The three large 19th-century European empires—Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia—all collapsed either during, or as a result of, World War I. New countries and altered boundaries emerged, often with different names or different spellings of geographical locations. Fortunately, finding aids for […]
About Edward David Luft
Jewish Vital Records in the Polish State Archives Not Listed Elsewhere
LDS (Mormon) microfilms of Jewish vital records from Poland are the most convenient sources of Jewish vital records.1 Although Miriam Weiner’s Routes to Roots website <www.rtrfoundation.org> does not include copies of records themselves, it is another highly useful […]
How the Virtual Shtetl Project’s Website Can Help Genealogists
Much has been written about the Virtual Shtetl Project, but no detailed discussion of what this project can do for genealogy researchers has appeared until now.1 The website www.shtetl.org.pl/ has many resources for genealogists interested in researching the Jews of […]
Directories in Addition to City Directories
When Alex Friedlander’s article on directories appeared in the Avotaynu Guide to Jewish Genealogy, it was accurate and covered many of the resources then available. Much more has become known on the subject, however, and some changes have occurred. Today, […]
Newspaper and Magazine Websites Valuable For Genealogical Research
Newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries are rich sources of genealogical data, but gaining access to them can be difficult and time-consuming. This article discusses two new websites that offer full-text, key-word access to these newspapers: […]
US Citizenship and Immigration Service Opens Fee-for-Service Genealogy Program
The long-anticipated U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) fee-for-service genealogy program opened to the public in August 2008 with USCIS’s well-known historian Marian Smith as Acting Chief. Complete details and history of the program were described by Arline Sachs in […]
Three Manhattan Databases: Using Newspapers to Find Bankruptcy Cases Leading to Court Cases
This article describes the use of three separate resources to augment information about an ancestor, including approximate date of residence in a specific locale, addresses and general lifestyle (in this case down to the type and number of underclothes the […]
Book Review: Germanic Genealogy: A Guide to Worldwide Sources and Migration Patterns
Germanic Genealogy: A Guide to Worldwide Sources and Migration Patterns, by Edward R. Brandt, PhD, Mary Sutter Bellingham, Kent Cutkomp, et al. 3rd edition, St. Paul, MN: Germanic Genealogy Society, 2006, 658 pp., $49 plus shipping and handling. Brandt and […]
How to Locate a Hard-to-Find Library Holding
My genealogical efforts center around two activities, research into my family history and the compilation of an exhaustive bibliography on the Jews of Posen, today Poznań, Poland. In the course of researching both, I frequently look for such printed items […]
Book Review: Bibliographie zur deutsch-jüdischen Familienforschung und zur neueren Regional- und Lokalgeschichte der Juden, by Angelika Ellmann-Krüger and Dietrich Ellmann
Bibliographie zur deutsch-jüdischen Familienforschung und zur neueren Regional- und Lokalgeschichte der Juden (Bibliography on German-Jewish family research and on the recent regional and local history of the Jews) by Angelika Ellmann-Krüger and Dietrich Ellmann, (Berlin: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), ISBN 978-3-05447-8. […]
Posen Province Archival Holdings at the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw
Edward David Luff describes his 2003 visit to the Archives and describes it holdings of genealogical interest.