lustig who is also a DNA relative of mine. Roger is an expert on the genealogy of the residents of the village of Jebenhausen in Germany to where I have traced a significant number of our my ancestors through Grandpa Harry. Roger told me to take a closer look because I was missing someone famous. I actually thought he was talking about an Ostertag who was an opera singer I had once heard about. I followed the lead he laid out for me, and lo and behold, Albert Einstein and I come from shared DNA.
Einstein a common name in Jebenhausen…or at least the name of a large extended family. The closest one on my tree was Josephine (nee Einstein) Schwarschild who was my GreatGrand Aunt, the the wife of Sigfried Schwarzschild, my GreatGrandmother Elsa Ostertag’s brother. But she was machatunim and Albert was blood related.
Which comes as no surprise to us descendants who share a common ancestor with Albert. Brilliance abounds in this branch 😉. Those common ancestors are my great x4 grandparents, Loeb Moses (1745–1831) and Voegele Juda Moses (1751–1807). See the relationship chart below which shows the generations side by side. My grandfather Harry Oster and Albert shared a pair of Great-Grandparents. Their great grandmothers Hanna and Blümle were sisters and so on.
It is not clear to me if they would have even known of each other.
But who knows, on the Locketz side…third cousins do often know each other. So maybe they did. It entirely depends on the proximity of the relatives…literally how close they lived to one another…and the warmth of connection in the prior generation. If I made a map of the places these folks all lived throughout the 18th and 19th century, it would look like a wagon wheel with Stuttgart as the hub in the middle and small villages (like Jebenhausen and Malsh, and Nordstetten) all the way around it for 30 miles in every direction.
