I have been interested in genealogy since I was a little boy, when my father would tell stories about the Old Country that he had heard from his father. His family came from the Ukraine, and there were many versions, […]
Sometimes a Simple Letter Can Find a Cousin
Sometimes we find long-lost relatives through essentially simple, but at the same time, roundabout ways. A case in point is my discovery of a third cousin, the great-granddaughter of Henry Heiman. Henry was the brother of my great-grandmother, […]
Proving One’s Judaism Through the Matrilineal Line
When people ask how long I have been interested in genealogy and family history, I answer, “I was born this way.” I cannot remember ever not being interested in my ancestors. When I was in the fourth grade, I wrote […]
Rocking and Rolling in Cleveland
The earliest known record of my Wudl/Woodle family in the United States was of B. Wudel who arrived in New York aboard the Washington on July 30, 1845, accompanied by his wife and one-year-old daughter, L. Wudel. New York city […]
The Six Lives of Gregory Meisler: Jew, Warrior, and Polish Patriot
The deeds of man, when unconfirmed by the voices of the witnesses or written documents, are bound to pass swiftly away and disappear from memory. Prince Boleslaw V the Pious The history of the Holocaust is never ending. Every […]
Abris Survived!
When my grandmother, Blanche Klein Sobel, came to the United States from Hungary in December 1902, with her mother, Rose (Rezi), and her two youngest siblings, Bertha and Maurice (Moritz), they joined most of the family, including her father, Bernat, […]
From Cracow to New Orleans: How Google Helped Reunite a Family Separated by War and Migration
Our visit to New Orleans in December 2002 was the culmination of an exciting adventure in family history. Just a few months earlier, who would have thought that my mother, brother, and I would travel from Vancouver, Canada, to attend […]
My New Hobby: How I Started to Look for My Relatives
Marina Zokolov z”l This article is dedicated to my beloved wife, Marina, who died on February 4, 2010, at the age of 44. Ihave enjoyed many different hobbies in my life, but recently I discovered something absolutely new. I will […]
Retracing My Grandfather’s Journey: Kovno to Hamburg, Through Hull to America
This is the story of how my grandfather, born Hillel Sragan in 1871 in Keidan, Lithuania, transformed himself into Henry Wolinsky, a clothing merchant in Boston, the Goldene Medinah, in 1892. For 30 years I had sought answers to questions […]
IAJGS 2010 Conference Is Coming to Los Angeles
Are you passionate about genealogy, but have never attended an IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genalogy? Do you need to jump-start your research? Maybe 2010 will be the year for you to join the world’s largest gathering of Jewish genealogists, […]
How the Virtual Shtetl Project’s Website Can Help Genealogists
Much has been written about the Virtual Shtetl Project, but no detailed discussion of what this project can do for genealogy researchers has appeared until now.1 The website www.shtetl.org.pl/ has many resources for genealogists interested in researching the Jews of […]
A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames in Bulgaria: A Window on Its History
The result of six years of work, my Dictionary of Jewish Bulgarian Surnames, with 803 individual names, has been uploaded on the web at <www.sephardicgen. com/databases/BulgarianSurnamesSrchFrm.htmldatabases. html>. Details given for each surname are: Surname All known variants Language from which […]
Jacobi Absolute Generations Scale
A major goal of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy and Paul Jacobi Center is to develop research tools and technologies for the use of Jewish genealogists and social scientists generally. One such tool for which there has long […]
Contemporary Topics in Genealogy: A Conversation with Professor Thomas Jones
Professor Thomas W. Jones, CG, CGL, FASG, was a recent guest on Tracing Your Family Roots, a cable television show hosted by Arline Sachs and Sallyann Amdur Sack-Pikus (www.tracingroots.nova.edu). The discussion, largely reproduced here, focuses on some major issues in […]
Photo Identification: The Process of Finding and Interpreting Clues in a Photograph
In an ideal world, a genealogist inherits the perfect family photograph—one in which relatives are thoughtfully posed in a well-lighted photography studio. The photograph had been passed down in pristine condition with the photographer’s imprint and logo clearly marked, and […]
Creating Master Indexes of Names For Districts Surrounding Major Shtetls, by Ronald Doctor
The Kremenets District Research Group has recently published its Indexed Concordance of Personal Names and Town Names, a master index that now has almost 73,000 entries. The group’s experiences in creating the Concordance suggest that it may be a fruitful […]
Georgette and Raphael Cohen Collection of Family Trees from Meknes, Morocco
This collection of family trees, as well as its extensive photographic material, has been entered into the Beit Hatefutsot database and currently is accessible to all onsite researchers. Hundreds of Sephardic surnames and tens of thousands of individuals from all […]
Methods and Resources for Sephardic Genealogical Research: The Example of Antebi Family Research
The Antebi family’s roots go back to the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Some members of the family settled in a small town in Turkey, Ein-Tab (“the Good Fountain”), known today as Gaziantep. After migrating from Ein-Tab to Aleppo, the […]
Discovering Freda Brachman
The name Freda is written on the back of a photograph that a relative inherited from her mother. We knew very little about Freda. Her maiden name was Zwein; she was married to a man named Brachman; she was from […]
Children’s Archive at the International Tracing Service
Child survivors of the Holocaust seeking to recover their past face particularly serious and unique difficulties. This article describes a little-known but highly valuable resource for such research, the Kinder Archiv (Children’s Archive) of the International Tracing Service of the […]
Holocaust Geographic “How To” for Genealogists
This article first appeared in Mishpocha, the magazine of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington—Ed. Genealogists searching for Holocaust information are accustomed to searching databases for family names of interest. They consult data provided by the many […]
Joint Distribution Committee Archives: Resources for Genealogists
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), popularly known as the “Joint,” was established in 1914 to provide aid to destitute Jews, primarily in what was then Palestine and in Eastern Europe, where Jews were often living in deplorable conditions […]
Vilnius and Belarus: Genealogical Travel
“Do you speak Yiddish?” my newfound cousin queried on behalf of her father, a Holocaust survivor who had settled in Paris after the war. I had located him through research at Bad Arolsen in the International Tracing Service records. His […]
JewishGen’s Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR)
JOWBR, one of JewishGen’s most popular databases, seeks to catalogue data about Jewish cemeteries and burial records worldwide, from the earliest records to the present, and to be the central search location for Jewish burial records. JewishGen charges no fees […]
Cemeteries in Upper Silesia
The Shoah has been called the end of European Jewry, and it is hard to argue the point. In most places, though, memory—wanted or unwanted—persists. The many efforts to deny the past are eloquent confirmation of its continued presence. In […]
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