Comment identifier nos origines ancestrales ? Il existe malheureusement très peu de sources historiques, familiales ou documentaires pour identifier nos ancêtres Juif marocains. Au mieux, nous avons connaissance d’un ou de deux ancêtres nés au 18e ou au 19e siècle parce qu’ils […]
Index of Jewish Surnames Found in 20th Century Cairo – Updated December 2022
The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable surge of publications, both academic and literary, about Jewish life in Egypt during the 20th century. The latest is the Ph.D. thesis by Dr.Liat Maggid Alon from the Ben Gurion University, a summary […]
A Consolidated Index of Jewish Surnames in 20th Century Damascus
Like many other Jewish communities in the Levant, the Jewish community of Damascus dwindled from a thriving community with 12,000 members in 1943 until only a handful remained by 2010. Its members largely left for Mandatory Palestine and later to […]
Baghdadi Female Given Names -A Crowd-Sourced Fragmental List
Little attention was dedicated so far to the research of female given names of the Jews in the Levant. The most recent dictionary by the late Mathilde A. Tagger[1] deals mainly with Sephardic given names and barely touches the given […]
An Analytical Approach to Decoding Jewish Tombstones and Other Artifacts
Twenty years ago I accidentally discovered my own great-grandmother’s matzeva (tombstone) in a small cemetery in Kezmarok, Slovakia, a town by then devoid of living Jews. This astounding discovery spurred me to examine thousands of other abandoned, unvisited, ignored, […]
MyHeritage Launches Book Matching
Books have always been one of the best resources for family history: they are often very organized and well-researched, and many of them were written by contemporaries of our ancestors. But for those of us who have spent countless hours […]
Subscribe to IAJGS Records-Access Alert!
In February 2013, the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS), started a new announcement list, the IAJGS Records Access Alert. At that time it was decided to open the Alert only to subscribers that were members of IAJGS member […]
Researchers band together to index records from Visokaye, Belarus
In the best tradition of Jewish genealogy, a number of the members of the Wysokie-Litewskie Internet mailing list have pooled their resources in a three-stage initiative to obtain genealogically relevant records from the town of Vysokaye (Visoko-Litovsk), Belarus. While the cost […]
Let’s Put All Our Eggs in One Basket
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 […]
“Sousa Mendes’s List” — The Search for Survivors
The Sousa Mendes Foundation actively seeks families who received lifesaving visas from the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes in the Spring of 1940. Sousa Mendes, stationed in Bordeaux, France, rescued thousands from the Holocaust by providing them visas to […]
Updated: Future Developments in Jewish Family History Research
As amply documented by Avotaynu over the last three decades, members of the Jewish genealogical community have made important contributions to the field of online genealogy with innovations such as the Jewish Genealogical Family Finder, the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex, JewishGen, and […]