The slow decline of the Aleppo Jewish community began during the 19th century following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and was accelerated following the turmoil of World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in […]
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 […]
Launching the Converso Genealogy Project: Tracking the Diaspora of the New Christians
I was born into a Roman Catholic family in Havana, Cuba, but from a young age, I felt Jewish and inexplicably was drawn to all things Jewish. After converting to Orthodox Judaism at age 34, I found clues along my […]
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 […]
Breaking News! NY Municipal Archives Throws In the Towel in Public Access Fight!
Reclaim the Records Won! Brooke Won! The Public won! Records Access won! In Early September I posted on Avotaynu Online about how one genealogist can make a difference-(see http://adam.learnpress.esy.es/2015/09/public-records-access-one-genealogist-can-make-a-difference/) when Brooke Schreier Ganz and Reclaim the Records filed a legal […]
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 […]
A Family Tree of Scottish Jewry: Records-Retrieval Stage Completed!
The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy (IIJG) has been engaged for three years in an exhaustive demographic study of the Scottish Jewish community from the founding of the community to the present. The IIJG is pleased to announce that Michael […]
A Brief History and Detailed Listing of the Jews of Tàrrega, Spain, Before and After the Black Death and Pogrom of 1348
Maria Jose Surribas Camps The Jewish community or aljama of Tàrrega, on the Royal Road between Barcelona and Lleida, dates back to 1278 or earlier.[1] What follows is a description of that community from a genealogical perspective, from its earliest […]
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 […]
Creating Master Indexes of Names For Districts Surrounding Major Shtetls, by Ronald Doctor
The Kremenets District Research Group has recently published its Indexed Concordance of Personal Names and Town Names, a master index that now has almost 73,000 entries. The group’s experiences in creating the Concordance suggest that it may be a fruitful […]
JewishGen’s Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR)
JOWBR, one of JewishGen’s most popular databases, seeks to catalogue data about Jewish cemeteries and burial records worldwide, from the earliest records to the present, and to be the central search location for Jewish burial records. JewishGen charges no fees […]
Projects Undertaken by Jewish Genealogical Societies
Most genealogy societies undertake projects of one sort or another—and try to publicize them. The problem is that we genealogists tend to suffer from stimulus overload and cannot always remember what we have read or heard about this or that […]
Jewish Genealogical Search Engines, Databases and Social Interaction Networks
This paper is based upon a talk given at the IAJGS Conference in Chicago, August 2008.—Ed. Many genealogists have discovered the value of the Internet to search for information about Jewish ancestors, descendants who migrated to other lands […]
JRI-Poland Database and Rabbinic Data Merging
In the Spring 2008 issue of AVOTAYNU, in an article that focuses on tombstone identification, Professor Daniel Wagner highlights the integration of “family data from different sources and databases from different repositories” (“Tombstone Identification through Database Merging”). In a similar […]
Susan King Steps Down as JewishGen Director; Warren Blatt Assumes Leadership
JewishGen, the preeminent Jewish genealogical website <www.jewishgen.org>, has had a change in leadership. Susan E. King, the ebullient founder and director of JewishGen, relinquished the reins effective March 31, 2008. Warren Blatt, JewishGen’s vice-president and editor-in-chief since 2004, has taken […]
Deep Linking and Deeper Linking: Getting the Most Out of Existing Search Applications
This article first appeared in APG Quarterly, the magazine of the Association of Professional Genealogists. My website at <http://stevemorse.org> consists of web-based tools that I’ve developed. Many of those tools use deep linking to allow you to search databases on […]
IAJGS 2006: Strategies for Assigning Surnames to Early JRI-Poland Records
Jewish genealogists who trace family to the early 19th century frequently encounter difficulty trying to follow the trail back to the time when their ancestors did not use hereditary family names. Researchers who find records without surnames often cannot determine […]
Finding Immigrant Ancestors in Historical Newspapers
The following article has been adapted and updated from a presentation given at the IAJGS conference in New York City in August 2006— Ed. Jewish genealogists tracking ancestors who emigrated to the United States generally are amazed to discover how […]
Some Issues in Ashkenazic Name Searches
During the symposium that inaugurated the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy in September 2006 in Jerusalem, one lecture particularly attracted my attention, that given by Professor H. Daniel Wagner of the Weizmann Institute of Science. During his presentation, Wagner enumerated […]