Andi Ziegelman of Halpern & Branches on FTDNA's Passing

 Nadene Goldfoot                                          

Andi Ziegelman, co-chair of Halpern & Branches on Family Tree DNA, passed away in Israel 6 months ago, about November 2021.  She was my 3rd cousin, and younger than myself, so this is a surprise.   Andi contacted me as she found me on GedMatch.com and saw that we were 3rd cousins.  She had made aliyah to Israel and had remained.  I had done the same in 1980 only returned the end of 1985, so we also had that in common. My first year was spent in Haifa.   Evidently we shared enough DNA for me and many of my father's side of the family, Moshe-Maurice Goldfoot,  to be in the group.  

                 Andi Ziegelman's family group picture

She and Sandra Aaronson started Halpern & Branches.  This is a Y-DNA surname project to look for relatedness of different groups of folks named HALPERN and related families (Rubenstein, Guggenheim, Wertheim). I believe she told me that my family had 3 routes to RASHI.

She wrote," My particular interest comes from having an ancestor, Nachum Eliyahu Halpern, who claimed descent from Jehiel Heilperin, a great talmudist from Minsk, Belarus. There are other HALPERN who descend from rabbinic families of the Russian Empire, as well as others who simply adopted the surname in the 19th century when it became necessary to chose a name.

So I am looking to dissect the different HALPERN groups to see which, if any, share a common ancestry. As of now (August of 2009), it looks as if my HALPERN family does NOT descend from the large HEILPERIN descended from Zebulun HEILPERIN, at least not via a direct male line. If I do descend from Rabbi Jehiel mentioned above, its likely also through a female line that later adopted the surname (or, alternatively, I either do not relate to Jehiel at all, OR Jehiel does not descend from this greater Heilperin family, as documented by Rabbi Meir Wunder.)"

Andi was also a businesswoman in Israel. She was listed in Linked in; Vice President at Ziegelman Institute for Marketing Research:  מכון ציגלמן לחקר השיווק

Andi Ziegelman has over 25 years of experience carrying out globally oriented marketing research projects for both low-tech and high-tech products. Her project findings are based on in-depth person-to-person telephone and email conversations with worldwide relevant market players. She has researched markets in countries of the three Americas, western and eastern Europe and the far east.
Sample products researched by Andi are traveling museum-quality exhibitions, licking salt for cows/ horses/ sheep, and also motion controllers for motors, and MEMS gyroscopes for Inertial Measuring Units (IMUs)
From her clients, the most common goals of her market research are: (1) to discover if there is or there is not a market for the researched product, and/or (2) to identify target customer market segments and target customer names, as well as how best to sell to them.

Andi will be sorely missed. 

 

Resource:

personal message

FTDNA

Linked in

former messages from Andi