In November 2014, I happened across an Ancestry.com online tree featuring Sarah Pikholz, her husband Eisig Baar and twelve children. The tree had them in Czechoslovakia but I quickly found the first three births in Yahilnytsya (Jagielnica) in east Galicia, […]
In Search of the Ciechanower Rebbe Connection
This is an article about the methodology I used in an attempt to prove (or disprove) a family tale of connection to a famous rabbi, the Ciechanower rebbe. It revolves around my grandfather, Simon Landau, who was born in Lodz, […]
Finding Mrs. Buchholz
I only knew my beloved childhood companion as “Mrs. Buchholz.” Between 1939 and 1942, when I was a small child, she lived with my family as our housekeeper. After she left us, I never saw her again, […]
Abris Survived!
When my grandmother, Blanche Klein Sobel, came to the United States from Hungary in December 1902, with her mother, Rose (Rezi), and her two youngest siblings, Bertha and Maurice (Moritz), they joined most of the family, including her father, Bernat, […]
My New Hobby: How I Started to Look for My Relatives
Marina Zokolov z”l This article is dedicated to my beloved wife, Marina, who died on February 4, 2010, at the age of 44. Ihave enjoyed many different hobbies in my life, but recently I discovered something absolutely new. I will […]
Retracing My Grandfather’s Journey: Kovno to Hamburg, Through Hull to America
This is the story of how my grandfather, born Hillel Sragan in 1871 in Keidan, Lithuania, transformed himself into Henry Wolinsky, a clothing merchant in Boston, the Goldene Medinah, in 1892. For 30 years I had sought answers to questions […]
Discovering Freda Brachman
The name Freda is written on the back of a photograph that a relative inherited from her mother. We knew very little about Freda. Her maiden name was Zwein; she was married to a man named Brachman; she was from […]
Paternal Family History of Bernard Madoff: A Case Study for Neophyte Genealogists
As publisher of AVOTAYNU, I receive many inquiries from people asking how they should begin tracing their Jewish family history. The process is almost stereotypical if your immigrant ancestor came from Eastern Europe. Recently, as an intellectual exercise, I tried […]
Dealing with Relationships That Are Known But Cannot Be Proven: A Case Study
Many researchers, particularly those who are working on very large families or single-surname projects, reach a point where a particular relationship can be deduced, but cannot quite be proven. Naming patterns may fit and the times and places are plausible, […]
Finding Prisoner B68739, Jacob “Cuppy” Migden
Even after spending 12 years researching and writing a book about the Migden families from Tarnopol, Poland, I never found Jacob (a/k/a Jack “Cuppy”) Migden. This happened only after attending a presentation by Jewish genealogist Ron Arons, author of The […]
Not Just an Old Piece of Paper
One evening in 1992, while sorting through some papers that had belonged to my late father, I came across an old and fragile Hebrew document that I could not recall seeing before. Because of the old-fashioned printing style, I suspected […]
Twenty-five Years and Five Name Changes Later: How I Found My Great-Grandmother
I was discouraged that the 84-year-old man for whom I recently discovered a paper trail had not called me back after two voice messages and a two-page letter with a photograph that I mailed. He might not be alive, or […]
Uniting Siblings—From a Distance
In the early 1990s, I began to research my Veffer family from Holland. It was before online telephone listings and before everyone had e-mail. While it could now be done in seconds online, I spent hours and hours tediously searching […]
How I Obtained Photographs Of All My Great-Grandparents
Every Thanksgiving my family sat around the dinner table and repeated exactly the same questions as the previous year: Where did our family come from and when? We believed that our great-grandparents immigrated to the United States in the 1890s, […]
Joseph’s Journey
My cousin said that there was something wrong with Joseph—he did not know what, but thought that he might have been retarded—and that he had been placed in an institution. When I was 49 years old, an […]
My Father Had a Secret
“I wonder?” That’s the question that strolled through my mind when I started my journey to my family’s past. How did they live? What were they like? How did what they did and didn’t do lead to me? Every time […]
Identifying Benjamin W. Cohen Of New York and New Orleans
Rabbi Malcolm H. Stern, FASG, built his classic book on Jewish families in America on a foundation of thorough understanding of Hebrew customs, skilled use of records and correspondence with descendants.[1] Decades later, omitted lines require specialized research to tell […]
Death In Venice: Seeking the Katzenellenbogen Tombstones [AB-033]
This article was first published on Chaim Freedman’s blog at http://chfreedman.blogspot.com/—Ed. Having recently discovered my descent from the Katzenellenbogen family, I decided to trace the graves of members of the early generations while I was in Italy in May […]
Case Study: Using ITS Records to Discover Fate of the Family of World-Renowned Talmudist Professor David Halivni
In the past few years the myth that no records survived for anyone who perished in the Holocaust finally has been exploded. One of the most comprehensive and overwhelming sources is found in Bad Arolsen, Germany, in the records of […]
Did They Really Meet on the Boat?
We all know about urban myths, legends, and fairy tales, et cetera. A story gets told, and retold, from person to person, until there’s no longer an original source, no factual back-up, and no way to know if the tale […]
About the Life of Barney Hysinger
After recovering the basic details of my ancestors’ lives, such as dates and places of birth, marriage and death, I like to learn as much as possible about their personal lives. Searches of the daily newspapers several days after death […]