Last year I flew to Israel to visit my cousin, H. Daniel Wagner. For some of us, I guess, family ties and tales become increasingly important—or at least, more interesting—as we get older. The events of our youth acquire a […]
Jewish Genealogy: Moving Towards Recognition as a Sub-branch of Jewish Studies
For the first time, a panel wholly dedicated to Jewish genealogy was held at the triennial Congress of the World Union of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, August 2–6, 2009). That precedent-setting event was sponsored by the International Institute […]
Paternal Family History of Bernard Madoff: A Case Study for Neophyte Genealogists
As publisher of AVOTAYNU, I receive many inquiries from people asking how they should begin tracing their Jewish family history. The process is almost stereotypical if your immigrant ancestor came from Eastern Europe. Recently, as an intellectual exercise, I tried […]
Unwanted Jewish Aliens in France: A Guide to French (and Other) Holocaust Records
This article is based upon a talk given at the IAJGS Conference in Philadelphia, August 2–6, 2009—Ed. For the past five years, I have been researching the fate of Jewish refugees in Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom […]
The Value of Creating a Family Name Website
Why create a genealogy website? All genealogists researching an uncommon family name should make use of modern communication medium and display their research on a public website. This is our emphatic conclusion two-plus years after publishing the Amdur family website […]
Jewish Migration to South Africa: Passenger Lists from the UK, edited by Saul Issroff
Jewish Migration to South Africa: Passenger Lists from the UK. Two large-format volumes, edited by Saul Issroff. Volume 1: 1890 to 1905. £10; $16.50. Volume 2: 1906 to 1930. £10 ; $16.50. Ordering from http://www.kaplancentre.uct.ac.za/kaplan/publications/books These two volumes offer extracts from passenger lists […]
Interactive website Brings Our Family Tree to Life
Genealogists Adam and Jacob Brown describe the genealogical breakthroughs achieved via the Geni.com genealogical platform.
Break the Brick Wall by Creating a ShtetLinks Site
How many times have I heard “but there’s no information on my shtetl”? Perhaps there’s no information readily available on the Internet, and you’ve tried Google and JewishGen’s databases and Ancestry.com, but alas…nothing. Yet plenty of information does exist about […]
Vilnius Jewish Leaders Who Were Killed (1941–1945): Seeking Answers
In July 2007, I attended the IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Salt Lake City, Utah. After returning home, I received a message from Carol Rombro Rider, who also had attended the conference. During her visit to the LDS […]
Dealing with Relationships That Are Known But Cannot Be Proven: A Case Study
Many researchers, particularly those who are working on very large families or single-surname projects, reach a point where a particular relationship can be deduced, but cannot quite be proven. Naming patterns may fit and the times and places are plausible, […]
Finding Prisoner B68739, Jacob “Cuppy” Migden
Even after spending 12 years researching and writing a book about the Migden families from Tarnopol, Poland, I never found Jacob (a/k/a Jack “Cuppy”) Migden. This happened only after attending a presentation by Jewish genealogist Ron Arons, author of The […]
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 […]
Directories in Addition to City Directories
When Alex Friedlander’s article on directories appeared in the Avotaynu Guide to Jewish Genealogy, it was accurate and covered many of the resources then available. Much more has become known on the subject, however, and some changes have occurred. Today, […]
Directories
This section will discuss four categories of directories whose contents can be useful for genealogical research: city directories, telephone directories, biographical directories, and professional directories. All of these valuable reference sources can be found in the United States and internationally. […]
When Jews Could Not Marry: Forbidden Marriages in 18th- and 19th-Century Bohemia
Bohemia now constitutes the western and central part of the Czech Republic and includes Prague. My grandfather, Hugo König (later King), came with his parents to the United States from Bohemia as an infant in the 1860s. My wife, Esther, […]
History and Genealogy of the Jews of Rhodes and Their Diaspora
From the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Rhodes in 1522 until the Holocaust, a vibrant Judeo-Spanish community flourished on this Mediterranean isle. Many books and articles richly chronicle the history of this relatively small community.1 From antiquity, a Romaniote (Greek-speaking) Jewish […]
Successful Quest for Ancestors in Aleppo and Baghdad and for Kinsmen in Calcutta
After more than 20 years of sporadic research carried out with the help of others, I can now report the success of my quest to trace the mutual relationships of the members of the Gubbay family of Aleppo, to identify […]
The Jews of Vienna and Their Moravian Hometowns
The marriage records (1850–90) of Sechshaus/ Fünfhaus, a heavily Jewish neighborhood of Vienna, show that a significant number of Jewish families came to Vienna from several towns of southwestern and central Moravia. Nikolsburg (Mikulov) is the most frequently mentioned town, […]
Just How Were Passenger Manifests Created?
As is well known, vast numbers of Jews left Eastern Europe around the turn of the 20th century, destined primarily for the United States—but also for South Africa, Palestine, Argentina, and elsewhere. The ships that carried them also brought passenger […]
British Migration Records, 1793–1960
This article is adapted from a talk given at the Chicago 2008 IAJGS conference—Ed. Genealogists sometimes tell me that they know what I do, but don’t need it because [they] have found [their] ancestor’s arrival records in the Ellis Island […]
Book Review: One Hundred Years in Canada: The Rubinoff-Naftolin Family Tree
One Hundred Years in Canada: The Rubinoff-Naftolin Family Tree, by Bill Gladstone, 2008. $40 (U.S. or Canada) Available at http://rubnaft.com/. http://www.billgladstone.ca Some books invite exploration from the minute you first set eyes on them. One Hundred Years in Canada […]
Book Review: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. 2 vols, by Alexander Beider.
Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. 2 vols, by Alexander Beider. Avotaynu, 2008. $118.00. To order: http://www.avotaynu.com/books/DJSRE2.htm When the first edition of Alexander Beider’s massive Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire came out in […]
Not Just an Old Piece of Paper
One evening in 1992, while sorting through some papers that had belonged to my late father, I came across an old and fragile Hebrew document that I could not recall seeing before. Because of the old-fashioned printing style, I suspected […]
A 180th Birthday Celebration
In 1828, in the small South Bohemian town of Ckyne, a businessman offered to build a new synagogue for the Jewish community if they would sell him the land on which their shul (synagogue) stood. The community agreed, and the […]
Personal Journeys: The Isenberg Family Comes Alive
The year was 1970. One morning that summer, I was exiting, quite unexpectedly, the railway station in Hamburg, Germany. It was the last place I wanted to be. I had misread the train schedule, leading me to believe I could […]
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