The presentation of Adam Brown and E. Randol Schoenberg at the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies’ conference in Boston in August 2013 and their articles in AVOTAYNU, Summer 2013, examine the future of genealogy research with particular attention to […]
Opinion: Is Our Tree Better Than My Tree? The Benefits and Pitfalls of Collaborative Genealogy
Until recently, we began by building our own individual family trees. We started with our parents, siblings, children, spouses and continued to fill in as much as we could. When we reached a branch where we did not know the […]
Opinion: On Certainty in Genealogy
In June, I wrote an article on collaborative genealogy for Avotaynu entitled “Is Our Tree Better Than My Tree? The Benefits and Pitfalls of Collaborative Genealogy,” In recent articles, two Avotaynu authors have responded by raising concerns about collaborative genealogy, […]
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 […]
From IIJG: Sephardi and Mizrahi Elite Families in Eretz Israel From 1800 to1948
Introduction With the support of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy and Paul Jacobi Center, we have completed two years of data collection, organization and analysis of material relating to two Sephardi elite families in Jaffa – the Chlouches and […]
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 […]
U.S. Library of Congress: Researching Jewish Family History, by James Sweany with Peggy Pearlstein
Recently, a middle-aged woman came into the Local History and Genealogy Reading Room of the Library of Congress seeking to locate her father, whom she had never seen. A search through the city directories and telephone books of Greater New […]
Genealogical Resources at the U.S. National Archives
Despite the plethora of online genealogical resources available today, not all information is online, and sometimes essential and valuable bits of data still can be found only in archives and libraries. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and […]
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, […]
Avotaynu Contributing Editors: Fall 2010
AUSTRALIA (Caplan) Australian Jewish Genealogical Society (Sydney) e-Report, October 2010. On October 31, 2010, as part of the Day of Jewish Culture and Heritage organized by B’nai B’rith, the society displayed books and CDs documenting the history of Jewish communities […]
JGS Newsletters: Fall, 2010
To read an article or news release excerpted in U.S. Update, order the issue of the publication in which it appeared from the appropriate JGS. A list of Jewish Genealogical Societies can be found at iajgs.org/members/members.html. A list of Special […]
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 […]
Ask the Experts, Fall 2010
The following message was sent to AVOTAYNU editor, Sallyann Amdur Sack-Pikus—Ed. I am seeking information about Radute or Redutka, a small community just outside of Rokiskis, Lithuania. Did all the families who lived in Redutka share something in common? A […]
In Search of the Family Name Tarica
This article first appeared in Sephardic Horizons, Vol. I, Issue 1, Fall 2010. It is reprinted with permission—Ed. For many years, undoubtedly like many other Sephardim, I often wondered where my patronymic name came from, what it meant, and who […]
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, […]
Jewish Memoirs and Autobiography
People with good stories inside of them often find the drive and determination to get those stories out into the world. On the several occasions when I’ve enrolled in creative-writing or memoir-writing workshops, usually with the aim of finishing a particular […]
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 […]
IAJGS 2011 Washington, DC
Washington, DC, “honey-pot” of world-class resources and repositories, will be the site of the 31st International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) Conference on Jewish Genealogy on August 14–19, 2011. The Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington (JGSGW) will host […]
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