Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento

Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10 a.m.

Albert Einstein Residence Center, 1935 Wright Street, Sacramento

“Mapping Madness” with Ron Arons

Ron Arons returns to discuss Web sites offering historical maps for genealogical research and review the basics of both Google and Microsoft’s map sites. He’ll also talk about other online mapping sites such as whitepages.com, MapCruncher, IBM’s Many Eyes, and more.

Come hear the program at 10 a.m., Sunday, December 20 at the Albert Einstein Residence Center, 1935 Wright Street, Sacramento. All are welcome to attend and to use the JGSS library collection. For more information about the JGSS, visit www.jgss.org, e-mail the JGSS at jgs_sacramento@... or leave a message at 916-486-0906 ext. 361.

 

And Mort Rumberg passes on the news that the Web site of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies can now be read in numerous languages:

El web de IAJGS se puede leer ahora en muchos idiomas
IAJGS Website kan nu worden gelezen in vele talen
IAJGS site peut être lu aujourd'hui dans de nombreuses langues
Honlap IAJGS olvasható most már több nyelven
Il sito d'IAJGS può essere letto oggi in molte lingue
IAJGS site web poate fi citit în prezent în mai multe limbi
DO WE NEED TO SAY MORE?
Now the IAJGS Website can be read in many languages:
Hebrew, Spanish, German, Bulgarian, Russian,
Hungarian, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian,
Turkish, Rumanian, Portuguese and many more.
Check the list of languages on the IAJGS homepage
and if you think we need another one, just let me know.

See you next Sunday.

December 6, 2009

 

Upcoming Meetings:

Sunday, Dec. 20, 10 a.m. – Ron Arons, “Mapping Madness”

Sunday, Jan. 17, 10 a.m. – Joann Weiser, “Everyone Has a Story”

Sunday, Feb. 21, 10 a.m. – Victoria Fisch, “Jews of the Gold Rush”

 

Dues are Due

Treasurer Allan Bonderoff has e-mailed a notice for 2010 dues.  The $25 per year helps us purchase new books, assist with speakers, provide the Einstein Center a Chanukah gift each year, and more.  You can bring your check to the next meeting or mail it to Allan Bonderoff, 1935 Wright Street, #116, Sacramento, CA 95825. Any additional sums donated are always appreciated.

Magnes Museum Archives Closure

 

Bob Wascou advises us hat that the collections of the Magnes Museum, including the archives of the Western Jewish History Center, will be closed to researchers starting January 1, 2010 due to the imminent move of the Magnes collections to the University of California at Berkeley. Reference and other collection services will resume in 2011, once the Magnes relocates to its new facility near UC Berkeley Campus.

 

Reference desk hours are by appointment only.  http://www.magnes.org/

 

Sacramento Spring Genealogy Seminar

Now’s the time to save the date for the Root Cellar –Sacramento Genealogical Society Spring Seminar.   It will be held on Saturday, March 27, 2010;

The annual event will feature Daniel M. Lynch, author of “Google Your Family Tree.”  He will discuss techniques for using Google to conduct effective family history research.

The Spring Seminar will be held from 9 a.m. to  3:45pm at the Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church, 11427 Fair Oaks Blvd., Fair Oaks, CA.  Check the Root Cellar website www.rootcellar.com for registration details and updates. Contact Sammie Hudgens at 916-481-4930 or e-mail samihud@....  This event is open to the public.
 
Visiting the National Archives in D.C.?
If you’re planning a trip to Washington D.C. and visiting The National Archives, there is a new online reservation system, to make it easier to visit the National Archives. The convenience fee for online reservations is $1.50 per person.  While reservations are not required to visit the National Archives and admission is free, this new system will eliminate the long lines and often lengthy wait. By going online, visitors can reserve their choice of dates and times.

 

Reservations will be handled through the National Recreation Reservation Service (NRRS). Visitors to the National Archives Experience can make reservations online http://tinyurl.com/d4by4o from the NRRS Web site at www.recreation.gov. Reservations can also be made through the NRRS Call Center: 1-877-444- 6777.

 

Meeting Notes – November 15, 2009

President Mort Rumberg called the meeting to order.  He mentioned that he had attended the recent meeting of the Genealogical and Historical Society of the Sacramento Valley, and they had passed out a CD with all the genealogy books in the Sacramento Library. They offer free genealogy classes and also have a speakers’ bureau.

Bob Wascou noted that all the headstones at the Home of Peace Cemetery in Sacramento have now been photographed, thanks to help from Carl Miller, Mark Heckman, Burt Hecht and Mort Rumberg.  Bob said they found an original plot book and beginning minutes from the cemetery from 1924.

November Speaker

Our speaker for the meeting was Jim Van Buskirk of San Francisco, discussing “My Grandmother’s Suitcase.”

Jim said his grandmother, Georgette Simon, was an opera singer in France in the late 1920s and 1930s.  She met her an American doughboy during World War I, Theodore Burns, who later became her husband. It was not a happy marriage but they had a little girl, Anne Marie,who Theodore took at age six to the United States in 1933.  He ended up with the girl in Los Angeles.  In 1945, after the war, Georgette went to the U.S. and found Theodore and her daughter.  Jim remembers his grandmother, Georgette, and especially a large ring she promised him.

In October 2000, Jim, who had been estranged from his mother, heard from his brother that she wasn’t doing well, so he went up to Seattle to see her.  “My mother said I have something to tell you – ‘you are Jewish.’”

His mother said there was a document somewhere with the name Bernstein. 

Jim said he had written an essay a few years before entitled “At the Museum of Jewish Heritage.” And he had just published an article on “Identity Envy” about the Jewish faith.

He was having brunch with his mother when she said “I have your grandmother’s suitcase.  The next day we went through it,” Jim said. “I envisioned an old suitcase maybe with stickers from places around the world – it turned out to be a piece of Samsonite.”

In the suitcase were documents, photos, contracts and letters, including letters from a young child to her mother.  His mother said there was also a document in another suitcase or trunk somewhere mentioning the word “Israelite.”

Jim said when he got home he attended a Jewish genealogy seminar by Judy Baston in San Francisco, and Judy helped him get started with his research.  He found a World War I draft registration card for his grandfather, Theodore Burns, which listed both Burns and Bernstein on it.  It also listed his place of birth in Russia.

“My mother then started doling out cousins – one side had not changed its name and were Jewish.”  One cousin sent a photo and family tree.

“I sent away for four siblings’ applications for Social Security – all had different names for their parents and different places of birth,” Jim said.

Theodore’s brother turned out to be president of a synagogue in Beverly Hills, but was introduced at the time as his lawyer.

Then Jim found a 1906 ship’s manifest for a Bernstein family and five children arriving in New York, noting they were going to meet a J. Bernstein in New York.

Jim said he read Arthur Kurzweil’s book, “From Generation to Generation,” talking about Jewish genealogy as a spiritual pilgrimage.  “I realized that was what I was on.  Kurzweil said the most important thing was to interview people while they were still able to tell the story.  So I told my mom I was coming up to visit with a tape recorder.”

“She said it was fine for her to tell me the stories, but she didn’t want to be identified as Jewish,” Jim said. “It turns out she was sworn to secrecy by an aunt by marriage.”

Jim ultimately was able to convince his mother to talk with him, noting how he had come out to his mother years earlier as a gay man.

“I was estatic with this new-found heritage,” Jim said.  “It confirmed the feelings I had had.”

He threw a party for himself – “a combination 55^th birthday/retirement/bris/bar mitzvah – my acknowledgement to my friends of my Jewish heritage.”

After his mother passed away, Jim cleaned out her apartment but never found the suitcase with the “Israelite” document

On a trip to New York, he did find a Jennie Bernstein – his grandmother -- through his research, and ultimately, her gravestone.

Jim joined a Jewish congregation in San Francisco and is in the process of writing his memoir.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~

 

This article first appeared in the October, 2009 issue of “Family Gatherings, Newsletter of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Broward County, Inc.” It is reprinted with their permission and that of the author, Ed Kritzler.

 

COLUMBUS’ ISLAND: JAMAICA FOR THE JEWS

By Ed Kritzler

 

Google “Christopher Columbus” and you find more than three million entries. Thousands of towns and cities bear his name. Yet, the wayward sailor, honored this week on the anniversary of his discovery of a New World, remains a mysterious figure. Italy, Spain and Portugal each claim his birthright, and much about him is debated. However, beyond dispute is a previously unreported relationship involving the Great Explorer and his family, and the Jews of Jamaica. From 1536 to 1655 (when England conquered Jamaica), the island was ruled by Columbus’ family who provided a haven for Iberian Jews on the run from the Inquisition.

 

Columbus’ close relationship with Jews began before his voyage of discovery. It was in the spring of 1492. Columbus was meeting with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. They agreed to sponsor his voyage but balked at his demand for hereditary rights to any land he might discover.Columbus, disheartened, was leaving the royal quarters when the king's financial advisor Luis de Santangel caught up with him. “Hold firm to your demand” he urged the explorer, explaining that he would try to get the royal couple to reverse their decision.

 

Santangel, a covert Jew, knew what was at stake. As the king’s counselor, he was aware that soon, town criers throughout Spain would proclaim the Expulsion Order of the Inquisition that mandated all Jews under penalty of death must leave. If Santangel could persuade the royal couple to accede to the explorer’s demand, Columbus, as ruler of a new land, would be in a position to provide a haven for banished brethren.

 

Granted an audience, the counselor addressed the monarchs. Columbus’ demand should not trouble them, he said. He and his crew could not possibly subdue one of the powerful Asian nations. However, if he was allowed to rule over a few islands he captured in the course of his  voyage, Spain would gain strategic way-stations for her trading ships plying the shortcut passage to Asia. Ferdinand relented, and Columbus set sail, having gained hereditary rights over any newly discovered lands – to be “enjoyed forever by his heirs.”

 

With Santangel (not Isabella’s jewels) paying for the voyage, Columbus – on the same day that Jews were expelled from Spain – set sail with a hidden agenda. Along with his stated goal to gain the riches of the East, he hoped to acquire a land where Sephardi could live free from the Inquisition. It was not to be. He never reached Asia. Nor did he secure hereditary rule over any land in his lifetime. However, his promise to provide a homeland for covert Jews was kept by his family in the one “new land” the Crown eventually ceded his heirs – the island of Jamaica.

 

It’s been theorized that Columbus’ pledge to Santangel was reinforced in 1504, when,

marooned on Jamaica for one year, he rewarded the young sailors who, led by his brother Bartholomew, defeated a mutinous uprising by older members of his crew. One may ask the reasons for the youths’ allegiance. First, they had a fiscal interest in the voyage, as their fathers helped finance it. Second, their families, being wealthy conversos (Jews who converted to the Catholic faith), were suspect and therefore targeted by the Inquisition. To keep their sons safe, Columbus agreed to take them along.

 

While the Jewish boys may have looked to Columbus as their Moses (as he himself did), Jamaica was no Promised Land. Still, after leading underground lives in Spain, a year’s idyll on a tropical island was likely no hardship. How much their support played in fulfilling Columbus’ early promise to Santangel cannot be quantified. When rescued from Jamaica, Columbus and his crew were first taken to Hispaniola before departing for Spain. But the young Jews, rather than go back to the dreaded Land of the Inquisition, remained in Hispaniola and in 1509 returned to Jamaica as the island’s first settlers.

 

For more than a century, Columbus’ heirs kept Jamaica – alone in the Spanish Empire

off-limits to the tentacles of the Holy Inquisition that had spread over the New World. As far as Jamaica’s proprietors were concerned, as long as their Jewish settlers wore a Christian mask, no one in power might question the sincerity of their religious beliefs. Protected by the Columbus family, Jamaica’s Jews posed as New Christians from Portugal (known as Portugals), the only category of settlers that did not require proof of Catholic ancestry.

 

 The family in partnership with Jewish traders and merchants ran Jamaica as a major smuggling port. This was revealed in 1568 when the Crown accused the current heir, Don Luis Colon, of “blocking an investigation into charges [he] used his private jurisdiction on Jamaica to cover illegal trade.” This violated Spain’s trade policy that required all goods to and from the New World to go via Seville.

 

Given that the Columbus family owned every inch of the island, Jamaica attracted few

Spanish settlers. No matter how prosperous they were, Spanish ranchers were little more than legalized squatters. To gain title to their estates, they needed the king to reclaim the island. Their means was the Inquisition. If they could expose Jamaica as a heretic island, it would give the Crown a reason to oust the Columbus family. In 1654, the opportunity arose when a Dutch ship carrying Jewish and Calvinist refugees from Brazil (after Portugal re-conquered the colony), was blown off course and forced to land in Jamaica. Local hidalgos thereupon invited Inquisitors from Columbia to investigate these “suspect heretics.” Jamaica’s covert Jews, fearing the inquiry could lead to their own exposure, sent a note to Oliver Cromwell’s agent: Jamaica could be conquered

with little resistance, and pledged their assistance.

 

The following year, a Jewish pilot led 36 English ships into the harbor, and two local

Portugals negotiated the treaty that surrendered the island. The Spanish were exiled, and Cromwell invited the Portugals to stay on as openly practicing Jews. Welcomed by the English, covert Jews throughout the New World shed their Christian cloaks and immigrated to Jamaica.

 

Until the 19th century, when its role as sanctuary was supplanted by the land of the free and home of the brave, Columbus’ island served as the principal haven for Jews in the New World.

 

In September, America’s Jews celebrated their New Year in freedom, thanks in part to the Discoverer and his family’s mitzvah in providing a sanctuary in Jamaica for Jews on the run from the Inquisition.

 

Author's note: Ed Kritzler, author “Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean” (Doubleday 2008), lives in Jamaica where he researched the island’s extraordinary Jewish history. He may be contacted asedkritzler@...

 

See you at our next meeting, Sunday morning, Dec. 20.

You won't want to miss Jim Van Buskirk's personal story, "My Grandmother's Suitcase," that is our program this Sunday.

 

Join us at 10 a.m. on November 15th at the Albert Einstein Residence Center.  It's also a chance to take advantage of our extensive genealogy library.

Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento

Sunday, November 15, 2009, 10 a.m.  Albert Einstein Residence Center.

“My Grandmother’s Suitcase: Unpacking Generations of Secrecy”

 

Jim Van Buskirk of the Bay Area will be the November speaker. Shortly after publishing an essay exploring his mysterious lifelong attraction to Judaism, Jim was told a secret by his mother: “You are Jewish.”  She showed him his grandmother’s suitcase filled with photos, letters and documents.  Jim continued to look for answers to his family’s history.  His audio-visual presentation is adapted from his memoir-in-progress.

 

After working as program manager of the Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library for 15 years, Jim is currently Book Group Coordinator at the Jewish Community Library. Jim's essays have been featured in various books, newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts and Web sites and he is working on a full-length manuscript of his family memoir.  Jim has co-authored "Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area" and "Celluloid San Francisco: The Film Lover¹s Guide to Bay Area Movie Locations." 

 

Join us next Sunday to hear Jim's presentation.
 

 

From the Nov. 1 Avotaynu E-Zine by Gary Mokotoff

Arthur Kurzweil To Be “Genealogist in Residence” at Annual Conference
Arthur Kurzweil, author of the pioneering book on getting started in Jewish genealogy, From Generation to Generation, has been designated “Genealogist in Residence” for the 30th annual International Conference on Jewish Genealogy to be held in July 2010 in Los Angeles. Kurzweil will give two hands-on workshops, “Climbing Your Jewish Family Tree” and “Holocaust Research: How and Why to Locate Information about What Happened to Your Family during the Holocaust.” He is an amateur magician and will perform his show “Searching for God in a Magic Shop.”

You can sign up for the Los Angeles conference newsletter at http://www.jgsla2010.com/about/sign-up-for-the-announcements-newsletter/. There is also a conference blog at http://www.jgsla2010.com/blog/2009/10/conference-firsts-from-iajgs-2010-conference-central/.

 
Trip to the Candy Store – Reflections by Gary Mokotoff

I just returned from my annual trip to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, the place I affectionately call the “candy store” because of all the genealogical goodies that are in the Library. This year, researchers in the group came from Australia, Canada, United States and Venezuela. The most significant discovery was by a regular on these trips, Ignacio Sternberg of Caracas, who found his parents’ marriage record in the Jewish records of Chernowitz (now Chernevtsy, Ukraine).

For those readers familiar with the Library, they have replaced their microfilm printers with a computer network based system that uses scanners. Images can now be saved directly to a flash drive or printed. Copying to a flash drive is free and printed copies of the documents cost only five cents (10 cents for 11x14 copies). Previously they cost 23 cents. A 2GB flash drive can be purchased at the Library for only $9.00. The network system also supports printing from the Internet be it genealogically relevant material, e-mail or boarding passes.

David Lebovitz of Chicago, another veteran of the annual trips made by Eileen Polakoff and me each October, shared with the attendees the advantages of keyword searches using Ancestry.com. Some of the data fields provided by Ancestry results are not part of the search parameters. Using the keyword option causes any data field for the keyword. Lebovitz used it to search the U.S. Immigration Collection to locate any immigrant from one of his ancestral towns.

 

I took advantage of the Footnote.com site to copy naturalization records for a number of people in my family history. Rather than print them, I copied them to a flash drive (and backed up the data on the laptop I brought along). For someone who claims his “genealogy is done,” I came home with 37 documents, mostly from Footnote.com.

Next year’s trip will be from October 14–21, 2010. Eileen Polakoff and I act as consultants, lecturers and social event planners. Additional information about the trip can be found at http://www.avotaynu.com/slctrip.htm.

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See you next Sunday the 15th!

 

October 29, 2009

 

Upcoming Meetings:

Sunday, November 15, 10 a.m. – Jim Van Buskirk, “My Grandmother’s Suitcase”

Sunday, December 20, 10 a.m. – Ron Arons, “Mapping Madness”

 

October 18, 2009 Meeting

The meeting was called to order by President Mort Rumberg.  He talked briefly about our upcoming meeting schedule, which inlcudes a presentation on “My Grandmother’s Suitcase” by Jim Van Buskirk on Sunday, November 15 and a program on “Mapping Madness” by Ron Arons on Sunday, December 20.

The 30th annual International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies conference is set for July 11-16, 2010 in Los Angeles.  A  Web site is now established for the conference: www.jgsla2010.com .

The Sacramento Regional Family History Seminar will be held Saturday, November 7 from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the LDS Library on Eastern Avenue.

Member Allan Dolgow is not here today because he’s presenting his talk on his trip to the Ukraine to the Bay Area JGS.  Mort mentioned that his talk to us generated considerable e-mails interested in his presentation.

From Treasurer Allan Bonderoff, our current account  balance: $1,217.39.  Your dues allow us to buy selected books for our library, offer small travel honorariums to our speakers, and more.

 

October Program

Our speaker for October was Dr. Roy Ogus, whose topic was Jewish Genealogical Research in South Africa.

Roy is vice-president of the Southern African Jewish Genealogical SIG (Special Interest Group) on the JewishGen Web site.  He was born in South Africa and has lived in the Bay Area since the 1970s.  Note that it is the Southern African SIG he’s involved with, taking in more countries than just South Africa.

Roy said his parents were born in South Africa but his grandparents emigrated there from Lithuania around the turn of the 20th century.

He began his talk with an overview of South Africa, which is about three times the size of California.  The population is about 47.3 million.  There are three capitals, one each for the legislative (Cape Town), executive (Pretoria) and judicial branches (Bloemfontein).

Until about 1850, the economy of the country was largely based on livestock and crops.  However, in the late 1800s, diamonds and gold were discovered “and it completely changed the country,” Roy said. “Mining became the basis of the economy.”

In 1820 the first British settlers came to South Africa, about 150 years after the Dutch.  The British abolished slavery which made the farmers irate.

In 1910 the colonies became self-governing (Union of South Africa) but part of the British Empire.

In 1948 the Afrikaner party wins the general election and apartheid begins.

 

Jewish Migration to South Africa

Roy gave us an historical overview that began in about 1652 when Jews were among the Dutch settlers, but were forced to convert to Christianity.

In 1820, there were 16 Jews recorded among the British settlers, and in 1841, the first Jewish congregation in Cape Town was founded by the British Jews.  By 1880, there were about 4000 Jews in the country.

Then came “Wave 1” of the Jewish migration, Roy said.  Between 1880 and 1910, a large number came from Lithuania.  The push to emigrate came from pogroms, catastrophes while the pull was the financial opportunity.

Then a chain reaction helped -- with family members already there, more emigrated from Lithuania.  By 1911, there were 47,000 Jews, mostly Lithuanians, in South Africa.

Why Lithuanians?  There was easy access to shipping companies, who had already set up trips for Cornish miners. Lithuanians had access to all-weather ports such as Libau. Some of the Lithuanians basically tried to recreate their shtetls in South Africa.

According to records of the Poor Jews Temporary Shelter in London, 40 percent of their clientele went to Africa, and of that 40 percent, 90 percent were from Lithuania.

“Wave 2” of emigration to South Africa occurred in the 1920s. And before the Holocaust, about 8,000 Jews from Germany came to South Africa.

From 1970-1992 there was the opposite trend, and an exodus of Jews leaving South Africa, many for political reasons.  The current Jewish population is about 72,000 and is pretty homogenous, Roy said, predominantly Lithuanian.  “It’s overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, with a low level of intermarriage.”  About 80 percent are Orthodox, with a Jewish Board of Deputies overseeing the congregations.

Southern African SIG on JewishGen: Roy is the vice-president of the SIG and said this site should be the first step for someone doing research.  There is a discussion forum and a newsletter as well as Web pages.

Other sources of genealogical information include the South African National Archives, with many records kept in the provincial archives.  “I’ve never visited the archives in South Africa but put together my complete family history,” Roy said.

There is also the South African Office of Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths, the Master of the Supreme Court, and “a wealth of records” on microfilm in the LDS Library.

For Jewish South African records, the Kaplan Center for Jewish Migration and Genealogical Studies at the University of Cape Town has a Jewish Rootsbank database. The South African Board of Deputies has burial records and there are 2-3 Jewish Genealogy historical socieites.

Estate documents -- Roy said these are valuable documents, “they can be unbelievably rich in information.”

He said census documents do not exist in South Africa-- they are routinely destroyed. “It’s one of the few countries in the world that without census documents.”

Roy showed some of the documents he has been able to gather, including naturalization and estate documents.  He also had a “complaint” document by one of his relatives against his landlord.  “It’s not genealogical but it does show the texture of their lives,” he said.

In order to obtain information from some agencies, such as the Registrar of Births, Marriages, and Deaths, “it’s a Catch-22 -- you almost need all the information from the recrod to get the record,” he said.

In terms of death certificates vs. death notices, he said the death notices have more information.

Roy wrote a paper on the LDS records for South Africa which include relevant film numbers and information on estate documents up to 1950, death certificates and burial information. The article will soon be posted on the Southern Africa SIG.

Roy can be reached by e-mail at r_ogus@...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From the JGS of the Conejo Valley (Ventura County) newsletter:

Vintage New York  --   An excellent compilation of vintage photos of New York City dating back to the late 19th century can be found at http://tinyurl.com/ygh9r5d.  Expect to find an uncommon blend of artistic photography, traditional snapshots and historical perspective.

From Family Tree Magazine  -- Family Tree Magazine has compiled the 10 best genealogy websites in each of 10 different categories –and one more for good luck. See if you agree at http://tinyurl.com/yhnk9b7

101 Best Web Sites 2009

By David A. Fryxell  9/30/2009

If our ancestors had swung down from the trees with six fingers on each hand, we'd probably be counting by dozens. But thanks to humanity's development of 10 fingers and 10 toes, we count things in 10s, group the years in decades and celebrate anniversaries ending in 0—such as this 10th annual  installment of Family Tree Magazine's 101 Best Web Sites.

 What's the one Web resource in a class by itself? Ancestry.com $$, of course. What can we say? With its ever-expanding collection of databases and globe-spanning country-specific sites, Ancestry.com comes the closest to realizing the dream of doing real genealogy online—not just finding a few clues, but tracing your ancestors in primary sources. The complete US census, indexed, searchable and linked to images, is only the beginning here. An annual membership is $155.40 for US collections only, or $299.40 for the World Deluxe membership.

10 Best Web Sites to See Dead People

Use these sites to find obituaries, cemeteries and other traces of your departed ancestors.

10 Best Web Sites for Vital Records

These are the best searchable databases of vital records from health departments, historical societies and state archives.

10 Best Web Sites for Storing and Sharing

Sharing your family history just got easier with these Web sites that let you create a family tree, store pictures and more.

10 Best Big Web Sites

You're sure to find information about your family in these stellar genealogy Web sites.

10 Best Web Sites for Maps

Trace your family's paths, find your ancestors' homes and explore the old country.

10 Best Web Sites for Local Searches

You can thank your lucky stars if your ancestors resided in the areas these Web sites cover.

10 Best Web Sites for International Searches

Tracking down immigrant ancestors has never been easier.

10 Best Cutting-edge Web Sites

Stay informed about the latest technology for genealogists with these sites.

10 Best Web Sites for Military Research

Find ancestors who served their country in these databases.

10 Best Virtual Library Web Sites

Powerful search tools let you explore great library collections in the comfort of your own home.

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Scientist works with stem cells during day, solves Jewish genealogy riddles in spare time

 

Dr. Karl Skorecki works on the cutting edge of molecular science, revolutionizing medicine through genetics and the use of stem cells to test anti-cancer therapies.

But as a sideline, the former University of Toronto professor has become world famous for applying genetics to genealogy and transforming history. He has found evidence to support traditional claims that modern-day Jewish priests, Cohanim, are descended from a single common male ancestor - biblically said to be Aaron, the older brother of Moses.

Among the other intriguing findings he has uncovered: that 40% of Ashkenazi Jews can trace their descent to four "founding mothers" who lived in Europe 1,000 years ago, evidence that all Jewish communities share a common paternal origin in the Near East, and genetic evidence supporting claims southern Africa's Lemba tribe may be Africa's "Black Jews."

"It began as a hobby, but it took on a life of its own," Dr. Skorecki says. "I didn't think anyone would really be that interested. I'm a nephrologist and a physician but I've always been interested in the genetic predisposition to disease."

Fifteen years ago, as he attended Shabbat services at his Toronto synagogue, Dr. Skorecki says his mind wandered during the reading of the Torah.

"A Cohen [Jewish priest] of North African, Sephardic, non-Ashkanazi origin was called up to read the Torah and it just got me to thinking what we have in common," he says.

"I myself am also a Cohen, but of recent European ancestry. It struck me as interesting that, on one hand, our paternal genealogies have been geographically separated for at least a thousand years. Yet, on the other hand, we share a Biblical oral tradition of common male ancestry dating back more than 100 generations."

According to tradition, the status of priest (Cohen) was conferred on Aaron and his sons, and has been passed on from father to son ever since the Exodus from Egypt.

As he sat in his Toronto synagogue, Dr. Skorecki says, "I realized if that were true, then it was a scientific hypothesis that was testable."

He reasoned the Cohanim should all have a common set of genetic markers at a higher frequency than the general Jewish population. After consulting Dr. Michael Hammer, a geneticist at the University of Arizona and a pioneer in studying the Y chromosome, the two men developed an experiment to test his thesis.

Besides determining maleness, the Y chromosome consists almost entirely of non-coding DNA, which is passed from father to son without recombination. Therefore the genetic information on a Y chromosome of a man living today is basically the same as that of his ancient male ancestors, with rare mutations that occur along hereditary lines.

By tracking those neutral mutations or genetic markers scientists can come up with the genetic signature of a man's male ancestry.

Dr. Skorecki's test found an array of six common chromosomal markers in 97 of the 106 Cohens he tested. Calculations based on variations of the mutations rooted the men's shared ancestry 106 generations in the past - 3,300 years ago, or the approximate time of Exodus.

He also discovered the common set of genetic markers in both Ashkenazi (European) and Sephardic (North African) Cohens, indicating they shared the same ancestry before their communities were separated more than 1,000 years ago.

"It's amazing," Dr. Skorecki says. "It's like an archeological finding. But instead of digging up in the sand, we dig in contemporary DNA."

His findings triggered a storm of interest in Jewish genealogy and the application of DNA analysis to the study of history.

The only child of Holocaust survivors, Dr. Skorecki was born and raised in Toronto. He took his medical degree at the University of Toronto, where he taught for 11 years before moving to Israel in 1995.

He is now director of the Rappaport Family Institute for Research in Medical Sciences and a researcher at the Rambam-Technion University Medical Center in Haifa, Israel's largest medical centre. After moving to Israel, Dr. Skorecki continued to dabble in genetic genealogy and conducted studies that suggest there is genetic evidence to support a common paternal origin for all Jewish communities.

In yet another study, Dr. Skorecki discovered an unusual genetic signature, thought to have originated in Central Asia, in more than half the Levites of Ashkenazi descent.

"They seem to be the descendants of one man who lived about 1,000 years ago somewhere between the Caspian and the Black Sea," he says. "Whether his ancestors originated there or he migrated from the Near East is unclear. We can't tell. But that is also the time and location of the mythical Khazar kingdom."

Dr. Skorecki says one of the most surprising discoveries of his genetic analysis of Jewish genealogy involves claims by the Lemba tribe of southern Africa to have Jewish origins.

The Bantu-speaking tribe of roughly 70,000, now mostly Christians, are spread across South Africa, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. But the tribe's oral history claims Jewish ancestry, saying their founding fathers were Jews, led by a man named "Buba" who sailed to East Africa.

Unlike any of their surrounding neighbours, the Lemba observe many Jewish traditions, such as kosher-like dietary restrictions and slaughter practices, male circumcision and one holy day a week.

"Most historians were skeptical," Dr. Skorecki says. "But the genetic evidence is one of the most surprising stories we've encountered.

It is not clear whether the genetic origin was Jewish or Arab or a mixture. But a strikingly high number of Lemba males also carry the same genetic signature markers Dr. Skorecki discovered in modern-day Jewish Cohanim.

More remains to be done, but Dr. Skorecki is convinced genetic research is a powerful tool for historical study.

"It's not perfect. It's not physics. But it is not less reliable than lets say fossil records, archaeology, liturgy or oral histories," he says. "In the larger context it adds further insight."

National Post/ pgoodspeed@...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

 

Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento

 

Sunday, October 18, 2009, 10 a.m.  -- Jewish Genealogical Research in South Africa  --Albert Einstein Residence Center, 1935 Wright Street, Sacramento

 

Roy Ogus will be the October speaker for the Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento. 

Roy is vice-president of the Southern African Jewish Genealogical SIG (Special Interest Group) on the JewishGen Web site.  He was born in South Africa and has lived in the Bay Area since the 1970s.

 --------------

 

From the Oct. 13 Avotaynu E-zine:

IIJG Announces Latest Grants

The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy has award two additional grants for research associated with genealogy; one for Latvian research and the other for Hungarian Research.

The first proposal is entitled “A Systematic Study of the Riga House Registers as a Source for Jewish Genealogy in Pre-War Latvia.” It will result in a detailed database of the 20–21,000 Jews living in Riga in the inter-war period.

The second project is entitled “Communal Protocols and the Daily Life of Hungarian Jews - Proposal for a New [Genealogical] Research Tool”. Its central aim is the creation of a database of mini-biographies of Jews who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries in three major Hungarian Jewish communities—Pest, Óbuda, and Miskolc

The IIJG Web site is at http://www.iijg.org.


Museum of Family History
I (Gary Mokotoff) have not visited Steve Lasky’s Museum of Family History at http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/ for some time. It had always contained a wealth of useful exhibits that are ancillary to Jewish genealogical research. One reason I avoided it is that it was not well organized—even though it had good information—and I found I was using the site map rather than links.

This is a thing of the past. The Museum of Family History site now has a very slick design. In fact, Lasky has taken the title of his site seriously and had created a virtual museum complete with floors, theaters, dining facilities and a bookstore. If a new visitor did not catch on that the Museum exists only on the Internet, I am sure Lasky would get e-mail questioning where the facility is located and what are its hours.

Many complex Internet sites have a site map. Lasky calls it a floor plan.  Visit a floor plan (site map) and you can click on the link to any of the exhibits on the virtual floor. For example, on the extreme left of the Main Floor plan are the country exhibits: Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Scandinavia, Spain and Ukraine. In the center of the main floor is the Family History Theater which links to audio/visual presentations at the site.

On the more serious side are the wealth of exhibits: visual, audio and video. Here are some of the recent additions to the site:
   • Shabbat and the Jewish Holidays
   • Castle Garden and Ellis Island: Ports of Immigration
   • Philanthropy: Jewish Hospitals and Societies which Cared for the Needy in New York City (1902)
   • Screening Room: Film clip no. 21: “A Great Day on Eldridge Street” Klezmer celebration on the Lower East Side
   • Photographic Studios of Europe

In the Educational Research section are items that are more pertinent to genealogy: Cemetery Project, Map Room of Eastern Europe, Synagogues of New York City and Genealogy and Family History. Visit the Museum of Family History. Lasky provides a monthly update of new items on the JewishGen Discussion Groups.

Ancestry.com Offers Webinars
Ancestry.com has a number of webinars (web-based seminars) that can be viewed at no cost. The list can be found at http://learn.ancestry.com/LearnMore/Webinars.aspx. A sample of some topics that might be of interest include:
   • Genealogy in Gotham: New York City Research
   • The Canadian Historical Censuses, 1851–1916
   • European Research: Tips and Tools for Success,
   • Genetic Genealogy Made Easy
   • Planning a Perfect Family Reunion


Philadelphia Conference Session Recordings Available
All the sessions recorded at the 29th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy (Philadelphia, August 2–7, 2009) are available for purchase online or on CD. Only those sessions where the presenter gave approval for the recording are included. You can order a set for the whole conference, specific days or individual sessions. The cost appears to be $14 per session. To order online, go to http://www.softconference.com/IAJGS/slist.asp?C=3086. To order by phone, call (314) 487-0135.


Reminder: Footnote.com Holocaust Collection Accessible at No Cost in October
Footnote.com and the U.S. National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) have announced the availability of more than one million Holocaust-related documents and an index at the Footnote.com site. For the month of October 2009 the records are available at no charge.

NARA records at the site include:
   • Concentration camp registers and documents from Dachau, Mauthausen and Flossenburg.
   • The Ardelia Hall Collection of records relating to the Nazi looting of Jewish possessions, including looted art.
   • Captured German records including deportation and death lists from concentration camps.
   • Nuremberg War Crimes Trial proceedings.
Also included are nearly 600 interactive personal accounts of those who survived or perished in the Holocaust provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

See you Sunday morning!

Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento

Sunday, October 18, 2009, 10 a.m.  -- Jewish Genealogical Research in South

Africa  --Albert Einstein Residence Center, 1935 Wright Street, Sacramento

 

Roy Ogus will be the October speaker for the Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento. 

Roy is vice-president of the Southern African Jewish Genealogical SIG (Special Interest Group) on the JewishGen Web site.  He was born in South Africa and has lived in the Bay Area since the 1970s.

 

The South African Jewish community is a large one, and while we may not know it, many of us may have South African connections through ancestors who may have emigrated there.  During the great wave of emigration from Eastern Europe (1881-1930s), many Jews, especially Lithuanians, left for the economic opportunity and freedom of South Africa.  Following the recent emigration of many South African Jews during periods of political unrest in the country, the end of apartheid in 1994 has revitalized our cousins’ homeland.
 
Roy’s presentation will summarize key sources of documentation and genealogical information of genealogical value in South Africa, and how these materials can be accessed and researched.  He’ll also provide an overview of South African history as a backdrop for the discussion of Jewish migration to that remote area.

 

All are welcome to attend the Sunday, October 18, 10 a.m. meeting.  It's also an opportunity to make use of our extensive genealogy library.

 

 

And from today’s Washington Post ..  where Al Franken, Tom Friedman and the Coen Brothers grew up…

 

My Dad Takes The Coen Bros. Back to Shul

By Neal Karlen
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, October 11, 2009

 

Fyvush Finkel, a venerable star of Yiddish theatrical melodrama, was expecting Joel and Ethan Coen to feed him nothing but juicy lines for their new film, "A Serious Man." Yet he felt they'd given him dreck. So Finkel, 86, did the heretofore unthinkable: He kibitzed the Coens on-set, and then, unbidden, rewrote 10 pages of the latest of their always-inviolable scripts.

 

It was 2008, and the brothers were filming in their home town of St. Louis Park, a Minneapolis suburb that would serve as the backdrop for "A Serious Man," their latest cinematic ode to tragicomic weirdness, this time grounded in their Jewish upbringing. As Joel later explained, it's a picture "filmed in the context our own youth in St. Louis Park, but with a made-up story."

 

Personally, however, nothing in their brilliant oeuvre could top the weirdness of Joel Coen phoning my 83-year-old father at home for a reason also never before thought possible: The sibling auteurs wanted an outsider's opinion on one of their scripts, specifically the 10 pages Finkel found so noxious.

 

Joel heard through the St. Louis Park grapevine that my father, Markle, was the most vital and fluent member of the local Jewish Community Center's Yiddish club. Dad, a widower, had recently hooked up with an 84-year-old friend, Roz Baker, who'd invested $500 in "Blood Simple," the Coens' first film, and was still receiving small royalty checks. Her son, David Amdur, one of the Coens' best friends since junior high school, told Joel that the most proficient local source was my father. Roz agreed.

 

If you're getting the sense that it's a small world in the Coens' home town, you'd be right. And such a prolific town it is in terms of Jewish achievers: Among St. Louis Park's roughly 10,000 Jews circa 1967 (when the new film is set) were near or actual teenagers Allen Franken, who went from "Saturday Night Live" to the U.S. Senate; Tommie Friedman, who alchemized into the celebrated New York Times columnist and author; Norm Ornstein, perhaps Washington's smartest political polymath; and of course "Joe" and "Eth" Coen, who vow to spend the rest of their lives collaborating, because, as Ethan said the other day, "two heads are better than none."

 

Oh, and now my father, the brothers' octogenarian script adviser. When Joel Coen gave my pop a call, he politely asked if Dad would compare for accuracy, tone and narrative flow their own 10-page prologue, written in Yiddish with English subtitles, against Fyvush's scribbled rewrite. Joel and my father talked for about 10 minutes about linguistic nuance; the essence of 19th century Jewish Eastern Europe; and Fyvush vs. the Coens. Joel immediately dispatched two versions of the script for exegesis.

 

In "A Serious Man," Finkel plays Reb Groshkover, a mysterious sage. During the film's opening scene -- which has no linear connection to the rest of the movie -- he wanders inside a rickety, 19th-century shtetl lean-to, inhabited by a peasant couple. Some crazy stuff ensues. Turns out the Reb may or may not be a dybbuk, a mischievous Jewish specter.

 

Two days later, Dad dialed one of filmdom's most guarded private numbers. "Joel, the first version wasn't bad," he said, "but the second one was pure dreck." My father waved his hand in the universal language of "Feh!" (The brothers' script was the first version, though my father was unaware of which was whose.)

 

And the story?

 

"Ach," Pop said, "It's the usual shtetl shtick. A woodchopper. A poor old woman. A dybbuk. Who needs it."

 

Hey, what about me? The Coens were my favorite local heroes. I'd seen their films more than 100 times (granted, 36 viewings were "The Big Lebowski"), while my father had never seen a single one, and even turned down a chance to invest a few hundred bucks in "Blood Simple" back in the mid-1980s. ("Meshugas," he still says.)

 

I was the guy in the family who made a living sweating out narrative arcs. Before he retired from medical practice, Markle Karlen had been a people doctor, not a script doctor. But at that point, unlike virtually everyone I've ever known from St. Louis Park, I had never laid eyes on the Coen brothers in my entire 48 years. I was a few years younger (Ethan is 52; Joel 54), but we'd all gone through the same public and Hebrew school systems, had our bar mitzvahs at the same synagogue, and had recently spent time quizzing my father.

 

Watching the movie the day it opened in Minneapolis -- there were lines around the block -- was a lot like going home (then again, I live seven minutes away from St. Louis Park). It tells the tale of beleaguered and a cuckolded physics professor named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), who attempts to divine the existential meaning of his disintegrating life in St. Louis Park from three incomprehensible rabbis.

 

Gopnik lives with his family -- adulterous wife Judith, pot-smoking son Danny and bohemian daughter Sarah -- on a street called Fern Hill. That was the name of my elementary school.

 

"Mr. Turchick," the Hebrew School principal Danny Gopnik was sent to after listening to his transistor radio with an earplug during his lessons, was the same Mr. Turchick I was condemned to see after I'd committed the exact same crime.

 

My first girlfriend was seventh-grade femme fatale Kori Samsky, who introduced me to the French kiss; Professor Gopnik's femme fatale next-door neighbor is Mrs. Samsky, who introduced him to infidelity. (The Coens were friends with Kori Samsky's older brother. You follow?)

 

Built-In Irony

 

The Coens didn't need to inject their usual surreal sense of character and space into this paean to their youth: Jews on the prairie is seemingly enough of a bizarre incongruity. Growing up in St. Louis Park, however, is not an exercise in Lake Wobegon-goes-to-Hebrew School.

 

Although roughly 20 percent of the suburb's residents are actually Jewish, the image of a gilded ghetto remains indelible in a state where only 42,000 Jews (29,000 in Minneapolis) dwell amid 5.2 million people. And despite Minnesota's progressive tradition, Midwest populism has historically carried a troublesome whiff of anti-Semitism. (In 1946, Carey McWilliams, editor of the Nation, wrote, "Minneapolis is the capitol of anti-Semitism in the United States.") As late as the 1990s, bagels were being thrown onto the rink when St. Louis Park's high school hockey team took the ice at away games.

 

Though anti-Semitism has eased over the years, a unique kind of Jew evolved in this atmosphere. This fact was of supreme importance to the Coens when casting their film. "Jews in the Midwest just sounds abnormal," Ethan says. "We were determined to use as many local Jews as we could instead of resorting to the usual Hollywood ethnic type. We wanted to communicate that there are Jews on the Plains. It is a subculture, and a feeling, that is different from Jewish communities in New York or Los Angeles."

 

That unique "feeling" is perhaps one reason St. Louis Park's most famous natives almost always come back. Al Franken came home to Minnesota to challenge a coreligionist, Brooklyn-bred Republican incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman. During the campaign, Franken liked to point out that "I'm the Jew who was actually raised in Minnesota."

 

Days after Franken announced his candidacy in 2007, his first large rally was held in the gym of St. Louis Park Junior High School. Dave Griffin, Franken's close friend since they met in the school's halls in 1963, introduced him with details of his old pal's run for seventh-grade class president. Franken won in a walk, with posters of him wearing a beard and a stovepipe hat atop the words "Vote for Honest Al."

Decades later, during the bruising Franken-Coleman battle, one of the only genuinely sweet moments was a commercial featuring Val Molin, Franken's fourth-grade teacher at St. Louis Park's Cedar Manor Elementary School.

 

Mrs. Molin filmed a spot for "Allen" in her natural "yer darn tootin' " accent, seemingly imported straight from the Coen brothers' "Fargo." The popular ad helped make the point that Franken was no New York carpetbagger.

 

Today, from his Senate office, he can tick off all his elementary school teachers with the rapidity of a Henny Youngman routine, minus any jokes. "Miss Jackson, first grade. Mrs. Morrison, second grade. Miss Bullock, third. Mrs. Molin, fourth. Mrs. Lungabaugh, fifth. Mr. Knudsen, sixth."

 

Thomas L. Friedman's timbre, meantime, turns from sober triple Pulitzer Prize winner to chairman of the St. Louis Park Chamber of Commerce when asked about his memories. "You can never go home again," he says, "unless you're from St. Louis Park."

 

His first bylines came as a junior on the high school newspaper. Among those stories was an interview with Ariel Sharon, who'd given a speech in Minneapolis. "My whole identity is St. Louis Park," he says, adding that the death of high school classmate Judy Bernstein on American Airlines Flight 11 on Sept. 11 "has partially informed my opinions of terrorism."

 

Friedman thinks there is a sui generis atmosphere to his home town that resulted in such an eruption of talent. "It was the mystery of a moment," he says. "It was this stew of a cosmopolitan community that had the tremendous stability of 'Leave It to Beaver.' We had a creative Jewish community mixed together during a progressive moment in politics when Minnesota meant Walter Mondale, Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey."

 

Friedman, who commands five figures per lecture on the Chautauqua circuit, has spoken gratis in St. Louis Park several times, helping to raise $350,000 for a local Jewish nursing home and $1 million for combatant casualties in Minnesota, among other causes.

 

He also spent his 50th birthday in Las Vegas with his best friends -- the same guys with whom he played cards during junior high school. Norman Ornstein, the political quote machine based at the American Enterprise Institute, also says he still considers St. Louis Park his home. The suburb's fame quotient might stem from its "warm environment for creativity," he speculates. "Conformity isn't valued in St. Louis Park. Great value was put on education, an offbeat sense of humor, and looking outside of ourselves to the rest of the world."

 

Interconnections to home often seem to entail zero degrees of separation. Ornstein once went on a date with Friedman's sister, and he gave Franken his guest bedroom while the neonatal senator looked for Washington lodgings. Friedman, Franken and Ornstein all angled for parts in the picture, but the scheduling didn't work out. The Coens, meantime, owe their career to contacts and introductions made in St. Louis Park with several dozen friends and acquaintances; friends of friends; and acquaintances of acquaintances of their parents and neighbors from childhood.

 

In junior high school, Joel made enough money mowing neighbors' lawns to buy a Vivitar Super 8 camera. The brothers' first movie was a remake of Cornell Wilde's "The Naked Prey," which they renamed "Zeimers in Zambezi." Later, although still not shaving regularly, the Coens were soon making three-to-five-minute films with titles like "Henry Kissinger -- Man on the Go." "Ed . . . a Dog" was their remake of "Lassie Come Home."

 

"Blood Simple" was financed via Joel giving a story pitch in hundreds of St. Louis Park living rooms, showing a two-minute film clip to shake loose $500 to $5,000 from potential investors.

 

For a quarter-century, the Coens were my Loch Ness Monsters, my Moby-Dicks. The only bumper sticker I'd ever put on my car bore the keynote line of "The Big Lebowski": "The Dude Abides." So, last year, I decided, the time to cross paths had finally come. I would try out to be an extra in "A Serious Man," and somehow meet the men who'd long served as living proof that just because you came from Minnesota didn't mean you had to end up as a citizen of Garrison Keillor's state-of-mind, which is apparently composed entirely of village idiots.

 

The casting company instructions: "PHYSICAL LOOK: Specific characteristics represent 1967 . . . ASM is not a 'glamorous' film. WE LOVE INTERESTING FACES. The dorkier, the better!"

I could do this. I could do "dorkier." Tryouts were held in a nondescript building west of St. Louis Park. I went into a small room filled with nine other hopefuls, and a woman with a Polaroid took a group shot. I faced forward, snap. I turned to the side, snap. I turned to the door, please leave.

 

Rejected, I drove home, passing St. Louis Park High School. Despite my geographic pedigree, I would never be a Franken, an Ornstein, a Thomas L. Friedman, or even see from afar the Coen brothers. They would remain as ethereal and frightening as dybbuks, a pair of ghosts.

 

Then I got this assignment, and weaseled my way into an evening with the Coens at Minneapolis's Walker Art Center a couple of weeks ago. It was a fundraising event reserved for the museums' best-heeled patrons. Most major donors seemed to have given their tickets to their Richie Rich children; the audience seemed filled with postmodern cinema hipsters straight out of "Sprockets," Mike Myers's "Saturday Night Live" bit.

 

Over the years, the Coens had blown me off at the last second for two interviews. I'd been treated like dog-dirt at tryouts for extras. And now, as their talk concluded, I was being warned by a supercilious film company minion to stay far away. (Evidently he'd been tasked with protecting the Coens from human beings unworthy to grasp at their jacket sleeves.)

 

Panicking, I performed a one-man Green Bay Packers-style sweep, and came within inches of running into Ethan's rear-end. Ethan, unperturbed, turned toward me, and I began babbling names we both knew at the speed of one of their favorite actors, Steve Buscemi.

 

Ethan shook my hand, apologized about the missed interview, and amiably chatted about life, movies, home. He also asked me to pass along greetings to mutual friends he wouldn't have time to call during this brief trip.

 

"Go say hi to Joel," he said, as the studio nabob looked on as if he needed a Valium the size of a pizza.

The elder Coen laughed, remembering my father's career as his script doctor. He too chatted warmly. "Say hi to your pop and Roz," he said.

 

"Did I do something terrible talking to you?" I asked Ethan, who'd circled back, seemingly trying to avoid the "Sprockets" crowd.

 

"No!" he exclaimed. "It's nice just to talk. And can you tell David [Amdur, Roz's son] I'm sorry we can't come over for dinner this trip?"

 

Dybbuks? Feh. Turns out they were just a couple of mensches from the old neighborhood.

 

Neal Karlen's most recent book is "The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews."

Q: Previously I had a Dell and Windows and used Family Tree Maker for genealogy records. Now that I'm an Apple owner, I find that Family Tree Maker does not work on an Apple, only Windows. What can I do about this?

A: It seems to me that you have three obvious options. If you still have your old Dell, you could crank it up again just for the purpose of running Family Tree Maker. Or, you could buy a boxed copy of Windows and install it on your Mac, which is fully capable of running Windows and Windows programs (assuming it’s an Intel-based Mac). Finally, you could switch to one of the native Mac-based genealogy programs and import your data from Family Tree Maker via the standard GEDCOM file format used in genealogy. One such program, called Reunion, includes specific instructions on importing data from Family Tree Maker on its “Top 10 Questions” page, at leisterpro.com.

—You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the new All Things Digital web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.  Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@...

30th IAJGS International Conference Now Has Web Site
The Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles, host of the 30th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, has established a conference website at http://www.jgsla2010.com. The event will be held from July 11–16, 2010, at the JW Marriott Hotel at L.A. Live. L.A. Live is a new downtown Los Angeles entertainment and cultural complex.

The Call for Papers will begin on November 15, 2009, and close on January 15, 2010. Persons who would like to lecture can see a list of possible presentation categories at http://www.jgsla2010.com/conference-program/
 

JewishGen Offering “Build Your Owen ShtetLinks Page” Course
Interested in creating a website for your ancestral town but don’t know how to do it? JewishGen is offering a course on "How to Make Shtetlinks Web Pages" to begin October 15. It is a six-week course where you will learn how to create web pages for ShtetLinks. JewishGen provides a free, downloadable, simple-to-use web page editor that runs on both PCs and=2 0Macs. They claim that only basic computer skills are need to develop a ShtetLinks site. Cost for the course is $36. Additional information is available at http://www.JewishGen.org/education..

NewsLibrary.com
A news clipping service at http://NewsLibrary.com claims to have online 182 million newspaper articles published in the U.S. At no charge, they provide approximately the first 7520words or the article; for $5.95 the entire article will be provided. A one-month membership is $19.95. There are 81 articles that include “Gary Mokotoff” and 266 articles that name any person named Mokotoff (all Mokotoffs in the U.S. are related to me).


GuyShachar.com
Guy Shachar, an Israeli photographer and traveler, has created a number of PowerPoint presentations of European synagogues at http://guyshachar.com. Click the word “English” in the upper left corner to view an English-language version of his site. The synagogue presentations are at
http://www.guyshachar.com/Synagogues_of_Slovakia_GuyShachar.pps
http://www.guyshachar.com/Budapest_Synagogue_Guy.pps
A photo essay of Berlin can be found at http://guyshachar.com/Berlin_Jewish_Journey.pps.

A complete list can be found at http://guyshachar.com/content/photography/presentations/presentations-full-list/. There are also photo essays at the site.

 

Footnote.com Allows Access to Holocaust Collection Free in October
Footnote.com and the U.S. National Archives and Record Administration have announced the availability of more than one million Holocaust-related documents and an index at the Footnote.com site. For the month of October 2009 the records are available at no charge.

NARA records at the site include:
   • Concentration camp registers and documents from Dachau, Mauthausen and Flossenburg.
   • The Ardelia Hall Collection of records relating to the Nazi looting of Jewish possessions, including looted art.
   • Captured German records including deportation and death lists from concentration camps.
   • Nuremberg War Crimes Trial proceedings.
Also included are nearly 600 interactive personal accounts of those who survived or perished in the Holocaust provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Gary Mokotoff found locating the search engine difficult. The following procedure is recommended.

Sign up (or log on) before using the site because the ability to save or print documents is not possible without joining Footnote.com, at least as a free-access user. (You can view documents without signing up.) Sign up at http://www.footnote.com/, then link to the Holocaust Collection from the home page. The Holocaust Collection page does not have a search function (those shown are ads for other web sites). Instead, click the words “National Archives Records” which will bring you to http://go.footnote.com/holocaust_records/. Click on an individual collection, for example “Dachau Entry Registers” if you want to search that collection only. Instead, use the search function to the right of the screen. It permits searching the entire Holocaust collection (actually the entire Footnote collection).

A subscription to Footnote.com costs $11.95/ month or $79.95/year. The home page shows a seven-day free trial. After inspecting the complete collection, it might be worthwhile to take out at least a one-month subscription to capture the documents of interest. You can browse their list of collections at http://www.footnote.com/browse.php.

 

Company provides insight on Jack the Ripper's victims

Jill Lawless, Associated Press

Sunday, September 20, 2009

(09-20) 04:00 PDT London --

- The world is endlessly fascinated with Jack the Ripper - but what about his victims?

Last week, an online genealogy company published census information that casts light on the lives of the women murdered by the Victorian serial killer.

The company, Findmypast.com, trawled records of Britain's 1881 census for information on the five women generally accepted as victims of the Ripper: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.

All were killed between Aug. 31 and Dec. 20, 1888, in London's East End, where they worked as prostitutes. Their bodies were mutilated.

The firm said the census data - available on its site and elsewhere online - provides "a small window onto the past" and dispels an image some people might have of the victims as teenage streetwalkers. Most were formerly married women with children who resorted to prostitution when their lives took a turn for the worse.

There is no record of Nichols or Kelly in the census, taken April 3, 1881, suggesting they already might have been working the streets at that time.

Stride was recorded as 37 and living with her husband, a carpenter. Eddowes was 38, living with her husband and two children, her occupation listed as "charwoman."

Chapman was 40, married but living with her parents. She later moved out of London to live with her husband, a stud groom.

The women appear to have turned to prostitution after their marriages dissolved. According to newspaper reports at the time, none of the victims was living with her husband at the time of her death.

"Some people treat the Jack the Ripper story as a bit of a game," said Alex Werner, a Museum of London historian and curator of a recent Jack the Ripper exhibition. "It wasn't a game. It was against real people in the East End, people who had fallen on really hard times, who had gravitated to the East End as a place where they could earn some kind of living as a prostitute."

Newspaper accounts at the time, which helped the Ripper's fame spread, touched on the women's fall from respectability.

The Star newspaper's report on Sept. 27, 1888, on the death of Chapman, struck a sympathetic tone, describing how a woman who "had perhaps a happy and innocent girlhood, and was once a wife, had to turn out and seek the sale of her body for the price of a bed."

"A few hours later," the newspaper said, "she was found a corpse."

The murderer's infamy spread quickly around the world. London newspapers reveled in the gore, which was spread across the country and to distant lands by telegraph. The killer was dubbed "Jack the Ripper" after a man using that pseudonym claimed responsibility in letters to the media and police.

No one was prosecuted for the murders, helping to fuel speculation about his identity that continues to this day. Among the suspects identified at various times are Francis Tumblety, an American quack doctor; Sir William Gull, physician to Queen Victoria; Victoria's grandson, Prince Albert Victor; and artist Walter Sickert.

Andrew Cook, author of the recent book "Jack the Ripper," thinks the Ripper always has been a media creation. He argues that the crime could not have been committed by a single person.

Cook said the Ripper myth has been constructed from "layer upon layer of sediment, nonsense and crazy theories."

"It has become an industry," he said. "What really was a terrible scenario of events has almost become over-commercialized."

Upcoming Meeting:

Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento                                

Using the Internet for Genealogy                                                                                Monday, Sept. 14, 2009, 7 p.m.

Jerry Unruh, a longtime member of the Placer County Genealogical Society, will speak about how you can effectively search for your ancestors on the Internet.  Although the Web contains a vast amount of information, the majority is not about our ancestors. What can you do to find the information you know is out there.  Jerry will share the procedures and techniques he uses to research the Internet.

Jerry Unruh is a Loomis resident who’s been researching his genealogy for more than 25 years. Early on, he wrote his own genealogy program when the few programs available were unable to meet his needs. He eventually switched to Family Tree Maker to be able to more easily exchange data with other family members.  Jerry has been a member of the Placer County Genealogical Society for the last twenty years, including three years as president. He currently maintains their Web site, is the newsletter editor and has been supporting their Family Tree Maker User Group for the last several years.

Please join us Monday at 7 p.m.

 

 

Upcoming Meeting:

Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento                                                                Using the Internet for Genealogy                                                                       Monday, Sept. 14, 2009, 7 p.m.

Jerry Unruh, a longtime member of the Placer County Genealogical Society, will speak about how you can effectively search for your ancestors on the Internet.  Although the Web contains a vast amount of information, the majority is not about our ancestors. What can you do to find the information you know is out there.  Jerry will share the procedures and techniques he uses to research the Internet.

Jerry Unruh is a Loomis resident who’s been researching his genealogy for more than 25 years. Early on, he wrote his own genealogy program when the few programs available were unable to meet his needs. He eventually switched to Family Tree Maker to be able to more easily exchange data with other family members.  Jerry has been a member of the Placer County Genealogical Society for the last twenty years, including three years as president. He currently maintains their Web site, is their newsletter editor and has been supporting their Family Tree Maker User Group for the last several years.

 

From the August 30 Avotaynu E-Zine:

CJSI to be Updated
Avotaynu plans to update its Consolidated Jewish Surname Index (CJSI) in the next few months. CJSI is the gateway to information about 700,000 surnames, mostly Jewish, that appear in different databases. These include most of the JewishGen surname databases, all surname books published by Avotaynu and other databases such as the Poor Jews Temporary Shelter, Sephardic surname databases, and Holocaust memorial books such as Gedenkbuch and Memorial to the Jews Deported from France. The database is sequenced phonetically rather than alphabetically using the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex System. Therefore, spelling variants of a name that sound the same are grouped together.

The major advantage to genealogists with Jewish heritage is that it is not necessary to search all the individual=20databases. CJSI will identify which database being searched has the surname (and its variants). For each online database in CJSI there is a link to the site where the surname can be individually searched, or there is link to a website where additional information can be found about those databases not online.

CJSI is used by non-Jews who think they may have Jewish heritage to determine if a surname is Jewish. This misuse of the database is so great that the matter is addressed at the site where there is a discussion of what is a Jewish surname. It notes that a surnames in CJSI is not necessarily Jewish because:

   • Jews and non-Jews share surnames. The third most common Jewish surname in the United States (after Cohen and Levy) is Miller. Clearly Miller in both non-Jewish and Jewish.
   • Intermarriage and conversion. The fact that the surname McKenney appears in CJSI does not mean necessarily that Jews bore this name. One source , the Family Tree of the Jewish People, is a database of family trees developed by Jewish genealogists, but these trees would also include non-Jewish branches of families.
   • Nature of database. Some of the databases named are predominantly Jewish but do contain non-Jewish individuals. An example is the Russian Consular Records database of people who transacted business with the czarist consulates in the United States.

Some years ago I found a link to CJSI at an anti-Semitic site. The site stated that if you want to know if you are dealing with a Jew, go to CJSI and see if his surname appears. This is nonsense because of the reasons described above.

CJSI is the most-visited page at the Avotaynu website with more than 2,500 visits per week. It is located at http://www.avotaynu.com/csi/csi-home.htm


IAJGS Plans Multilingual Conference Internet Site
Planners for the 30th International conference on Jewish Genealogy are looking for volunteers to translate the informational pages of the conference’s website. The event will be held July 2010 in Los Angeles. The languages are Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian. Translation is needed for descriptive text of about 1,000 words. Persons fluent in any of these languages willing to volunteer for the project should contact Pamela Weisberger, Co-Chair IAJGS Conference 2010 at pweisberger@....


Ancestry.com Is Going Public
Ancestry.com has filed an Initial Public Offering to sell $75 million of stock to the public. The filing requires disclosure of the company’s operations. As of June 30, 2009:
   • they had just short of one million paid subscribers
   • revenue from paid subscribers approaches $200 million per year
   • they spend $60 million per year on marketing and advertising
The full public disclosure document can be found at http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1469433/000095012309028902/d68252orsv1.htm

.

New England genealogy 101: top 10 reasons to print on paper

August 26, 9:21 AMBoston Genealogy ExaminerRobin C. Mason

 

 

August 23, 2009

 

Mark Your Calendar – Upcoming Meetings

Monday, Sept. 14, 7 p.m. – Using the Internet for Genealogy – Jerry Unruh

Sunday, Oct. 18, 10 a.m. – The South African Jewish Community – Roy Ogus

Sunday, Nov. 15, 10 a.m. – My Grandmother’s Suitcase – Jim Van Buskirk

 

Notes from August 17, 2009 Meeting

President Mort Rumberg called the meeting to order and shared several announcements. The annual Family History Day at the Archives is set for Saturday, October 10.  All the area genealogical societies are represented, and we will have a table.  We hope to have computers available for Ellis Island look-ups as were done at the Jewish Heritage Festival.

The Nevada County Genealogical Society is hosting “Digging for Your Roots” this Saturday (August 22) in Nevada City, across from the High School.

A Jewish genealogy research trip is being organized to Salt Lake City October 22-29 by Gary Mokotoff and Eileen Polakoff.

Bob Wascou reported on his attendance at the August conference in Philadelphia.  Bob, who is active in RomSig, the Romanian Special Interest Group, linked up with Dorin Dobrincu, the archivist of Romania.  Mark Heckman also attended the conference and coordinated the computer set-up for the participants.  Our library will have the syllabus and research guide developed for the conference.

Dave Reingold handed out information on Sacramento History Day and is looking for resource people who might want work with students doing primary and secondary research, including oral histories.  Topics could include the Holocaust  and other historical events about which you might have first-hand knowledge.)

Treasurer’s Report:  Allan Bonderoff reports a balance of $1,230.36 in our account.  We greatly appreciate your dues -- they go to pay honorariums for our speakers, purchase books for our library and fund photocopying and other expenses.

 

August Speaker

Ron Young -- Converting 35mm Slides to Electronic Format

Ron Young, an active member of the Nevada County Genealogical Society, presented a program on converting slides to digital format.

Ron said you can put 500-1000 slides on a CD, and they won’t fade any more.  “Maybe every fifth year, copy on to a new CD, to counteract CD aging.”

In his handout and presentation, Ron provided a glossary of terms, from 35 mm film to dpi and JPEG to megapixels and Tif.  JPEGs should be the last format you arrive at in the conversion process.

Why should you convert your slides?

-- Slides fade with age, turning red or losing contrast.

-- Prints can be made from slides, but don’t last as long as the slides.

-- Slides copied by camera or scanner are best for high resolution storage.  “But every five years or so, convert them to the next format.”

-- Electronic storage never changes color and you can make copies of CDs to send to others.

Ron outlined four basic methods of conversion:

1) A digital camera with adapter.

2) A flatbed scanner, with illumination in the lid.

3) Specialized slide and negative scanners.

4)  A USB slide converter.

 

Digital camera with adapter:

You need a camera with at least 3 megapixels of resolution or better.

Ron showed a flower graphic which signifies your camera has a macro lens.  You also need filter mounting threads and a front lens element that doesn’t move when you focus.

To find a slide adapter, Ron advises going to amazon.com, and you should be able to find one for $75-80.  “Ask for a ‘slide copier.’” he said.  There are several pages for different cameras.

Ron said you’ll also need a light source, such as daylight -- don’t use fluorescent lighting, or it will distort the color balance.

Ron recommends a static brush to sweep particles off the slides.

And Ron drew groans from the group when he said, “If you use a camera to copy slides, you really should read the camera manual.”

The camera with adapter should allow you to copy about 10 slides a minute.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

For color corrections of slides, Ron recommends using Picasa from Google, which can be downloaded free.

 

To make a CD from Picasa, you can click on “Gift CD” and choose what slides you want on the CD.  It will play on a DVD player onto your TV.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Flatbed scanner

Ron says you need one that has a backlight in the cover.

This scanner takes a bit longer (about 2 slides per minute) but does well with slides that may be warped or crinkled -- good depth of field in copying.

The file size is big, about 10 MB JPEGs.

 

What Ron Recommends: The Wolverine Slide Copier.

Ron showed off the small Wolverine F2D Slide Copier, which is available at Costco (or Wolverinedata.com) for around $100.  A self-contained unit requiring only a USB connection, it copies a single slide at a time to a memory card, and will hold about 100 different shots. It will also copy color and black-and-white negatives.

----------------------

Treasurer’s Report:  Allan Bonderoff reports a balance of $1,230.36 in our account.  We greatly appreciate your dues -- they go to pay honorariums for our speakers, purchase books for our library and fund photocopying and other expenses.

 

From the August 16 Avotaynu E-Zine by Gary Mokotoff

New Location for IAJGS International Jewish Cemetery Project
The IAJGS International Jewish Cemetery Project site has moved from JewishGen to the IAJGS site at http://iajgs.org/cemetery. The project’s goal is to provide information about every Jewish burial place and currently contains thousands of listings from all over the world. Some locations include additional information, such as a history of the Jewish presence in the town, name/addresses of synagogues, geographic information and other facts.

Videos of Polish Jewish Cemeteries on YouTube
There are a number of videos of Jewish cemeteries on YouTube, perhaps as many as 246. To locate a particular video, search using the Polish words for “Jewish cemetery”—cmentarz zydowski—and the name of a particular town.

Search for Descendants of Red Star Line Passengers
Between 1873 and 1935 the Red Star Line shipping company transported almost three million people from Antwerp to the United States and Canada. The City of Antwerp has created a Red Star Memorial site at http://www.redstarlinememorial.be/smartsite.dws?id=MHE_LANDING&ch=MHE with plans to open a museum in Antwerp.

The project is looking for individual stories about the immigration experience of using the shipping line including photographs. If you are/know a person or descendant of a person who took a ship from Antwerp to settle in North America, contact redstarline@.... The names of the different Red Star ships are listed.

 

Google Maps Now Includes More Ukrainian Towns
The JewishGen Ukraine Discussion Group reports Google now has most, if not all, of the towns of Ukraine at http://maps.google.com. Use the current spelling of the town and add “Ukraine” as a keyword of the search. Searching for the major Ukrainian city of Kamenets Podolskiy (Russian spelling transliterated) produced no results. Adding the keyword “Ukraine” only added a Sponsored Link (advertisement) for trips to the city. Then searching the web using Google for Kamenets Podolskiy identified the current spelling transliterated from Ukrainian as Kamianets-Podilskyï. It was unnecessary to then search Google Maps with the correct Ukrainian spelling. Merely clicking the link to “Maps” produced a map of the area of Ukraine that includes the city.

JewishGen Wants More KahaLinks Pages
One popular component of JewishGen is their ShtetLinks site where individual family historians have created web pages for their ancestral shtetl (town) in Central and Eastern Europe. The equivalent for towns in the Sephardic area of influence is called KahaLinks; “kahal” being the Hebrew word for “Jewish community.” Persons wishing to create a KahaLink site on JewishGen should contact Jeffrey Malka at JeffMalka@...

Online Language Translators
 Whether visiting a web site or sending/receiving e-mail in another language, an online language translator can be a useful tool. For many years I have used AltaVista’s Babel, now http://babelfish.yahoo.com/, with limited success. (Note from Susanne: Not too swift in French) It does not handle more esoteric languages such as Polish. For Polish, I used poltran.com which gives poor translations.  

Google’s translator at http://translate.google.com seems to do an excellent job of translating 42 languages.

Next Year in Los Angeles, July 11-16, 2010

At the Philadelphia International JGS Conference this year, there were 275 sessions including lectures, computer workshops, a film festival, and working breakfasts and luncheons. Almost all lectures were given as PowerPoint presentations, the standard for a number of years ing coordinators participated in the program The six hour-and-a-quarter time slots during the day had eight concurrent sessions plus the computer workshops and the film festival The resource room had about 30 laptops with Internet access, free of charge, to most major fee-for-service genealogical databases The US Holocaust Memorial Museum allowed online access to databases normally available only at the museum. The Exhibit Hall included nearly 20 vendors. At the Avotaynu booth, Google Your Family Tree was the best seller

More and more, the Jewish conferences are including experts beyond the genealogical community. Two European archivists, the head archivist of Romania and the deputy archivist of Ukraine, gave lectures At least five speakers were university professors.

In 2010, the 30th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy will be held July 11–16 at the new Marriott Los Angeles at LA LIVE which opens in February 2010 The hotel is located in the heart of the city.

--------------

Our next meeting: Monday evening, September 14.

Monday, August 17, 2009, 7 p.m. – Converting 35mm Slides to Electronic Format

Ron Young, a member of the Nevada County Genealogical Society, will present four different methods to convert your old slides and display them without the need of a projector.  Ron will talk about how color shift in old slides can be corrected, and that 400 to 600 can be stored on one CD.  These CDs can be played through your TV and copies can be easily made to send to relatives.

Ron specializes in computer applications of genealogy projects and has written many columns for local genealogy newsletters.

 

'Detectives' on the trail of family history
By Howard Shapiro   Ha’aretz   Thu., August 13, 2009  Av 23, 5769
PHILADELPHIA - The 1,000 people who came from all over to the International Conference on Jewish Genealogy are grandmothers and mothers, fathers and sons, professionals and retirees. And besides being Jewish, they all have one thing in common. They are detectives. Some, like Ann Francesconi of Tavares, Florida, have been on the trail of their extended family's past, as she said, "pretty much all my life." Francesconi's most recent discovery was the passenger manifest that pinpointed her son-in-law's Italian roots. "And when I found it, I went: Yes! Yes!" she said, reliving the "wow" moment of even the smallest find - which can lead to the next, larger discovery and, in turn, to sites that were towns before the Holocaust, or to places around the world where newly discovered family members live.   "Genealogists never die," declared the slogan on the T-shirt she was wearing. "They just lose their census." Others, like Philadelphia freelance writer Stacia Friedman, have been tracing their roots for little more than a year. Friedman struck gold on her first trip to Philadelphia's National Archives office, when curiosity about her paternal grandmother led her to a document that listed the place where her great-uncle was born. "There are some moving borders; it might have been in Ukraine one day and Russia the next," she said. No matter. The information placed a part of her family in a locale two generations back, and gave her more of a perspective. In very little time, Friedman was hooked and volunteering at the conference. "We all came from somewhere," said Philadelphia-based author Estelle Carpey, one of the luncheon speakers at the conference, which began August 2 and ended August 7. Her forthcoming book, "A Piece of Heart," will tell the story of an aunt lost to the family for decades, then discovered. "We all have a history," she said. "We have a culture. What your family went through, you have to put in the context of what the world was like at the time." Those stories - and certainly that context - have drawn growing numbers of people of many ethnic groups to genealogy. They are searching for their pasts in a present that holds more opportunity, with new digital equipment and databases and, for those of Eastern European descent, more archives opening across the ocean as governments liberalize access. "This is an attempt to connect with something larger than yourself," said David Mink, a Philadelphia restaurateur and international conference co-chair who wanted to give his children a sense of their ancestry, and thus began researching his family four years ago. "I felt a desire to give the people not just names, but personalities," he said. "We are the results of everything that preceded us, I believe. There's probably a lot of my grandparents in me." This was the 29th conference, which is now sponsored each year by the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, a confederation of about 75 local societies around the world, and by the host society - in this case, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Philadelphia. The convention tends to draw largely from the region where it is held and throws a spotlight on that locale's Jewish history. This year, programming about Philadelphia's Jewish community, among the nation's oldest, was abundant. But there was also, it seemed, something for everyone, with more than 100 presenters, and stations that included information on DNA testing, databases, document searching and the Red Star Line, which sailed immigrants to Philadelphia and New York from Antwerp for 61 years, plus document translators and the requisite jewelry and handicrafts tables. The keynote speaker was the Rev. Patrick Desbois, a French-born Roman Catholic whose dogged research has shown that after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, they killed about 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine. On August 2, the night Desbois was addressing the conference, cable's National Geographic Channel was broadcasting "Hitler's Hidden Holocaust," the story of Desbois' work in Ukraine. Many sessions offered updates on digital research and documentation. "Technology is not really new to the conference, but it's gaining momentum - using Google Earth, for instance, to locate where family members lived," said Mark Halpern, the conference programmer. "We have a presentation by a man from Israel about using face-recognition technology to do genealogy." Still, a session that offered basic tips on digital photography - how to shoot pictures of tombstones so that you can decipher the Hebrew, for instance - drew a full house. The conference featured a newly compiled digital listing of information that could be a rich mine for some genealogists: It holds the contents of a never-released 1936 immigration bank book that tells who deposited money with which ticket agents for Jewish passengers coming from Europe at that time. The book was from the Rosenbluth company, a firm that eventually became a corporate travel agency. The Holocaust, of course, is a reason for many Jews to begin researching their family histories - to fill in blanks about murdered relatives, or as a way to find information that their parents and grandparents perhaps knew but would not share. Sometimes, as conversations with participants demonstrated, people began researching simply because they knew little about their families in a Diaspora that extends back to the destruction of the Second Temple. "My wife was introduced to a cousin she didn't even know existed," said Ron Lapid, one of about a dozen Israelis at the conference, recalling his drive to begin research. Jeff Vasser, who handled the conference's publicity, found out that when he was growing up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, "cousins were living three blocks from me and I never knew." That started him on his research. ("What?" Vasser said he asked his dad. "Why didn't you tell me?" "You didn't ask," he said his dad replied.) Jeanette Rosenberg, one of several attendees from London, simply wanted to learn "how lots of people we call Uncle-this and Auntie-that are related to me." Her research has united her with several newly found family members in Europe and the United States. She contacted them, she said, "and the rest is history." History it is, indeed.

 

August 12, 2009   New York Times

U.S. Bares ‘Alien Files’ Kept on Immigrants

By JANIE LORBER

WASHINGTON — Immigration files containing a wealth of information collected by American border agents, some of it dating from the late 19th century, will be opened to the public soon and permanently preserved, providing intriguing nuggets about such famous immigrants or visitors as Alfred Hitchcock and Salvador Dalí.

But to millions of Americans, the real treasure will be clues about their own families’ histories in the photographs, letters, interrogation transcripts and recordings that reflect the intense scrutiny faced by those trying to enter the United States during an era when it waged two world wars and adopted increasingly restrictive immigration policies.

Under an agreement signed this year, the files, on some 53 million people, will be gradually turned over by the Department of Homeland Security to the National Archives and Records Administration, beginning in 2010. The material, accounting for what officials describe as the largest addition of individual immigration records in the archives’ history, will be indexed and made available to anyone.

At present, members of the public typically gain access to the documents, known as the Alien Files, by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request. But that is a cumbersome process that can take months to produce documents — and even then only photocopies, not originals — and, says Jeanie Low, a private consultant to family historians, deters many amateur genealogists unfamiliar with navigating government bureaucracy.

That is how Thelma Lai Chang obtained the 103-page file detailing immigration officials’ interviews with her father, who immigrated from China as a 12-year-old in 1922. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act, most Chinese were then barred from entering the United States, and her father used a fake identity, claiming to be the son of a family already in the country.

“I cried because these are real documents,” said Ms. Chang, who keeps a copy of her father’s Alien File in her desk drawer at her San Francisco home. “All these years my dad used to talk about how he came, and this is proof to me of what he went through. I mean, all these questions for a little kid.”

The decision to preserve the files is a victory for historical and immigrant groups that had been concerned because federal regulations permitted the government to destroy them once they were 75 years old.

The files contain a trove of information for historians of all fields. The file on Dalí, for example, the Spanish Surrealist who fled to the United States at the onset of World War II, contains more than 40 pages of travel documents.

But the material will be particularly significant to the descendants of persecuted immigrants like Jews who fled Europe before World War II.

“For so many of us, this is all that exists,” said Rodger Rosenberg, whose great-grandparents escaped pogroms in Eastern Europe at the turn of the century. “So much was lost.”

The public demand for access to government records like these has been fueled by Web sites, including Ancestry.com and Footnote.com, that have made it easier for people to do research even if they have no formal genealogical background.

“Before, it was just microfilm, constantly microfilm, going through hours of microfilm,” said Adele Macher of Baltimore, who has been researching her family’s Italian roots for 17 years. Once started, the research becomes almost an addiction, Mrs. Macher said as she pored over a copy of her great-aunt’s Alien File, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

“This is like really putting a puzzle together,” she said, “and every piece that you find you want to find the next piece and the next piece and the next piece.”

Perhaps most exciting to researchers is that the files, which they will be able to see at the regional archives in San Bruno, Calif., and Kansas City, Mo., contain the original documents. Some include artifacts like wallets, 45-r.p.m. records and detailed maps that prospective immigrants drew by hand at the border to prove claims about where they came from.

“The bottom line is that you want as many original documents as possible,” said Schelly Talalay Dardashti, who writes Tracing the Tribe, a Jewish genealogy blog. “Each time something is written down, there is a chance of something getting screwed up. Each time a document is transcribed, mistakes will be made.”

Still, for many among a generation of immigrants who dodged the Chinese Exclusion Act by inventing their heritage or spinning elaborate tales of lost documentation, the accessibility is alarming. The exclusion act was repealed in 1943, but fears of deportation ran rampant in the 1950s, when, in the wake of the Chinese Revolution, McCarthyism tore Chinese immigrant families and communities apart.

Scarred by a period of what they recall as institutionalized racism, many aging immigrants refuse to discuss the Alien Files. They are afraid, they say, that lies told by young immigrants so many years ago and recorded in the files then could result in deportation now.

But officials of the Homeland Security Department say the files will be used for historical purposes, not law enforcement. Further, records will not be released until the immigrant in question has died or turned 100, and the names of the living will be redacted.

The files and immigration agents “have always been seen as the enemy,” said Jennie Lew, spokeswoman for a coalition that pushed for the new agreement. “We’re trying to make this the silver lining of years of discrimination.”

~~~~~~~~~~~

                                 See You Monday Evening!

Next Meeting, a Week from Monday:

Monday, August 17, 2009, 7 p.m. – Converting 35mm Slides to Electronic Format

Ron Young, a member of the Nevada County Genealogical Society, will present four different methods to convert your old slides and display them without the need of a projector.  Young will talk about how color shift in old slides can be corrected, and that 400 to 600 can be stored on one CD.  These CDs can be played through your TV and copies can be easily made to send to relatives.

Ron specializes in computer application to genealogy projects and has written many columns for local genealogy newsletters.

Join us on Monday evening, August 17.

 

Phila. convention to explore Jewish genealogy

By David O'Reilly, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer                                                                                                 August 2, 2009

For the last six years, the Rev. Patrick Desbois has traveled the back roads of Ukraine, knocking at huts and farmhouses, asking their elderly occupants to speak to him of the unspeakable.

Tonight, before an expected audience of hundreds at the opening of the 29th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, this soft-spoken Frenchman, a Roman Catholic priest, will relay the horrors and shame he found hidden there.

"Most people try to forget the genocide [of the Holocaust] in order to sleep," Desbois said in an interview Friday. "We try to awaken them."

The conference, which continues through Friday at the Sheraton Philadelphia Center City Hotel, will not dwell on the Holocaust. With walking tours and workshops bearing titles such as "Mapping Madness" and "The Role of Philadelphia Jews in the Rise of Basketball," its overall tone is buoyant and industrious.

Yet, program chairman Mark Halpern pointed out, the "imperative" that compels Jewish interest in genealogy is serious.

"Jewish families have been fractured for a long time," said Halpern, an amateur genealogist.

Decades before the Nazi extermination of six million, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Eastern Europe to escape persecution. For many of their children and grandchildren, he said, genealogy is "a way to reclaim the lives and history" of those who fled or were executed.

This is the first time Philadelphia is hosting the convention, which will feature about 125 presenters and is expected to attract nearly 1,000 visitors.

The list of workshops and activities, which runs 12 pages, includes such topics as "Finding Places in the Russian Empire," "Learning the Cyrillic Alphabet," "The Changing Borders of Eastern Europe," "Common Genetic Traits and Diseases" of Jews, and "Finding Your Jewish Ancestors on Ancestry.com."

One of the field trips will visit the South Jersey chicken farms where many Jewish immigrants started their lives in America.

Although most of its events are focused on Eastern European Jewish identity, the convention is open to the public and includes some workshops of general interest to aspiring genealogists, such as "Preserving Documents and Photographs" and "Choosing Genealogy Software."

Unlike the Nazi exterminations in Central Europe, not much was made public about the massacres in Russia during the war - until Desbois recently began to investigate.

His research has revealed that the Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after invading the Soviet Union in 1941.

Grateful for what they supposed was release from communist oppression, or fearful for their own lives, countless Ukrainians pointed out the Jews in their midst – then watched in shock as the Germans herded them into fields or forests, shot them, and buried them in mass graves.

"It was not possible to forget," Desbois said in the interview. "These were not 'one million Jews' but neighbors, schoolmates."

Most of their graves are long grown over. But Desbois, who arrives in Ukrainian villages wearing his clerical collar and asks unaccusing questions, has coaxed his interview subjects into revealing the sites of more then 800 mass graves.

So detailed has his knowledge become, he said, that he can sometimes give an answer when someone asks about an ancestor's burial site.

Lately, he said, he hears of families organizing trips to visit the villages "and pray at the mass grave" of their grandparents or great-grandparents.

In 2004 he created Yahad-in Unum, a Paris organization devoted to Jewish-Christian understanding that is funded by a Holocaust foundation and the Catholic Church. Last year he published Holocaust by Bullets, a book about the Nazi genocide in Ukraine, and said he was at work on a second.

Last week, the National Geographic Channel televised Hitler's Hidden Holocaust, about Desbois' work in Ukraine.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Ancestry.com plans to go public

IPO » Online family history company's initial offering is up to $75M of shares.

By Tom Harvey  The Salt Lake Tribune  Updated: 08/07/2009

Ancestry.com, the Provo-based family history online research company, hopes to go public with an initial offering of up to $75 million of shares.

In its prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company formerly know as The Generations Network reported revenues of $197.6 million and a profit of $2.38 million in 2008.

Its main Web site, Ancestry.com, offers monthly subscriptions for access to its millions of genealogical records, plus gives subscribers the ability to build family trees and share information and documents with others.

The company indicated it might use some of the new capital for acquisitions of other companies, products or technologies.

Ancestry.com declined to comment on Friday, citing a required "quiet period" before the stock sale. In its SEC prospectus, Ancestry.com said the stock sale will take place sometime after 180 days from its filing on Monday.

The company now has 44 shareholders who own 76.6 million shares of common stock. The IPO underwriters are Morgan Stanley & Co., Merrill Lynch, BMO Capital Markets, Jefferies & Co. and Piper Jaffray & Co.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

See you Monday evening, August 17. 

July 27, 2009

 

Upcoming Meetings:

Monday, August 17, 7 p.m. --  Ron Young, Converting 35mm Slides to Video

Monday, September 14, 7 p.m. --  Jerry Unruh, Using the Internet for Genealogy

Sunday, October 18, 10 a.m. -- Roy Ogus, The South African Jewish Community

 

Notes from the July 20, 2009 Meeting

President Mort Rumberg introduced the evening’s speaker, Dr. Joel Weintraub of Dana Point.  Joel is an emeritus biology professor at Cal State, Fullerton, who has volunteered for many years at the National Archives facility in Laguna Niguel.  He has also worked with Steve Morse since 2002.

Joel’s two-hour presentation focused on the 1940 U.S. census which will be open and available to the public in April 2012.

“It’s 986 days away -- two and a half years,” he said about the opening of the census.  And since April 1, 2012 is a Sunday, he guesses Monday, April 2 will be the first day the data will be available.

 

 

 

 

Why talk about it now, Joel asks?  “Because it’s the last good genealogy census, we can showcase one-step tools and we’re looking for volunteers.  And everything you know about why the census is released after 72 years is wrong.”

Taking us back to 1940, Joel noted that the minimum wage was 30 cents an hour, unemployment was about 15 percent.  The census started April 2, 1940, “a frozen moment in time.”

Joel provided definitions used, such as enumerator (the counter), schedule (the forms the enumerator filled out) and ED (enumeration district). 

“Those alive on that day are counted,” -- or are they? 

Joel said his main research sources are a 1940 enumeration handbook, old newspaper columns and archives, a scrapbook of clippings he found on eBay, films, and a book on procedural history.

He said planning began for the census with a committee created in 1937. Some 6,000 questions were suggested to be included in the census. Among those rejected: do you own a Bible, are you over 6 feet tall, and how many dogs do you own?  (Although one county in New York took a dog census in 1941-- enumerators were paid 20 cents a dog, versus four cents usually provided for humans in the regular census.)

Joel showed a clip from a short Three Stooges movie (1940) focusing no the census: “No Census, No Feeling.”

The government did a trial census using two counties in Indiana.

Highlights of the 1940 Census questions:

-- Name

-- Who gave the information

-- A new question: What is your highest grade completed?  (In 1930 they had asked whether the person was able to read and write.  In 1940, an estimated 1/4 of the population had a high school education.)

Dropped was a question about parents’ birthplaces; there was no immigration information or dates, or naturalization, just one citizenship column.)

The 1930 census was not a Depression census -- it hit after.  But the 1940 census did include a question regarding residence as of April 1, 1935, and did you move from a rural area or a city greater than 2,500 people.

Employment questions -- Did you work the week before the Census date? Were you on relief?

Some of those in CCC camps may have not been counted, some may have been counted twice.

The last question --- How much money did you earn? And did you earn more than $50 from other than wages or salary?  People got furious about this question, Joel said.

The average wage in 1940 was about $1900.

 

Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire opposed the census and advocated a national census strike.

If you didn’t want to tell the enumerator something, you were able to fill out the form, place it in a sealed envelope.  The enumerator noted where you lived and put a “C” for confidential on his form.

For the 1940 census, Joel said 5 percent of the population was sampled -- this was the first year of population sampling.  These people answered additional questions.

Joel said the trend has been less questions for everybody and more sampling.  On the 2010 census form, he said there are only 10 questions.

“The 1940 census was the last good genealogical census,” Joel said.

In promoting public awareness of the 1940 census, a record was made and distributed to radio stations, and  a slogan developed: To Know America, Tell America.

In 1940, Joel said they began to estimate the undercount of the census.  About six months after the census, there was mandatory Selective Service registration.  Based on that data, there were 13 percent more blacks and 3 percent more non-blacks.

On opening day of the census, what can you expect, Joel asked.

-- Most likely, there will population schedules  online (no film)

-- There will be no name index

Geographical searches and locational tools

Check out www.stevemorse.org, census folder -- where search tools are posted.

Joel has manually transcribed 28 rolls of film, the National Archives is proofing.  There will be a city block index, and information about changes in enumeration districts from the1930 to 1940 censuses.

“We can use volunteers” to do more, Joel said.

All cities over 50,000 in population are done and will be searchable.  Joel has taken photos of more than 61,000 frames from 1940 films.   “We have lots of tools all dressed up and ready to go.”

The 72-Year Rule and Confidentiality

Joel presented a chronology about the census itself as well as the 72-year rule for release of census data.

In the Constitution, in 1787, Congress was given the right to direct the census.  States have also taken censuses -- New York completed its last one in 1925.

In the 1790 census, there was no confidentiality and the tradition of census data being public continued until 1850.

Presidential proclamations beginning with William Howard Taft stressed the confidential nature of the census, but Joel said the Census Bureau didn’t follow along, and in 1917, used some of the information to track down draft evaders.  In 1940, census data was used to aid in the internment of the Japanese.  “And, on at least one occasion,” Joel said, “in 1943, names were given to the FBI.”

In Canada, census data is closed for 92 years, and now, if you say you don’t want your information to be disclosed, it won’t.  In Australia its 99 years and 100 years in England.

Why 72 years in the U.S.? “It has nothing to do with life expectancy,” Joel said.

Is it because there are 72 columns around the National Archives building? No.

Here’s why:  the 1870 census records were transferred to the Archives in 1942 and released -- 72 years after they were taken.  It became the tradition, records being closed for a period of 72 years.  (FYI, the life expectancy for those born in 1870, was 66.2 years.)

Joel then traced the history of divergent views on census records disclosure and restrictions, with debates between the head of the National Archives and the head of the Census Bureau.  The Census Bureau usually advocated for confidentiality, the Archives for openness and the right to know.

In 1973, it was decided that confidentiality restrictions were no longer necessary.  Joel said there were three things that continued to support this view -- 1) House Speaker Carl Albert was interested in genealogy, 2) so was President Jimmy Carter, and 3) the acclaim of the book “Roots,” tracing Alex Haley’s genealogy.

But, Joel said, “the director of the Census Bureau and the Archivist could changes the rule tomorrow if they wanted to.”

For more information on Joel Weintraub’s presentation and related efforts, see his Web site at http://members.cox.net/census1940/

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Treasurer’s report from Allan Bonderoff:  Our JGSS account balance is currently $1320.25 after recent expenditures.  Your annual dues go to purchase books for our library, provide small honorariums to our speakers and more.

 

From recent editions of Avotaynu’s E-Zine:

New Book: Handbook of Ashkenazic Given Names and Their Variants
The most important part of Alexander Beider’s name dictionaries is not the dictionary portion but the introductory portion, a scholarly dissertation on the book’s subject. It was this portion of his first book, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire, that established him as one of the world’s leading authorities on the origin and evolution of Jewish surnames in Eastern Europe. The 300-page introductory portion of his Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names actually is his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne’s Dept. of History.

 Dr. Beider has created a new book, Handbook of Ashkenazic Given Names and Their Variants which is that portion of the larger Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names: Their Origins, Structure, Pronunciation, and Migrations focusing on the needs of genealogists. Missing from the smaller work is the doctoral thesis and the portion citing sources for all the variant names. Included in the Handbook is the description of the origin and evolution of the name, a tree-like structure of all the name variants showing how they were derived from the root name, and the all-important indexes which list all 15,000 names derived from the 735 root names. The index is in three sections: names as they appeared in the Latin alphabet, names in the Cyrillic alphabet and those in the Hebrew alphabet.

I (Gary Mokotoff) used it to research my mother’s Hebrew name: Tsiril. I was surprised to find out that it is a variant of Sarah. The Derivation Scheme for Sarah showed the evolution of the name from Sarah, to Tsore to Tserl(e) to Tsirl(e). All told, Dr. Beider identifies nearly 100 variants of the popular feminine given name, Sarah.

Handbook of Ashkenazic Given Names and Their Variants is 232 pages, softcover and costs l$26.00 plus shipping. It can be ordered at http://www.avotaynu.com/books/handbook.htm. As an illustration of the content of the book, the complete citation of the feminine name, Sarah, is shown, including a description of its origin and derived names. Also shown at the site is a complete list of the 15,000 names..


New Book: Sephardic Genealogy–Second Edition
Jeffrey S. Malka, author of the award-winning Sephardic Genealogy: Discovering Your Sephardic Ancestors and Their World, has completely updated the book.  Nearly 100 pages longer, it adds a new chapter on DNA as well as new chapters on resources for the Sephardic communities of Portugal, England, Rhodes, Hamburg-Altona and Vienna. There is also a new chapter on how to research the Spanish archives with clues on deciphering old Spanish script.

The section on the Internet is fully updated and now includes more than 300 links to sites that have information valuable to Sephardic research. The surname index alone has 3,037 names.

The book, 472 pages with hard cover, can be ordered for $45 plus shipping through http://www.avotaynu.com/books/Sephardic.htm.

Need Volunteers to Translate Yizkor Book Information
Lance Ackerfeld, recently appointed JewishGen’s Yizkor Book Project Manager, is looking for volunteers to translate from Hebrew to English lists of necrologies found in yizkor books. Yad Vashem has supplied these lists as Excel files. According to Ackerfeld, these lists have important information including names of parents, spouses, location in the war and more. To volunteer for the translation project, contact Ackerfeld at lance.ackerfeld@....

New Functions at Stevemorse.org
Stephen P. Morse reports two new functions at his One-Step site, http://stevemorse.org.

Morse has had for some time an Assembly District/Election District (AD/ED) finder for the New York State censuses of 1905, 1915 and 1925 for all boroughs of New York City. Given a street address in New York City, the function determines the correct AD/ED.  You then use this result to find the census record on microfilm.  FamilySearch, the genealogy arm of the Mormon Church, has now placed at its site images of the 1905 census for the borough of Brooklyn without a name index. Morse has update his AD/ED finder linking the results of the search directly to the FamilySearch census images.

The second function is an Ahnentafel calculator converting an Ahnentafel number into a description of the relationship between the individual and the person whose pedigree is being defined – i.e., on a pedigree chart, the person with an Ahnentafel number of 123 is the mother's mother's mother's father's mother's mother of the person whose pedigree is defined. For more about the numbering system: http://genealogy.about.com/cs/research/p/ahnentafel.htm.


JOWBR Now Has 1.2 Million Records
The JewishGen's Online Worldwide Burial Registry has been updated for the Philadephia conference. Added are more than 94,000 new records and 12,000 new photos from 16 countries. This brings JOWBR's holdings to more than 1.2 million records from more than 2,400 cemeteries (or cemetery sections) from 46 countries.

Some of the collections added in the recent update are:
   • U.S. National Cemetery Records. More than 23,000 records from 150 national cemeteries located in 46 states and Puerto Rico. These records represent veterans whose markers have a Star of David on it.
   • Iasi, Romania. 17,500 additional burial records translated from the Hebrew burial register from 1888–1894 and women's records from 1915–1943.
   • Bathurst, Ontario. 9,000 additional records from 60 sections of this Canadian cemetery.
   • Krakow, Poland. 6,300 records from the Miodowa Street Cemetery in Krakow.
   • Vitsyebsk, Belarus. 5,600 cemetery records
Bayside, NY. 5,600 additional records from the Bayside/Ozone cemetery complex
   • Chernivtsi, Ukraine. 4,300 additional records and photos

The database is searchable at http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/cemetery/. A list of cemeteries included in the collection can be found at http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Cemetery/tree/CemList.htm


Mormon/Jewish Controversy: The Problem That Won’t Go Away
Mormon Leaders Present President Obama with HIs Family History
The Mormon Church practice of posthumously baptizing Jews murdered in the Holocaust made the news media again when Mormon leaders presented  President Barack Obama with five leather-bound books detailing Obama's family history.  What was not mentioned at the meeting was the fact that the Church had posthumously baptized Obama’s mother as well as other ancestors of the U.S. president.

In response to the revelation by the news media of the baptism, a Church spokesperson gave the standard Church response, "It is counter to Church policy for a Church member to submit names for baptism for persons to whom they are not related."  So baptism of non-relatives goes on unabated contrary to Church policy but in conformity with Church doctrine.

Meanwhile the posthumous baptism of Holocaust victims continues. Baptisms as recently as July 2009 have been discovered contrary to Church policy but in conformity with Church doctrine.

Third Edition of Polish Translation Guide Published
Judith Frazin has expanded and enhanced her A Translation Guide to 19th-Century Polish-Language Civil-Registration Documents (including Birth, Marriage and Death Records) in a third edition. In addition to being a translation guide, it also helps the reader locate Polish ancestral towns on a modern map, determine if old vital records exist, learn how to acquire them and—through its unique step-by-step method—decipher and translate the records. The book is published by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois of which Frazin is a former president.
 
Jewish Genealogical Research Trip to Salt Lake City
For those who want an additional dose of genealogical research in addition to, or instead of, the annual conference, veteran Jewish genealogists Gary Mokotoff and Eileen Polakoff are offering a research trip to the LDS (Mormon) Family History Library in Salt Lake City from October 22-October 29, 2009, for the 17th consecutive year. To date, more than 400 Jewish genealogists have participated from around the world.

The program offers genealogists the opportunity to spend an entire week of research at the Library under the guidance of professional genealogists who have made more than a three dozen trips to Salt Lake City. For details: http://www.avotaynu.com/slctrip.htm.

                                                               ----------------

Monday, July 20, 2009, 7 p.m.  –  Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento

Preparing Search Tools for the 1940 Census – 2-hour program

The speaker will be Joel Weintraub who will discuss the upcoming availability of 1940 census data in 2012 and why we wait 72 years to see a census. He’ll also talk about various search tools that will be needed to find people and what’s in the works to make things easier.  These tools can be used right now to find people in the 1880 through 1930 censuses.

Joel is an emeritus biology professor at Cal State Fullerton.  He became interested in genealogy about 12 years ago and regularly volunteers at the National Archives (NARA) in Laguna Niguel.  

The program will be divided into two 50-minute segments with a short break. 

 

Actual Census Day

 

July 15, 11:23 AM  Boston Genealogy Examiner

If one of your relatives was born, married, or died during a census year, it’s important to know what date the census taker was using to collect household data. For example, if the census taker arrived August 15 and your ancestor died July 15, will he be listed on the census? That depends on the year. If the census was for 1850, then yes, your ancestor should be listed because the census taker was supposed to be asking who was in the household on June 1, 1850.

 

 

Use this chart as reference to the census days: 

 

Census	Year	Series	Census Day
1st	1790	M637	August 2 (1st Monday in August)
2nd	1800	M32	August 4 (1st Monday in August)
3rd	1810	M252	August 6 (1st Monday in August)
4th	1820	M33	August 7 (1st Monday in August)
5th	1830	M19	June 1
6th	1840	M704	June 1
7th	1850	M432	June 1
8th	1860	M653	June 1
9th	1870	M593	June 1
10th	1880	T9	June 1
11th	1890	M123	June 1
12th	1900	T623	June 1
13th	1910	T624	April 15
14th	1920	T625	January 1
15th	1930	T626	April 1
16th -- 20th	1940--1980		April 1

 

For more information about the census, visit the U.S. Census Bureau web site.

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See you Monday evening.

Our Next Meeting:  Monday, July 20, 2009, 7 p.m.  --  Preparing Search Tools for the 1940 Census (2-hour program)

The speaker will be Joel Weintraub who will discuss the upcoming availability of 1940 census data in 2012 and why we wait 72 years to see a census.  He’ll also talk about various search tools that will be needed to find people and what’s in the works to make things easier.  These tools can be used right now to find people in the 1880 through 1930 censuses.

Joel’s talk will be in two 50-minutes segments, with a brief break.

Joel is an emeritus biology professor at Cal State Fullerton.  He became interested in genealogy about 12 years ago and regularly volunteers at the National Archives (NARA) in Laguna Niguel. Joel started transcribing streets within census districts in 2001 to help researchers search the 1930 U.S. census released in 2002. 

So mark your calendar for Monday evening, July 20 at 7 p.m.

 

From recent Avotaynu e-zines edited by Gary Mokotoff:

Ellis Island Videos on YouTube
There are a number of original films of the Ellis Island experience on YouTube.com. Search for “Ellis Island Immigration.” One of the more interesting ones, taken in May 1909, is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8bPDdNRoxc There is also a 29-minute documentary at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4wzVuXPznk.

New Web Site Information  -- Censuses of Scotland

ScotlandsPeople, located at http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/, claims to be the only site to have complete Scottish census records from 1841–1901. It includes both an index as well as the actual images. This fee-for-service site also has birth, marriage and death records.

United Synagogue Marriage Authorisation Index has been updated by an additional two years and now identifies records from 17th February 1880 to the 31st December 1891. The index contains 8,236 records for England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It is located at http://www.theus.org.uk/support_services/find_your_family/marriage_records. It is updated whenever an additional year is indexed.

Contemporary Maps of Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. It was reported on various JewishGen SIG Discussion groups that there are detailed contemporary maps of Hungary, Slovakia and Romania at http://www.hiszi-map.hu/catalog/index.php. The maps include small towns and villages. Geographic markers (roads, bridges, streams, wooded areas) as well as inhabited areas and cemetery locations are shown.

Commentary About Identity Theft and Homeland Security
More and more U.S. government offices holding records of value to family history research are using the pretext of identity theft and homeland security as an excuse to prevent family historians from accessing records of their ancestors.

Recently a professional genealogist went to the New York City Department of Health with a court order requesting the birth record of a deceased person. She was denied a copy of the record because she did not know the given names of the decedent’s parents. The purpose of the court order was to determine the parents’ names.

Dick Eastman, in his daily e-zine on genealogy, addressed the subject.  It can be read at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/07/preventing-identity-theft-with-the-ssdi.html

Latvian Jewish Records Now Online
The State Archives of Latvia is placing digitized images of Jewish vital records at their genealogy website. They include the towns of Aizputes, Bauskas, Daugavpils, Glazmankas, Grīvas, Grobiņas, Ilūkstes, Jaunjelgavas, Jēkabpils, Jelgavas, Kuldīgas, Liepājas, Ludzas, Maltas, Piltenes, Rēzeknes, Ribinišku, Rīgas, Sabiles, Saldus, Sasmakas, Skaistkalnes, Subates, Tukuma, Varakļānu, Ventspils, Viļakas and Višķu.

To use the site requires that a user first register. Go to the home page at http://www.lvva-raduraksti.lv/en.html and click Register in the upper right corner. Once registered, a shortcut directly to the Jewish (Rabināti) records is http://www.lvva-raduraksti.lv/en/menu/lv/7/ig/7 .html. Click on the town of interest and a list by year and record type is displayed. Records are identified by type: dzimušie (birth), laulātie (marriage), mirušie (death), šķirtie (divorce). Browse the digitized images by clicking the arrows in the upper right corner; you can also zoom in on an image.

The project currently has more than 3.8 million images online of vital records of all faiths. Plans call for digitizing revision lists (censuses) of 18th–19th centuries (1782–1858), and those portions of the All-Russia census on 1897 that survived.

Estonian Records Online
The State Archives of Latvia referred to a project of the Estonian State Archives to place digitized images online. It does not include Jewish vital records but does appear to include revision lists, 1782–1858. The site is at http://www.ra.ee/dgs/explorer.php

Prague Conscription (Residence) Records Up to the Letter “O”
The Prague National Archive project to index their conscription records (1850–1914) now has 1.1 million entries. Conscription records are residence permits issued at the Prague police headquarters for the Prague region. The names are being indexed alphabetically and now include those starting with the letter “O.”

The entries include the name of the head of household, followed by the name of wife, children and other relatives with whom the family shared the residence, date of registration, number of the house, and job of the head of household. It may include year and place of birth, religion and, in case of a married woman, her maiden name. The sheet may also contain entries concerning marriages and deaths.

The records are located at http://digi.nacr.cz/prihlasky2/indexen.php.


List of People Expelled from the University of Vienna in 1938
 JewishGen reported that the University of Vienna has published a database of 2,700 persons, mostly Jews, who were discharged or expelled in 1938. Among these persons are professors, students and university employees. The database is available at http://gedenkbuch.univie.ac.at.

 
Lost Wooden Synagogues of Eastern Europe Now on CD
Among the many tragedies of the Holocaust was the fact that the wooden synagogues of Eastern Europe—some 1,000 structures—were systematically burned to the ground.  A few of these magnificent structures survived and a group has documented them, as well as the history of these synagogues in a recording titled Lost Wooden Synagogues of Eastern Europe. Originally only on video tape, it is now on CD.

The 48-minute video narrated by Theodore Bikel includes photos of many of the famous wooden synagogues of the past and file footage of Jewish life before the Holocaust. It also documents a trip to Lithuania to film the few (abandoned) remaining wooden synagogues there.  Order through http://www.avotaynu.com/books/synagogues.htm. Cost is $25 plus shipping.

 

From the newsletter of the Conejo Valley (Ventura County) JGS:

“Jews in Mexico” is how Jorge Gonzales titles his story of finding and connecting with two “lantsmen” <sic> in Mexico. Jorge presented his story at the June 7 “Successes and Roadblocks” JGS meeting. It should be an inspiration for all.

My wife and I went to Mexico for our annual “Mexican vacation.” On February 13, 2009,

we loaded our pick-up, and packed some snacks for our adventure. We traveled to Tequila,

Jalisco (about 34 hours driving). Besides the beautiful scenery, buildings, archeological sites

and awesome food, I was determined (my wife calls it obsessed) to find out if there were any

descendants of the Jews in the smaller towns of Mexico. In Mexico City there are around

15,000 Jews but they are from Ashkenazi roots, and the same in Guadalajara.

 

For the first nine days, I came up empty-handed. But on February 23, after traveling to several small towns and cities, we arrived in the beautiful city of Uruapan, Michoacan. As we were checking into the hotel, my wife said to me “look at the ceiling, there are your Jewish stars.” I looked up and saw two beautiful Stars of David in the center of the chandeliers. I asked the hotel front desk if by any chance the owner was Jewish, she said: No, he is Catholic.”

 

 Later I asked the valet the same question and he said: “He is not Jewish, he is Mexican.” After more questions he described the owner as a Hassidic rabbi. Early that evening we met a gentleman with features similar to the hotel owner. I greeted him with, “Shalom, mash lom ha?” He just looked at me and waved. At this point I was happy because I thought that I had run into a fellow Jew.

 

About 9 p.m. I noticed a man selling paintings. He approached me and said, “This is going to sound weird, please don’t think that I am crazy, but by any chance are you of Jewish descent?” I asked him why. He said, “I just feel a calling of the Blood!” I asked, “What do you mean?” He said, “My grandparents were Jewish. They kept Shabbats,prayed Siddur, lit candles on Shabbats and wore Tallit. So, if they were Jewish, I guess that it makes me Jewish also, ah?”

 

At this point I didn’t tell him that I am Jewish but asked him about his grandparents. He told me they could trace their roots prior to the Inquisition, and they sought refuge in smaller towns for fear of being persecuted. They moved from town to town, and even changed their last names. They ended up in a town called Cotija, Michoacan. His parents moved to the town of Uruapan, and his mother, not knowing much about Judaism, raised them Catholic. He said that he wants to return to Judaism, but in this town the closest that he can get is messianic Judaism. I told him that yes I was Jewish, and I showed him my Star of David necklace. He became very happy, and asked me questions

about Judaism, which I promptly answered. He asked me if I wore a kippa, and I told him yes. I showed him my kippa that I carried on my pocket, and he got so excited. I told him that I had an extra in my pick-up, and would be more than happy to give it to him tomorrow.

 

The next day, as we were eating breakfast the other man (the one that fit the description of the owner) showed up. I asked him if he was the owner, and if he was Jewish. He said he was not the owner, and he was not Jewish – just another traveler. He said that the day before when I said, “Shalom, mash lom ja?”, somehow he knew that I was greeting him. He told me that he had been asked before if he was Jewish, but always replied that he is Mexican. Just out of curiosity I asked him if he knew his ancestry, and he said that yes his grandparents were from Italy. As we were leaving the hotel, my friend Miguel showed up, and I gave him the promised kippa. Immediately he put iton and tears fell down his cheeks. He was so happy to be wearing something really Jewish. I asked my wife to snap a picture.

 

As we were saying good-bye, the man I encountered in the restaurant earlier was leaving also. In my heart I knew that somehow three Mexican Jews had crossed paths, on that day. Driving back to my parents’ town I noticed the sign posted on the back of the trailer I was following. The very clear Hebrew letters read “ISRAEL”, made in Guadalajara, Jalisco. Automatically, overwhelmed I said, “Shema Israel Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai echod, Baruch shem k vod malchto l’olam va ed.”

--------------------------

See You Monday evening, July 20

June 23, 2009

Upcoming Meetings:

Monday, July 20   Joel Weintraub – Search Tools for the 1940 Census

Monday, August 17    Ron Young – Converting 35mm Slides to Digital

Monday, September 14   Jerry Unruh – Using the Internet for Genealogy

 

Notes from June 15, 2009 Meeting

President Mort Rumberg called the meeting to order and welcomed members and guests.  He passed around the latest catalogue of genealogy-related books published by Avotaynu.  “We have a lot of these books in our library, and one of the benefits of membership is you can check them out for a month at a time,” Mort said.

Mark your calendars for Saturday, October 10 -- that is Family History Day at the State Archives in Sacramento.  We’ll have a table at the annual event, held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Galitzianer, the quarterly magazine of the Galicia Special Interest Group, or SIG, is looking for articles to publish.  Mort says he’s submitted two and one has been published.

June 26-38 is the 40th annual Southern California Genealogy Jamboree.

Bob Wascou gave an update on the cemetery project, begun 10 years ago by Judy Persin and Iris Bachman, to document the headstones in Sacramento’s Home of Peace Cemetery.  Data collected over the years has now been transferred to an Excel format, but JewishGen also wanted photos.  Mort, Bob, Mark Heckman and Burt Hecht photographed all the headstones, although not yet the nameplates on the crypts.

Bob noted that Home of Peace has now renumbered its grave sites.

Burt handed out a brochure on the DNA Shoah Project, headquartered at the University of Arizona.  The effort is aimed at building a database of genetic material from Holocaust survivors and their descendants.

Mark Heckman spoke about the upcoming Philadelphia conference, and a show of hands indicated four people are planning to attend.  Mark is one of the program chairs as well as the technology chair.  For more information, go to www.philly2009.org. Next year’s conference is a bit closer, in Los Angeles.

Gary Sandler encouraged members to check out “The Shtetl Book” from our library.  He said it uses documents from Poland to paint a picture of shtetl life. “It’s a wonderful read and full of color.”

A bank account update from Allan Bonderoff: as of June 15, we have $1400.77 in our account.

June Speaker

Our speaker was Anna Fechter of Utah, community operations manager for the Generations Network which oversees ancestry.com.  She has been with the organization for about four years and oversees Rootsweb.  She also oversees about 60 message boards.

“We are the largest online genealogy site,” Anna said,” with thousands of databases and one billion names submitted.”

Anna demonstrated some of the newest features of the ancestry.com site, including the personalized home page.  New records are added pretty much every day. The “Publish” feature allows you to create your own books and posters.  Check out the 1940 Census Substitute.

Anna said Ancestry.com has offices around the world, including San Francisco, Seattle, the UK, France, Germany, Australia and China.

She encouraged people to take advantage of the online webinars, hosted on a regular basis.  Gary Mokotoff of Avotaynu did one recently.

Anna said last year Ancestry joined up with JewishGen, providing access to their databases.  “They’ve seen a huge increase in visitors” in just a short time.

Anna highlighted the value of Ancestry’s “Card Catalogue” to get a list of all the different collections.  “You can type in the word “free” and find 345 free databases, if you don’t have a subscription.”

Anna was asked if you can “weight” a search to emphasize something you know.  She suggested using the “exact” box.

 “Always search by individual databases, rather than just putting a name in a general search on the home page.  “Then, if you find the name’s not there, you can check that one off.”

Sort through things 50 items at a time -- or if you want to do 100, you can change the number 50 to 100 in the url at the top.

“If you research with other people, here, or across the country, you’ll want to put your tree on line,” she said.  It can be either public or private.

And trees are a free access item, you don’t need a subscription, but you do need to have a registered guest account.

Anna said genealogy.com was bought by Ancestry -- at the time it had better census data.  It hasn’t been updated in recent years, just maintained.

The Ancestry Library Edition -- free in many libraries -- allows you to get all of the world’s records, not just U.S. records.  But you can’t do personal trees or message boards from the library.

There are about 750-1,000 Ancestry staff, including contractors, at any one time, with about 600 people headquartered in Provo, Utah.

Message boards --  (“they’re wonderful,” said Mort) -- there are probably more than 60,000 total, many being surnames.  And Anna said every county has a message board.

The lifesaver icon you’ll see on Ancestry means “I’ll help you,”  -- the feature was added last year.

Anna mentioned the World Archives Project which encourages people to volunteer to key in records.   If you key in a certain amount, you’re eligible for a discount on your Ancestry subscription.

Anna is reachable by e-mail afechter@....

 

From June 21 Avotaynu E-Zine

U.S. National Archives to Get Alien Registration Records
During World War II, all persons over the age of 14 residing in the United States who were aliens were forced to register. They include people who immigrated decades earlier never bothered to become naturalized citizens. These records have been in the possession of the Citizenship and Immigration Services and are now in the process of being turned over to the National Archives. These Alien Case Files (commonly referred to as A-Files) will be sent to the National Archives when 100 years have passed since the birth date of the subject of a file. At that time, they will be available to the public. The files include information such as photographs, personal correspondence, birth certificates, health records, interview transcripts, visas, applications and more. Additional information can be found at http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2009/nr09-90.html.

Museum of the History of Polish Jews Creates Virtual Shtetl Site
In 1996, the Jewish Historical Institute Association in Warsaw undertook a project to build a Museum of the History of Polish Jews. It will open in 2011 on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. The museum will be a multimedia narrative museum and cultural center presenting the history of Polish Jews and their civilization over almost 1000 years.

The museum now has developed a Virtual Shtetl site at http://www.sztetl.org.pl/?lang=en_GB. The site development is in its infancy but already there is information about many Polish towns. Potentially each town will have subsections identifying the town’s location through maps, general history of the locality, Jewish history, demography (general and Jewish population through the years), Jewish cemeteries, places of martyrology (sites that memorialize the Jews of the town), location of archival material, bibliographies and links to other sites with information about the town. Viewers are encouraged to contribute information about the Jewish presence in the town either as text, photographs, audio or video recordings.

Using the search engine requires a bit of training. In the area just below the word Search there is a place to key in any word or portion of a word. The result is any place at the site that contains the characters in the search argument. Below the data entry field is another field to search for information about a specific town; it requires the correct spelling in Polish. Possibly to help those unfamiliar with the Polish spelling, as each character is typed, all towns at the site that start with the letters are immediately displayed. Therefore typing “Bia” is sufficient to determine they have a site for Białystok. This scheme does not work, of course, for towns whose initial letter starts with a letter that has a diacritic mark such as Łańcut.

Details can be found at http://www.jewishmuseum.org.pl/index.php?lang=en.


British Library Places 19th-Century Newspapers Online
The British Library has launched the public version of its 19th-century British Library Newspaper Web site, located at http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs. There are some two million digitized pages with full-word indexing. Searches of the site are free and downloads of full-text articles are available by purchasing either a 24-hour or seven-day pass.

Canadian Censuses 1851–1916 Now Online
Ancestry.ca, in partnership with Library and Archives Canada, has completed the first online launch of the Canadian censuses, 1851-1916. The censuses are fully indexed and include original document images. Included are more than 32 million names and 1.3 million images of original records. Additional information can be found at http://blogs.ancestry.com/circle/? Ancestry.ca is a fee-for-service site.

Israel Genealogical Society Places Mount of Olives Cemetery Data on Internet
The Israel Genealogical Society has placed on their Web site an index to burials at the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem. The source is the book, “Helkat Mehokek,” which was published in 1913. It is a bilingual (Hebrew-English) searchable database of 8,092 tombstones, mostly covering the period between 1740–1906, although the earliest inscription dates from 1646.

The database was originally made available at the 2004 International Conference on Jewish Genealogy on CD. The English version is located at http://www.isragen.org.il/siteFiles/1/153/4977.asp. The Hebrew version is at http://www.isragen.org.il/siteFiles/13/79/5778.asp.

The actual search function is at the very bottom of each of the pages named above. These pages start with a lengthy description of the history of the index followed by guidelines for using it; scroll down the page to find the results.

New York State Newspaper Site
A number of New York State newspapers have been digitized and indexed at http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html. Of greatest interest to Jewish genealogists will be the Brooklyn Eagle. There are even more recent editions of this newspaper than on that newspaper's own Internet site. I could find no place at the site that listed which newspapers and years have been indexed, but there are Brooklyn Eagle pages into the 1950s and New York Times pages into the 1920s.

Anna Fechter will be out here from Utah to speak to us about the latest from Ancestry.com

 

See you at 7 p.m. on Monday the 15th.

Jewish Genealogy Society of Sacramento

Next Meeting: Monday, June 15, 2009, 7 p.m.

 

Using Ancestry.Com to Enhance Your Family History Research

 

You’ve probably seen the television commercials for Ancestry.com, where a woman goes online and find a leaf of her family tree.  Next Monday, the JGSS will hear from Anna Fechter, of Utah, Community Operations Manager for The Generations Network, which oversees Ancestry.com. She’ll talk about the Web site, which is the number one online source for family history information, including the Web’s largest collection of historical records.

 

Anna, who has been with The Generations Network for four years, currently works with

RootsWeb, the Learning Center and the World Archives Project.  She is a long-time user of Ancestry.com and RootsWeb and enjoys the challenge of piecing together her own and others’ family history research.

 

Newspaper Archives Online

Here’s a free site you should check out – www.newspaperarchive.com -- sponsored by Heritage Microfilm, which says it’s the “world’s leading provider of historical newspaper content, focusing on individual people and the events that impacted their lives.”

NewspaperARCHIVE.com, the largest historical newspaper database online, contains tens of millions of newspaper pages from 1759 to present. Every newspaper in the archive is fully searchable by keyword and date .NewspaperARCHIVE.com is adding about 2.5 million newspaper pages per month.   The Web site claims billons of birth notices, death notices and the lives in between.

(A personal testimonial: I had never heard of this site until last month. I decided to look for an obituary of a great-aunt with a not-so-common name who had died at 5 of scarlet fever in 1906.  (I used her first name +  last name, rather than the name as a whole.) While I didn’t find anything on her, I found two brief “comings and goings” articles from 1933 and 1934 in a small California paper. One mentioned my aunt, with the same first name, and her grandmother (the same last name), as well as four other named family members, “motoring” to Lake Tahoe for the Fourth of July.

 

So I encourage you to give it a try, especially if you can search a less common name on your family tree.     – Susanne)                             

 

 

 

From Avotaynu’s May 31 E-Zine

 

Aufbau Indexing Project Has 47,600 Records Online
The Aufbau Indexing Project plans to index announcements of all births, engagements, marriages, deaths and other special occasions that appeared in the pages of Aufbau between 1934 and 2004. Aufbau is a German-language Jewish newspaper founded in New York in 1934, and since 2004, published in Zurich. The data online can be found at http://www.calzareth.com/aufbau/search.html. When completed, the project expects to have more than 150,000 announcements in the database. Volunteers are sought to help complete the project; send e-mail to aufbauindexingproject@... .


St. Petersburg's Preobrazhenskiy Jewish Cemetery Now Online
Information about 75,000 persons buried in the Preobrazhenskiy Jewish cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia, is now online. The site, located at http://www.Jekl.ru, provides name, birth and death information and a picture of the grave site. It is completely in Russian. Use the Google translator at http://translate.google.com, which does a good job of converting Russian to your native language. In addition, if you are unfamiliar with the Cyrillic alphabet, use the English to Russian alphabet converter at http://stevemorse.org. Searches must be done using the Cyrillic alphabet

Looking at the pictures shows the deplorable condition of the older graves at the cemetery. I searched the surname Pevsner, the name of the chief rabbi of St. Petersburg. Almost every grave more than 50 years old was overgrown with underbrush and trees. The cemetery plans a program where people can pay for the maintenance of a particular grave.


Second Source for Auschwitz Deaths
For a number of years, the museum at Auschwitz has had a searchable list of 69,000 Auschwitz deaths at http://en.auschwitz.org.pl. Most of the records were destroyed by the Germans shortly before the Russian army occupied the camp. The list is of those recorded deaths that survived. A posting to the JewishGen Discussion Group notes there is a second site that has the information. It is located at http://houston.indymedia.org/news/2007/03/56657.php. The Auschwitz Museum site has a conventional search engine that is used to locate a person. The alternate site downloads all the records by initial letter of the surname. The advantage of the second site is that it gives the researcher the opportunity to locate a person by alternate spellings or misspellings of the name. The site, however, takes much more time to download, because it supplies all the records for a given letter of the alphabet.


All-Hungarian Database Now Has 800,000 Records
Tthe Hungarian Special Interest Group (SIG) Discussion Group that the All-Hungarian Database (AHD) has been updated with some 105,000 new vital records. The AHD, which now contains around 800,000 records, includes 180,000 birth, 45,000 death, and 25,000 marriage records. It is located at http://www.jewishgen.org/Hungary.

Included among the new records are vital records for Bezi, Budapest, Csenger, Eger, Erdotelek, Erk, Eperejes, Fuzesabony, Gyomore, Gyongyos, Hodasz, Jarmi, Kassa, Kemcse, Kisleta, Koszeg, Mateszalka, Miskolc, Moson, Sztropko, Szeged, Szobrance, and Vag Besztercze. Of these, Budapest, Gyongyos, Miskolc and Szeged are still ongoing efforts. The AHD now includes more than 20,000 records from Miskolc and 60,000 records from Budapest. The Hungarian SIG is working on the records for Budapest, including those for the Budapest orthodox community, Miskolc, Anarcs, Apagy, Baja, Papa, Sopron, Szeged and Lackenbach.

The work of the Hungarian SIG is done by volunteers. Persons interested in assisting in growing the database can contact the group through their web site.

Most Special Interest Groups under the JewishGen umbrella have projects to index records of their (usually geographic) area. A complete list of regional SIGS can be found at http://www.jewishgen.org/JewishGen/sigs.htm.



FamilySearch Has Records for Numerous Southern U.S. States
FamilySearch, the genealogy arm of the Mormon Church, has announced that in the past 18 months they have added numerous digital images and indexes of records from Southern U.S. states. The records can be searched at the Record Search pilot at http://familysearch.org. Click “Search Records,” and then click “Record Search pilot”.

Among the records are:
  • Alabama Deaths 1908–1974 (Index only)
  • Arkansas County Marriages: 1837–1957
  • Florida Deaths 1877–1939 (Index only)
  • Florida State Censuses: 1855, 1935, 1945 (Images only)
  • Georgia Deaths 1914–1927
  • North Carolina Deaths 1906–1930
  • North Carolina, Davidson County Marriages and Deaths, 1867–1984 (Images only)
  • South Carolina Deaths 1915–1943
  • South Carolina Deaths 1944–1955 (Index only)
  • Texas Deaths 1964–1998 (Index only)
  • Texas Deaths 1890–1976
  • West Virginia Births 1853–1990 (Index only)
  • West Virginia Marriages 1853–1970 (Index only)
  • West Virginia Deaths 1853–1970 (Index only)

 

 

 More Items of Interest (courtesy of the Bay Area JGS)

CALIFORNIA

Los Angeles, California Address Directories

Selected Los Angeles city directories and address directories from 1915–1987 are accessible at http://rescarta.lapl.org:8080/ResCarta-Web/jsp/RcWebBrowse.jsp

The search engine will indicate which of the directories has the surname requested.

 

MARYLAND

Baltimore, Maryland Jewish Cemeteries

www.jewishmuseummd.org/html/cr_genealogy_fhc.html

The Jewish Museum of Maryland has five pdf files available for download that have the burial listings for the cemeteries of Baltimore, Maryland. From Steve Lasky, JewishGen Digest, Feb 9, 2009.

 

UKRAINE

Jewish Agricultural Colonies in the Ukraine – new material

www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Colonies_of_Ukraine

Recent additions to the site include:

1) Translation from Russian of a list of over 700 Holocaust victims killed in the Jewish colony Novozlatopol.

2) Full translation of the 1858 Revision list from the colonies Grafskoy (Prolotarsky) and Mezeritch.

3) Full translation of the 1852 list of settlers on Novozlatopol who came from Latvia in 1846, mainly from the town Lutzin (Ludza).

4) Prenumeranten list of 2000 names in colonies and towns of Yekaterinoslav and Kherson Guberniyas, from ‘Imrei Shmuel’, Part three, 1912. (in Hebrew). From Chaim Freedman, JewishGen Digest, March 12, 2009

 

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See You Monday Evening!