On a visit to Cape Town, South Africa, in 1999, I telephoned my cousin, Ronnie Levinsohn, whom I last had seen as a child. I was telling him of our visit to Latvia the year before and that we had […]
Genealogical Sources for the Jews of Southern Germany During the Pre-Emancipation Period
Before 1806, southern Germany consisted of hundreds of independent territories of varying sizes. Some were owned and ruled by noble and princely families, others by bishops (and called bishoprics). The largest realms with a Jewish population were the Electoral Palatinate […]
Book Review: My Future Is In America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants. Edited and translated by Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer
My Future Is In America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants. Edited and translated by Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer. Softcover, 330 pages. Published by New York University Press in conjunction with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. $25.00 In 1942, […]
The 1897 All-Empire Russian Census
The 1897 All-Empire Russian Census was the first and only census conducted in the Russian Empire prior to World War II. Its major interest and value both for personal genealogy and for the history of Jewish communities is that the […]
Jewish Surnames Adopted in Various Regions of the Russian Empire
This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the IAJG Conference in Chicago, August 18, 2008—Ed. Generally speaking, it is relatively easy to distinguish Sephardic surnames from Ashkenazic surnames. For example, if one sees two lists, the […]
A Website List of Latvian Jewry Prior to World War II
This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the IAJGS Conference in Chicago, August 2008—Ed. The purpose of the Latvian Holocaust Jewish Names Project is to recover the names and the identities of Latvian Jews who perished during World […]
Book Review: Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors. A Guide for Family Historians. Rosemary Wenzerul. Barnsley, S. Yorkshire
Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors. A Guide for Family Historians. Rosemary Wenzerul. Barnsley, S. Yorkshire: Pen and Sword Books Ltd., 2008. Price: £ 12.99 This excellent guide focuses primarily on United Kingdom Jewish genealogy, but also has much to offer to […]
Accessing Archival Sources: Project Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia Judaica
Genealogical research does not always end with the compilation of a family tree. The desire for a colorfully illustrated tree of life often inspires the dream of putting specific faces to the names one has found, investigating more closely the […]
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 […]
Litvak Migratory Decisions in the 19th Century And Their Consequences: Prussian Transit Migration
This article is based on a lecture given at the 28th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy held in Chicago, August 2008. The history of Jewish migration from the Czarist Russian Empire beginning in the second half of the 19th century […]
Czech Archival Sources: History of the Jews in the Czech Lands
The following article is an adaptation of a lecture given at the 28th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy held in Chicago in August, 2008—Ed. The political and social changes that occurred in the Czech Republic after November 1989 opened access […]
Book Review: Posen Place Name Indexes: Identifying Place Names Using Alphabetical and Reverse Alphabetical Indexes, by Roger P. Minert
Posen Place Name Indexes: Identifying Place Names Using Alphabetical and Reverse Alphabetical Indexes, by Roger P. Minert, (Provo, UT: GRT Publications, 2004), 101 pp., soft-cover, ISBN 0-9716906-6-9. $9.95 from <www.grtpublications.com>. Note: Roger Meinert published a series of 23 books (and […]
Bringing the “Great Terror” Home
Family stories had Mowshe (Morris) Rosenfeld coming from “Minsk, Pinsk, Russia.” As my research progressed, I learned from Morris’ ship’s passenger list that he had, in fact, come from a place called Turovo. Slownik Geograficzny Krolestwo Poliskich, the multi-volume, standard […]
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 […]
German Passports Found in Shanghai
This article appeared initially in The Kosher Koala, newsletter of the Australian Jewish Genealogical Society, Inc., Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2008. It is reproduced with the permission of the author— Ed. Sitting at the computer, my wife, Rieke, knew […]
A Journey to Ukraine: A World That Was but Is No More
At the end of our journey to Ukraine, an obvious question arose, a question that touched the very essence of our having been there—what was the meaning of our desire to visit lands in which we were not born, where […]
From Russia and Back—Full Circle in 99 Years
Unlike most of those who emigrated from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century, my grandfather did speak quite a bit about the family he left behind. My father and his brother tended to roll their eyes when […]
Book Review: Germanic Genealogy: A Guide to Worldwide Sources and Migration Patterns
Germanic Genealogy: A Guide to Worldwide Sources and Migration Patterns, by Edward R. Brandt, PhD, Mary Sutter Bellingham, Kent Cutkomp, et al. 3rd edition, St. Paul, MN: Germanic Genealogy Society, 2006, 658 pp., $49 plus shipping and handling. Brandt and […]
Jewish History as Reflected in the Documents of the State Archives of Odessa Region
A variant of this article appears on the Internet at http://www.rtrfoundation.org/Odessa.html. The State Archives of the Odessa Region (GAOO), one of the large-scale archives in southern Ukraine, holds 13,110 fonds (collections) with 2.2 million files, the majority in […]
Book Review: History of the Jewish Community of Schneidemühl 1641 to the Holocaust
History of the Jewish Community of Schneidemühl 1641 to the Holocaust, by Peter Simonstein Cullman. Hardcover, 390 pages + x. Bergenfield, New Jersey: Avotaynu, 2007. The title of the book really says it all. Peter Cullman has meticulously studied five […]
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 […]
Jewish History as Reflected in the Documents of the State Archives of Odessa Region
A variant of this article appears on the Internet at http://www.rtrfoundation.org/Odessa.html The State Archives of the Odessa Region (GAOO), one of the large-scale archives in southern Ukraine, holds 13,110 fonds (collections) with 2.2 million files, the majority in Cyrillic. Others […]
Jewish Ancestors? A Guide to Jewish Genealogy In the United Kingdom, by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain
Jewish Ancestors? A Guide to Jewish Genealogy in the United Kingdom. Published by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain; contributing editor Rosemary Wenzerul, 2006. Paperback, 144 pages. Because my paternal grandfather and grandmother were born in London’s East End […]
Book Review: Bibliographie zur deutsch-jüdischen Familienforschung und zur neueren Regional- und Lokalgeschichte der Juden, by Angelika Ellmann-Krüger and Dietrich Ellmann
Bibliographie zur deutsch-jüdischen Familienforschung und zur neueren Regional- und Lokalgeschichte der Juden (Bibliography on German-Jewish family research and on the recent regional and local history of the Jews) by Angelika Ellmann-Krüger and Dietrich Ellmann, (Berlin: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), ISBN 978-3-05447-8. […]
Constructing a Town-Wide Genealogy: Jewish Mattersdorf, Hungary, 1698–1939
On November 16, 1707, 18-year-old Jakob stood in front of a three-member beit din (rabbinical court) to testify about an unfortunate joke that he had made four years earlier. On the first day of Sukkot in 1703, Jakob, the son […]