Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors. A Guide for Family Historians. Rosemary Wenzerul. Barnsley, S. Yorkshire: Pen and Sword Books Ltd., 2008. Price: £ 12.99
This excellent guide focuses primarily on United Kingdom Jewish genealogy, but also has much to offer to the broader genealogy community, both Jewish and non-Jewish. It is suitable both for beginners and the more advanced. The book is an improvement with significant additions to the author’s previous publications, which include A Beginners Guide to Jewish Genealogy in Great Britain, Genealogical Resources in the Jewish Home, Jewish Ancestors: A Guide to Organising Your Family History Records, and other works.
Starting with a brief social history of the Jews in England, the book deals with London, the East End, and the provinces. A summary of this type is difficult to cover, yet the author has managed to make the subject lively and pertinent to subsequent sections. The next chapters deal with the practicalities of how to begin research, draw family trees, and use genealogy software. The named family tree software programs could have been expanded e.g., to include the multilingual My Heritage software <www.Myheritage. com>, Legacy, and others. A variety of Internet links are listed, generally relevant and up-to-date.
Subsequent chapters detail specific archives, public record offices, libraries, and museums that hold both general records and more specifically, Jewish records. Regarding libraries, it would have been helpful to include COPAC <http://copac.ac.uk/libraries/> which shows holdings in 24 major academic libraries in the UK.
Later chapters consider the minutiae and specifics of marriage and divorce records, death and burial records, and the deciphering of tombstones. The Hebrew text with transliterations is especially useful. Wenzerul has had some experience as a licensed marriage officer, and this comes over in her very clear exposition of the marriage authorization process, requirements for a Jewish marriage, and the process of a get (Jewish divorce). Some early years of the UK marriage registers are now online on the JGSGB website. Wenzerul errs, however, in describing the worldwide online burial database as being a project of the IAJGS; it is the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR).
Additional sections are on extending the family history, the bits and pieces of family lives that are the “meat” of everyday living: photographs, letters, certificates, and invitations. This includes websites for children and also useful advice about digital photographs, backups, and upgrading to newer technologies. How many of us have material on old floppy discs and no longer have the disc drive to read it?
The chapter on Jews in the armed forces and how to obtain these records is well structured and includes some useful resources. It could be noted here that the World War I Roll of Honour publication is in the process of being revised and updated. Jewish names and naming patterns is a difficult topic, but the author has managed a concisely written chapter on the subject.
One difficulty any work of this type has is that by the time it gets to print some references are outdated. Now, in 2008, we have a new, two-volume expanded edition of Alexander Beider’s A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire to replace the 1993 edition referenced in the text.
Out-of-the-ordinary areas of research also of use to non-Jewish researchers are the chapters on the medical profession and heraldry. Useful areas also are the UK and overseas connections. Unfortunately, this section omits the Carribean and Latin America, but that does not detract from its basic usefulness.
Under Israel, there is no mention of JFRA, the Jewish Family Research Association, formed by Israel to help people find roots and ancestors, trace families, create family trees, and research databases and archives <www. genealogy.org.il>. Also missing is The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy and the Paul Jacobi Centre at the Jewish National and University Library (HUJI), Israel, This is developing Jewish genealogy into a recognized academic discipline within the realm of Jewish Studies. Its website is <www.iijg.org/home/ index.html>. The section on South Africa omits the most relevant online SA Jewish Rootsbank database <http://chrysalis.its.uct.ac .za/CGI/CGI_ROOTWEB.EXE>, from the Centre for Jewish Migration and Genealogy Studies at the Kaplan Centre, University of Cape Town. Another omission is that of the growing area of Jewish Genetic Genealogy—the study of Y-DNA and MtDNA markers in terms of family connections and migration patterns.
The last chapter has useful illustrative case studies based around the author’s own Anglo-Dutch ancestors, helpful to anyone beginning genealogical research.
In a publication of this nature, there are always publisher’s constraints in terms of the length of the guide. Obviously the author has to make some judgments, and the few omissions do not detract from the overall usefulness of this guide. This attractive and compact publication is very well laid out and profusely illustrated. The illustrations are clearly printed; the type fonts are very easy to read, and there is paragraph spacing that makes it very readable and user friendly. It is properly referenced and the bibliography, although succinct, is most useful.
There is certainly no equivalent publication to date in the UK. I have no hesitation in recommending it to all who have even a remote interest in the topic. I should add that Wenzerul is responsible for the series of publications that resulted in the recent International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) award to the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain.
Saul Issroff
