JNS.org published a news article about the recently completed Jerusalem International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies conference.
The article quotes several conference luminaries including Michael Goldstein, Crista Cowan of Ancestry, Neville Lamdan, Marlis Humphrey, Michael Tobias and yours truly.
My minute of fame is in a side bar: "Tips for budding Jewish roots-searchers." These tips were, apparently, taken from my beginning Jewish genealogy presentation delivered on Monday, 6 July 2015.
I am pleased to be included in this article. My only complaint is that one bit of my purported advice involves downloading family trees. Noooooo! Did not say that - would not say that - especially not to a beginner. [Sigh]
I started Wednesday early with Jordan Auslander's talk:
"American Jewish World War I Service"
Jordan summarized the state of the U.S. military prior to U.S. entry into World War I as "unprepared." There were few soldiers in the U.S. military at a time when changes in technology affected the the scope of warfare. In 1915 there was a stalemate in the trenches; zeppelins dropped bombs on civilian targets in Great Britain; airplanes were weaponized; and submarines wreaked havoc on trans-Atlantic travel from Europe, effectively stopping immigration.
Prior to the U.S. declaration of war on 6 April 1917, American volunteers were sought by other nations such as, Great Britain, Canada, and France. There was no significant combat participation by Americans until about the Spring of 1918.
Despite the fire in the archives that destroyed some WWI soldier records, there are some documents for genealogists interested in their WWI ancestors' records at Fold3 (Bureau of Investigation report on "slackers") and Ancestry (War records of the American Jewish Committee). Documentation may be available on a state-by-state basis.
"JewishGen 2015"
Warren Blatt, JewishGen's Managing Director; Avraham Groll (Director of Business Operations); and Michael Tobias (Vice President for Database Programing) presented at JewishGen's annual meeting.
Avrami Groll presented a wonderful tribute to Bob Wascou whose volunteer efforts to acquire records for the Romania Special Interest Group were exceptional. RomSIG is struggling to replace him.
JewishGen started in 1987. There are now more than 700 volunteers working throughout the world.
Dick Plotz, who has worked tireless (and brilliantly - in my opinion) as lead for all discussion group moderators on JewishGen received the Volunteer of the Year Award. I have worked with Dick for several years in my role as one of the moderators for the JewishGen Discussion Group and I know first hand of his fair and even managerial style and his well-reasoned opinions. Congratulations. Well-deserved!
Another big announcement came from Michael Tobias who introduced fuzzy matching. JewishGen has allowed exact and Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex matching for searching their databases for some time, as well as starts with and contains. There is fuzzy matching, fuzzier matching and fuzziest matching. With the addition of fuzzy matching, one may direct one's search to include spellings with one letter different than what one had entered. Fuzzier matching will allow results with two chages from the searched name. Fuzziest will allow up to 1/3 divergence from the searched word.
"IAJGS Annual Meeting"
As chair of the Phoenix, AZ Jewish Genealogy Group, I attended the IAJGS Annual Meeting. There was discussion and voting on by laws and guidance for the organization and discussion of some of IAJGS' desire to create "Society in a Box" - tools for developing a society for IAJGS' member organizations. Phase 2 will be developing templates for society use. The IAJGS is also working to develop one-hour videos that may be used by member societies for meeting content.
Blogger Luncheon
Last year I started a new "tradition" - the geneablogger get-together. This year we met for lunch on Wednesday at a restaurant a short taxi ride from the conference venue. We were honored this year by the presence of Dick Eastman, long time blogger (Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter) and IAJGS 2015 banquet speaker. The other participants were Tammy Hepps (Treelines), Banai Feldstein (The Ginger Jewish Genealogist), Smadar Belkin Gershon (Past-Present-Future), Israel Pickholtz (All My Foreparents), and me, Emily Garber (The Extra Yad). A very pleasant luncheon. Unfortunately, we forgot to take a group photo. :-(
Tuesday at the IAJGS conference was Ukraine Special Interest Group (SIG) day and the middle of my day was booked for a Ukraine SIG meeting, lunch and then another meeting. I did, however, attend two good sessions before the Ukraine SIG festivities began.
"Finding Your Immigrant Ancestors on Ancestry.com"
Attending a talk by Crista Cowan of Ancestry is always worthwhile. Crista has an experts knowledge for making most out of Ancestry database searches and, even in her more beginning-level presentations, an experienced genealogist may learn something.
Crista structured her talk by using the elements of the Genealogical Proof Standard, especially conducting a reasonably exhaustive search, analysis and correlation and resolution of conflicts.
Ancestry now has about 16 billion records and uploads 1-2 million records each day. Crista prefers to access records via the Ancestry Card Catalog. She drills down through that to find particular collections of interest. She noted that one advantage of this strategy is that search boxes are tailored to particular collections. By searching one collection with its particular search box (as opposed to the generic one on the Ancestry home page) one may reap some advantages.
Those who have some understanding of the development of soundex systems in the United States know that American Soundex (which Ancestry uses) is not very good for finding central and eastern European names often found in our Jewish families. Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex was developed to for the address the short-comings of American Soundex. On Ancestry one may change the default American Soundex to Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex by selecting the Jewish Collection focus on the bottom of the search box.
"Reconstructing Small-Town Jewish Communities in America"
Tammy Hepps has taken on Homestead, Pennsylvania - putting her relatives and the Jewish community, in general, in context.
While we tend to think of eastern European immigrants as big-city dwellers, there were also Jewish communities in small-town America. Jewish lives, unlike those in big cities, were not dominated by Yiddish culture, or radical socialists. The Jewish families in these small town tended to keep their heads down. They maintained their culture as best they could in a foreign environment, not necessarily conducive to keeping the faith.
Tammy suggested studying the organizations with which one's relatives may have interacted: synagogues, fraternal organizations, and social clubs (to name a few). In addition, seek out local records and histories and search in archives for manuscripts. Put people in context by studying the non-Jewish neighboring populations and regional Jewish populations.
Tammy's presentation was well structured and presented. My time was well-spent.
Ukraine SIG meetings and luncheon
The Ukraine SIG meetings featured Janette Silverman providing a tour of the Ukraine SIG webpage; Phyllis Grossman providing advice on touring and archive experiences in Ukraine; and several reports on a variety of Ukraine SIG projects.
Ukraine SIG continues to collect records and collections at an astounding rate. The SIG has been working closely with the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) to acquire records from eastern Europe.
In addition, volunteers continue to collect records on information FamilySearch Library microfilm for indexing.
The main limitation at this point is volunteers and money: getting volunteer project leaders and raising money to pay translators for their indexing work.
Expect the fruits of some of these labors to be available on JewishGen in the next few months.
After a whirl-wind few days of sight-seeing (more about that in future posts) in Israel I've settled in for several days of teaching and listening. I limited the sessions I attended today in final preparation for my beginning Jewish genealogy talk at 3:00 P.M.
"Footnotes, Side notes and Remarks in European Vital Records"
Dr. Yohai Ben-Ghedalia, Rony Golan and Orit Lavi team taught a class regarding usual and some unusual notations that may be found on records. These are frequently difficult to read and infrequently indexed.
Prior to 1877 metrical records were not standardized. After that, a columnar format was adopted and all had remarks columns. Usually the remarks were used to note changes in status regarding subjects of records. This could involve correcting minor mistakes to legitimizing marriages via civil marriage ceremonies. Understanding the context of such changes can add to our understanding of our ancestors' lives.
Ben-Ghedalia, Golan and Lavi presented several interesting cases from several locations in eastern Europe, including Congress Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Austrian Empire and Russian Empire.
There was quite a bit of discussion among the three presenters and the audience regarding indexing projects including information on notations. Few indexed records include the information included in metrical records.
The take away from this talk is that a notation may point the researcher toward addition records, sometimes in far off locales. It behooves us to follow the path provided.
"Evacuatzia - Searching for Documentation on Those Evacuated to the Depths of the USSR during WWII"
I was very interested in this talk by Serafima Velkovich of Yad Vashem because my grandfather's sister Sarah Garber Giller and her family were among those evacuated from Starokonstyaniv, Soviet Union (now Ukraine) in advance of Nazi occupation.
My family members were sent to Chelyabinsk in the interior of the Soviet Union during the war and chose to remain in that area for the rest of their lives. Some of their descendants still live there.
There were essentially three types of migrations from this part of Ukraine. The Stalin distrusted Jews in eastern Europe and deported those whose loyalty he questioned. Many people, Jewish and non-Jewish were evacuated from the area by the government. And, finally, there were those who decided to flee themselves and head into the USSR interior.
The movement started in June of 1941 and by 2 July 1941 210 trains had already left heading east. Ultimately, 17 million people evacuated to the Soviet interior. People were settled among local populations in a variety of regions. About 53 percent of the evacuees were Russian and 24 percent were Jewish.
I tend to think of Yad Vashem's "Shoah Names Database" as solely relating to those who perished during the war, but it also includes more than 600,000 evacuee names taken from State Archive of the Russian Federation record group M.46 and almost 20,000 from record group M.33 of The Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate German-Fascist Crimes Committed on Soviet Territory.
Thus far, I have not located my family among the records. I will have to think of some different database search strategies.
Jewish Genealogy - How to Start, Where to Look and the Breadth of What's Available"
I won't be reviewing my own talk, but I do think it went well. It has been taped for distribution via On Demand! The biggest challenge was limiting the talk and questions to 45 minutes. Usually IAJGS talks are 60 minutes plus 15 for questions. As it turns out I was not able to keep the talk short enough to include questions in the 45 minute schedule. However, I did go into the hallway after my talk to answer questions.
I offered five genealogical research best practices:
- Begin at home
- Organize to anticipate growth in your collections
- Work backwards from what is known
- Use all records and information relevant to your research questions
- Share your success with others
The remainder of the talk focused on U.S. records one might use to research one's family's post-immigration lives, their migration from the old country to the new (i.e., naturalization records and manifests), and their lives in the old country.
We ended with suggestions for further education, such as this conference, JewishGen online courses, blogs, discussion groups and podcasts.
