At an ever-increasing pace, creators of genealogically useful databases are posting them on the Internet—and scattering them in a variety of different locations. Some may be found on the website of a Jewish genealogical society; others are on JewishGen; still […]
Personal Journeys: A Leaf in the Genealogy Tree, by Madeleine Isenberg
I’ve been working on my family tree for about 20 years now and helping others find their roots, branches, or leaves in theirs somewhat less than that. My work, while it is something of a hobby, is quite intense. Now […]
Personal Journeys: A Trove of Family Letters Yields a Novel, by Julie Freestone
I was four years old when my mother, Mathilda Gruber Conan, and my sister Laura and I joined my father Abraham Conan (née Makovietzki), in Germany where he was working as part of the Allied High Command Occupation Forces. He […]
Personal Journeys: Searching for Stones, by Madeleine Isenberg
No matter how much you ask people for their help, there are times you just have to do it all yourself. Take my quest which became a hunt for stones, to find more about a distant relative whose name was […]
Avotaynu Contributing Editors: Fall 2010
AUSTRALIA (Caplan) Australian Jewish Genealogical Society (Sydney) e-Report, October 2010. On October 31, 2010, as part of the Day of Jewish Culture and Heritage organized by B’nai B’rith, the society displayed books and CDs documenting the history of Jewish communities […]
JGS Newsletters: Fall, 2010
To read an article or news release excerpted in U.S. Update, order the issue of the publication in which it appeared from the appropriate JGS. A list of Jewish Genealogical Societies can be found at iajgs.org/members/members.html. A list of Special […]
Ask the Experts, Fall 2010
The following message was sent to AVOTAYNU editor, Sallyann Amdur Sack-Pikus—Ed. I am seeking information about Radute or Redutka, a small community just outside of Rokiskis, Lithuania. Did all the families who lived in Redutka share something in common? A […]
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, […]
Ask the Experts: Winter 2009
by Randy Daitch and Eileen Polakoff My great-grandfather, Meshullem Yankov ben Yitzkok Gottesman, married Rachel Fleischer (b. circa 1860, died 1918 USA), in the town of Sniatyn, Ukraine, and died there circa 1891–1901. He had a sister, Belima, […]
JGS Newsletter Summary: Winter 2009
by Diane Goldman To read an article or news release excerpted in U.S. Update, order the issue of the publication in which it appeared from the appropriate JGS. A list of Jewish Genealogical Societies can be found at <iajgs.org/members/members.html>. A […]
Contributing Editors: Winter 2009
AUSTRALIA (Sharpe) Jewish Genealogy Downunder, quarterly publication of the Australian Jewish Genealogical Society (Victoria), Vol. 11, No 3, October 2009. Bubbles Segall, well known for her work over many years with the South African Special Interest Group (SIG), recently […]
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 […]
Personal Journeys: The Isenberg Family Comes Alive
The year was 1970. One morning that summer, I was exiting, quite unexpectedly, the railway station in Hamburg, Germany. It was the last place I wanted to be. I had misread the train schedule, leading me to believe I could […]
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 […]