The Scottish Jewish Archives Centre is housed in the beautiful Garnethill Synagogue, Scotland’s first purpose-built synagogue, erected in the Garnethill district of Glasgow during 1879. The Centre houses a diverse collection of records of the Jewish experience in Scotland since […]
Tracing German-Jewish Ancestry to the 17th Century — And Much Earlier, by Arthur Obermayer [AB-057]
With the help of Y-DNA analysis, fortuitous acquaintanceship with an extraordinary researcher and the use of some relatively unknown sources, I have traced my Obermayer family history unequivocally to 1655 and, with less certainty, even earlier than that — a […]
The Obermayers: A History of a Jewish Family in Germany and America, 1618—2009, by Kenneth Libo and Michael Feldberg
The Obermayers: A History of a Jewish Family in Germany and America, 1618—2009, by Kenneth Libo and Michael Feldberg. The book contains histories and genealogies of the Obermayer, Lehmann, Sinsheimer, and Oberndoerfer families from Creglingen, Augsburg, Furth, and other towns […]
Rural Jewish Population of Minsk Guberniya, 1795–1914
Although Jews typically are viewed as urban dwellers, there was a considerable rural Jewish population in early modern Eastern Europe. The census of Jews in the Polish crown lands conducted in 1764-65 indicated that, of the total number of Jews in the […]
European Union’s Proposed “Right to be Forgotten” Described
We have been reading and hearing about the European Union’s “Right to be Forgotten” and “Right to be Erased” both through a proposed data privacy regulation and a recent European Union Court of Justice decision. This article is an attempt […]
Int’l Inst. of Jewish Genealogy: Riga House Registers in 1918 – 1940 Latvia
This paper by Olga Aleksejeva utilized the new searchable database of the 20-21,000 Jews living in Riga in the inter-war period and is accompanied by an extended historical and sociological narrative, contextualizing the findings in the database. The work was […]
The Jews of Óbuda, Miskolc, and Pest: A Grassroots Genealogical Approach
Avant Propos – a Genealogical Approach to Jewish History In an episode of the NBC television show Who do you think You are?, a show in which Hollywood actors and other entertainers search for their family roots, two historians helped a […]
Galicia: Land of My Ancestors
Some of my earliest memories are of my parents telling my brother and me stories of their journey from Vienna to America, which occurred several years before I was born. At some point I no longer needed to hear those […]
Navigating the ELA Database on the Polish State Archives’ Website
The database ELA (Ewidencje Ludności w Archiwaliach—Registers of Population in Archival Materials) of the Polish State Archives (PSA) is a valuable resource for genealogists researching communities in current-day Poland.1 Although many population registers were lost or destroyed during World War […]
Genealogical Research and the Virtual Jewish Community in Germany Today
This article is adapted from a presentation at the IAJGS conference in Los Angeles, July 2010—Ed. Two Jewish communities are flourishing in Germany today, a real community and a virtual community. The real Jewish community consists of about 200,000 individuals, […]
Book Review: La Frontiere Jurassienne au Quotidienne 1939–1945, by Henry Spira
La Frontiere Jurassienne au Quotidienne 1939–1945 (Daily events at the Jurassic frontier 1939–1945), by Henry Spira. Geneva, Switzerland: Editions Slatkine, 2010. In French. Available at Amazon.com Henry Spira’s monumental and illuminating achievement took 15 years to complete. It provides the reader […]
Book Review: Lithuanian Jewish Culture, by Dovid Katz
Lithuanian Jewish Culture, by Dovid Katz. Originally published 2004 and reprinted in 2010, by Baltos Lankos of Lithuania. Large format, 400 pages, hardcover. ISBN 9955-584-41-6. www.baltoslankos.lt. Available online from: http://www.amazon.com/Lithuanian-Jewish-Culture-Dovid-Katz/dp/9639776513 Dovid Katz, the New York-born, award-winning Yiddish scholar who founded the […]
Getting It Right: Working with the British Commonwealth Graves Commission
Since approximately 1995, a team of enthusiastic and dedicated historians and genealogists working with the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women (AJEX) has provided appropriate evidence to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) to amend errors in relation to the […]
The Problem of Jewish Burials in Geneva, Switzerland: The Cemetery of Veyrier
On the face of it, the Jewish community of Geneva, Switzerland, would seem to have no problems burying its dead according to Jewish law. It uses the Jewish cemetery in nearby Veyrier. The cemetery itself, however, is an anomaly, the […]
Leading Genealogical Resource for Frankfurt am Main Jewry Now Online
Personal data about virtually every Jew buried in the once-important Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, circa 1240 to 1900, is recorded in the German-language publication Ele Toldot (These are the generations) by the late Shlomo Ettlinger, a post-World […]
Genealogical Sources for Researching Jewish Families in Maramaros Sziget and Vicinity
The following article is adapted from a presentation the coauthors gave at the IAJGS conference in Los Angeles in July 2010—Ed. Jewish History in Maramaros Before the Holocaust, the Jewish population of Maramaros County, Hungary, and its capital city, […]
State Historical Archives in Vilnius: Lithuania Roulette
The following is excerpted from a larger article in Rodziny, The Journal of the Polish Genealogical Society of America, Winter 2010—Ed. with translation assistance from William F. Hoffman The collections of the Lithuanian State Historical Archives clearly reflect the geopolitical […]
Resources to Find Any Location in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Similar Resources for Imperial Russia and Imperial Germany
The three large 19th-century European empires—Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia—all collapsed either during, or as a result of, World War I. New countries and altered boundaries emerged, often with different names or different spellings of geographical locations. Fortunately, finding aids for […]
Online Polish Resources for Tracing Ancestry
This article surveys online resources that help genealogists determine where records were created and where they are found. Determining place names and jurisdictions are the basic skills a researcher must develop when searching for a Polish ancestor in the place […]
Book Review: Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, by Benjamin Nathans
Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, by Benjamin Nathans, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xvii + 424 pp. $26.95. At a recent genealogy society meeting, someone commented that her ancestor had lived in St. Petersburg […]
Bibliography for Records of the Former Soviet Union
At the IAJGS conference in Los Angeles, July 2010, Professor Benjamin Nathans presented a report on the archives of the former Soviet Union. As part of his talk, Professor Nathans distributed the following list of sources. His book, Beyond the […]
A Different Approach to Polish Research
This article first appeared in the e-report of the Australian Jewish Genealogical Society, (Sydney), July 2010— Ed. Researching my father’s paternal Nachemstein side over 25 years has yielded wonderful results both in record retrieval and in finding and meeting cousins […]
Exploring Cemeteries and Byways in Ukraine
From May 17 to June 1, 2010, I traveled in Ukraine, spending 15 days visiting 18 cities, towns, and villages looking for traces of Jewish life and records of my family’s residence there. My parents and grandparents all immigrated to […]
Nineteenth-Century Jewish Civil Records In Southern Germany
This article is adapted from a presentation at the IAJGS conference in Los Angeles, July 2010—Ed. Most Jewish genealogists researching their European ancestry eventually confront 19th-century civil records, but the variety of types and forms of such documents may be […]
Jewish Vital Records in the Polish State Archives Not Listed Elsewhere
LDS (Mormon) microfilms of Jewish vital records from Poland are the most convenient sources of Jewish vital records.1 Although Miriam Weiner’s Routes to Roots website <www.rtrfoundation.org> does not include copies of records themselves, it is another highly useful […]