In an ideal world, a genealogist inherits the perfect family photograph—one in which relatives are thoughtfully posed in a well-lighted photography studio. The photograph had been passed down in pristine condition with the photographer’s imprint and logo clearly marked, and […]
The Value of Creating a Family Name Website
Why create a genealogy website? All genealogists researching an uncommon family name should make use of modern communication medium and display their research on a public website. This is our emphatic conclusion two-plus years after publishing the Amdur family website […]
Directories
This section will discuss four categories of directories whose contents can be useful for genealogical research: city directories, telephone directories, biographical directories, and professional directories. All of these valuable reference sources can be found in the United States and internationally. […]
Publish or Perish: How I Got the Rubinoff-Naftolin Family Saga into Print
“Zhhlobin–Market Street” reads the caption of this rare postcard photograph, circa 1900, of the Belarussian shtetl where my great-grandparents lived before bringing their children to Canada around 1910. The postcard is part of an incredible collection of more than 100 […]
Book Review: Google Your Family Tree, by Daniel M. Lynch
Google Your Family Tree, by Daniel M. Lynch. Softcover, xii + 340 pp. FamilyLink.com, Inc. $34.95. Available through Avotaynu, <www.avotaynu.com/books/ Google Your-Family-Tree.htm> I rarely get excited about new things. The last time that happened was when a man named Stephen […]
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: […]
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 […]
Coming to America through Hamburg and Liverpool Part II: Crossing the Atlantic
In Part I of the saga, “Coming to America Through Hamburg and Liverpool,” in AVOTAYNU, Vol. XXII, No. 4, (Winter 2006), pp. 15–22, we tracked the six Boonin children across Europe to Hamburg, their crossing of the North Sea, their […]
Tombstone Identification through Database Merging
This article originally appeared in the Fall/Winter issue of Roots-Key, the journal of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles. It is reprinted with permission—Ed. The development of sophisticated tools designed to integrate—or merge—family data from different sources and databases […]
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 […]
Careful researchers must always seek to verify an age or birth date
Originally published under the title: “Age Makes a Difference”. Genealogists typically pay close attention to the ages and birth dates of individuals. Often this data is used to determine whether or not a given individual is a particular ancestor being […]
Finding Emigrants Who Sailed Under a Different Name
After five years of fruitless searching, I finally found the ship manifest for my grandfather and his parents. I had critical help. Someone else actually did it. The method used may be useful to others. A marine historian, Allan Jordan, […]
Book Review: A Practical Guide to Jewish Cemeteries
A Practical Guide to Jewish Cemeteries, by Nolan Menachemson. Hardcover, 248 pages + vii. Bergenfield, NJ: Avotaynu, 2007. As becomes apparent from the pages of this tome (pun intended), there is richness even in death. This is the most concise […]