Formally speaking, for Jews who lived during the 18th–20th centuries in Eastern Europe (in the territories of present-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Latvia, and Russia), we cannot take for granted that all their ancestors necessarily dwelled in the region […]
About Alexander Beider
Jewish Surnames Adopted in Various Regions of the Russian Empire
This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the IAJG Conference in Chicago, August 18, 2008—Ed. Generally speaking, it is relatively easy to distinguish Sephardic surnames from Ashkenazic surnames. For example, if one sees two lists, the […]
Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching: An Alternative to Soundex with Fewer False Hits
Searching for names in large databases containing spelling variations has always been a problem. A solution to the problem was proposed by Robert Russell in 1912 when he patented the first soundex system. A variation of Russell’s work, called the […]
Some Issues in Ashkenazic Name Searches
During the symposium that inaugurated the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy in September 2006 in Jerusalem, one lecture particularly attracted my attention, that given by Professor H. Daniel Wagner of the Weizmann Institute of Science. During his presentation, Wagner enumerated […]
Jewish Surnames Adopted in Various Regions of the Russian Empire
Generally speaking, it is relatively easy to distinguish Sephardic surnames from Ashkenazic surnames. For example, if one sees two lists, the first with the names Abitbol, Cordovero, Haddad, Modigliani, Oliveira and Toledano, and another list with the names Bergelson, Goldman, […]