The author, Israel Pickholtz, is a native of Pittsburgh who has been living in Israel since 1973. He began working seriously on his families’ genealogies in 1994 after many years of talking about it. Since 2008, when he took early retirement from his drudge job, he has been accepting genealogy clients from Israel and abroad.
His flagship work is the Pikholz Project which serves to identify and reconnect all Pikholz descendants and he is not ashamed to admit that his genealogy database is on Brother’s Keeper 5.2 for DOS.
He has been involved in genetic genealogy since 2012 and participated in the inaugural Practical Genetic Genealogy course at the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh.
He blogs on matters genealogical at All My Foreparents and is a member of the International Society of Genetic Genealogy and the Guild of One-Name Studies.
He is a member of the Israel Genealogical Society (IGS) and has spoken at their meetings around the country and at IAJGS Conferences in the United States. He is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists and its Writers SIG and has written for the APGQuarterly as well as for the IGS quarterly Sharsheret Hadorot, where he served briefly as editor, and for Avotaynu, The Galitzianer and other genealogy publications.
Israel’s Pikholz haplogroup is R-A9700 (downstream of R-M269) and his maternal haplogroup is U1b1.
He lives in Jerusalem and can generally be found in his office merrily scrutinizing virtual chromosomes for his families and for clients.