Finding Your Canadian Ancestors: A Beginner’s Guide, by Sherry Irvine and Dave Obee. Softcover, large format, 270 pages. Ancestry Publishing, Provo, Utah. $18.95. Available through Ancestry.com Several Jewish-Canadian historians have done an admirable job in recent decades of demonstrating how […]
“Deported—Likely to Become a Public Charge”
Shocking words! Especially when you discover that they were applied to your mother’s family. Yet these were the words I saw on the document before me that I had just chanced upon while searching for something else. I had long […]
Researching Old U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Correspondence and Case Files
An earlier version of this article was published July–September 2005 in NW Updates, an internal, National Archives electronic newsletter—Ed. For determined and methodical researchers looking for a fascinating yet obscure gem of a resource related to 20th-century immigration […]
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 […]
Small Light
When she came to the phone, she said, “I know who you are.” It was about 5:00 p.m. on the East Coast, September 21, 2005. Her daughter, Amy, answered and said her mother was outside. Could she call me back? […]
My Faceless Grandfather
The challenge for us genealogists is to learn as much as possible about ancestors whom we never or hardly ever knew. We strive to give them a face, to bring them back to life through our research. I was fortunate […]
Genealogy Changed My Life
“I have something to tell you, and I want you to hear it from me while I’m alive.” I had no idea what my mother was going to say. “You are Jewish.” I knew that her mother’s parents, Noemi David […]
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, […]
Using the 1890 New York City Police Census To Find Family Records
I have had success in using the Steve Morse web portal <www.stevemorse.org> and the Ancestry.com for-fee website to research family members and to locate family records in United States censuses. Since I have learned from my research that one of […]
How to Locate a Hard-to-Find Library Holding
My genealogical efforts center around two activities, research into my family history and the compilation of an exhaustive bibliography on the Jews of Posen, today Poznań, Poland. In the course of researching both, I frequently look for such printed items […]
Immigrants to Argentina Listed as Baron de Hirsch Colonists
In 1881, after the murder of Czar Alexander II, the new Czar, Alexander III, appointed Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev as interior minister and charged him with solving the so-called “Jewish problem.” Accordingly, Ignatiev initiated a policy to persecute Jews and […]
United States Citizenship Records: Derivative, Replacement, and Repatriation Certificate Files
Family history researchers long have known the value of naturalization records. Most researchers interested in documenting naturalizations in the United States begin by searching for court copies of the records that today are located in courthouses, local archives, and regional […]