What made me pick out this town's list is because Baruch Leib was the name of my great-great-grandfather as this appears on the gravestone of my great-grandfather Mordechai (Marks) ZIANTS. My paternal grandfather, Moshe (Morris) was born in Narewka, and always identified himself as a Bialystoker, but I have been told by other family members that his mother's family were from Bielsk. I see from the map, that Lubartow is also in this general region. My grandfather just had sisters and from the descendants of Mordechai at least, I am now the oldest living person carrying the ZIANTS name within this small immediate family.

The name on the list, though, cannot be my great-great-grandfather because Mordechai, his son, was born in the 1860s (exact date not certain due to discrepancies of age in different documents, etc.), and the name on the list was born in a substantially later generation. I am very curious to find hints that these, or some of these might be cousins. 

Although I am not in a position to be able to do DNA testing (these are not available in Israel where I live and in any case at this time I cannot afford the expense), I would be very  happy to try and reach out to anyone who feels that they might be descended from the people on that list, or anyone else of Jewish descent that carries my family name.

Is any one able to tell me the root of the first names of the marrying couple Gerszek and Szandla Zlata? I initially thought that maybe Gerszek was Gershon, but the different family name seems to indicate that this is the female. I would not be surprised if many of the others on the list are their children, but this is probably something we will never know due to the incomplete records.

One of the issues that held me back in examining myself as a ZIANTS in my earlier family research was because of a buber-maaser ("grandma's tale") in the most literal sense, and this can be seen in some of the postings I made on this forum from two or three decades ago. My grandmother told me, concerning my grandfather's father, that his family name was originally ZENETSKY and was changed to ZIANTS. It turned out that his mother's family name was ZENETSKY and was changed to ZIANTS when she married Mordechai - as many wives change their name when marrying :-) . Moreover there really was a paternal family name change in that generation, from ZENETSKY to SCHLOSBERG of my great-grandmother's brothers (they did this in Hamburg on route to England and America) - which I do not remember my grandparents telling me and I only found out, after they had left this world, from a third cousin.

David Ziants
Ma'aleh Adumim, Israel
Searching: ZIANTS, ZENETSKY (SCHLOSBERG), ISMACH (ISHMA, DAVIDSON, OSMAN), FRIEDMAN, ALPERT (from Narewka, Bialystok, Bielsk, Lomza, Lodz, Warsaw); GEWELBA (GABLE,GALE, RAVEL), SINGER (Warsaw); REINA (UK and Netherlands), MICHAELS (UK and W. Europe), VIEYRA, JUDA-RODRIGUEZ (PASCAL) and all W. Sephardi families (primarily UK and Netherlands).