IAJGS 2018 Warsaw Conference - Day 4

I had the pleasure of breakfast with Judy Golan this morning. I have been enamored with her prize-winning work tracking marriages and contacts among Jewish people in the Opatow area of Poland ("Reading Between the Lines: Mining Jewish History Through Extraction of Polish Archive Data"). Take a look at the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy and the Paul Jacobi Center website to read her research report. 

I see her work as quite anthropological (and just up my alley). Unfortunately, I could not attend her presentation Tuesday morning since mine was scheduled at the same time. 

Judy has also been very helpful to me in seeking JRI-Poland indexed records for researching my Aunt Lee Urbass Wilson's family from Opatow and Ostrowiec. Thank you Judy for making time for a fan.

Wednesday morning belonged to Ukraine SIG. I attended the Ukraine Special Interest Group meeting followed by the luncheon. 

Ukraine SIG's mission is to collect, transcribe, translate and create indices for records from towns within the Russian Empire portions of today's Ukraine. 

There are now 4,163 subscribers to the JewishGen's Ukraine SIG Discussion Group. This year, there are 11 new town leaders and several new kehilalink (ancestral town) websites hosted on JewishGen.

The SIG is slowly working through 1897 Russian census records (67,000 pages) and has translated 600 pages, resuting in 1,644 lines of information. 

A 1916 business directory covering Kiev, Podolia and Volhynia gubernias the latest project.

At the luncheon, Lara Diamond, Phyllis Grossman and Anna Royzner spoke about their successful (and sometimes poignant) roots trips. These should be inspirational to anyone planning such a community visit in the old country.

After lunch I attended the Bukovina BOF get-together. It was rather free-form. Some of the same tpics discussed at the RomSIG meeting the previous day were discussed. One of the challenges that I see it that there are several unrelated websites hosting Bukovina Jewish records. While JewishGen's RomSIG page includes some links. They do not include all of them.

Later in the day, I took in "Unique Surname Gives insight Into the History, Adoption, and Regulation of Jewish Surnames: Poland, Galicia," presented by Drs. David Elbaum and Heshel Teitelbaum. One of the reasons I wanted to attend this talk was to meet Heshel. He and I have crossed paths since he came up as a fairly close relative of a couple of my father's first cousins (siblings). My cousins are related to me via their father. They are related to Heshel via their mother's family. It was nice to make the connection.

The talk was interesting but I have to admit the time of day and emphasis on rabbinic genealogy conspired to make me miss portions of the talk. Their apparently provocative hypothesis was that Rabbi Yakov Koppel Likower of Poland was actually an Italian Jew (possibly from Amsterdam or Venice). I kept on thinking that DNA testing might be a good idea.

The JewishGen 2018 Annual Meeting was at 6:00 PM. 

JewishGen now has over 1000 volunteers working all over the world. They announced Yefim Kogan, of Bessarabia SIG, as volunteer of the year. 

This year's meeting included announcement of additional partnerships that can only enhance JewishGen's status of a go-to center for Jewish genealogy:

• Miriam Weiner Routes to Roots Collection - this collection includes items Miriam collected over the years as she researched in archives in Eastern Europe. Material is and will be searchable via JewishGen's search box. Som material is already online. More will come. The collection includes more than 15,000 Holocaust records, maps, name lists for Poland and Ukraine, antique postcards and both Miriam Weiner's books.
• Israel Genealogy Research Association - by Fall 2018 one will be able to search their website via access through JewishGen (and vice versa).
• Jewish Galicia & Bukovina.org - 10,000 burial records will soon be added to JOWBR. 
• Gesher Galicia - received a grant from JewishGen to index 8,000 Holocaust records from the Polish State Archives in Nowy Sacz and Rzeszow.
• Beit Hatfutsot - Their family trees will be included when one searches JewishGen's Family Tree of the Jewish People.

Of great interest to me, since I am one of the moderators of the JewishGen Discussion Group, was the long-overdue announcement about improving the group by replacing the Lyris software. The new software will have html capability, allow plain text and non-Latin characters. Hurrah!!!

In the next few year, JewishGen will start the process to replace and update their website. 

In the meantime, the current JewishGen site now includes a unified search capability that it did not previous have. Now one can search the Family Tree of the Jewish People, the JewishGen Family Finder, Jewish Records Indexing-Poland, and all-country and all-topic databases from one search box. This is a significant improvement for reesearchers.