YAKHNOVICH, TAUZNER, PIKER / ЯХНОВИЧ, ТАУЗНЕР, ПИКЕР

[ruthb]

I am trying to find out how to start a new topic on my maternal grandmother's family who lived in Novogrudok, Baranovichi and nearby Gorodishche (Minsk gub). The names are Yakhnovich, Tauzner and Piker. I am most interested at the moment in where these families came from before they ended up near Novogrudok. The Tauzner family lived around Pinsk and Lyubeshov in the early 1800s and late 1700s but I have mostly seen the name in Slovakian records. The Pikers were only in Belarus from about 1850 and I wonder if they are connected to Pikers in Bukovina or Bessarabia as I have found several DNA matches from northern Romania and the border with Ukraine. The Yakhnovich name started with a 13-year-old boy, Shaya Leib Moshe, sent from Minsk to Gorodishche to study with my great great great grandfather rabbi Aron Tauzner and marry his daughter. I know nothing about his family.
My grandparents, Yankel Rabinovich and Rebecca Yakhnovich married in Baranovichi around 1897 and probably had their first two children there in 1898 and 1901, Aron and Sara. They had another son, Michel, in Kiev in May 1905. I think they then went to Odessa as I have a craft guild certificate of my grandfathers to set up a shoemaking factory dated 1905 in Odessa. I assume they got caught up in the 1905 pogrom as they left Russia for America in 1906 which was obviously not the plan as they had just set up a new business in Odessa. They also had two other children who died in Russia and I cannot find any records for them in Kiev or Odessa, so I suppose they were born and died in Baranovichi. I have not found any records from Baranovichi and some birth records are missing from Kiev. I don't know their names but would love to find their births or deaths.
I would like to find out how to use the data pieces on this site to see if I can find out more about these families. Another mystery is why one of my great aunts went from Novogrudok to Kiev around 1880 as a teenager – whether it was to study or work? She married a socialist journalist in 1885 and became a socialist and later in America an anarchist. Thanks for your help, Ruth