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Most JGSMD programs will be held on the fourth Sunday at each month. As of September 2016, the majority of our programs will begin at 1:30PM at the Pikesville Library.
Some programs will be held at different times or locations.
Be sure to check the schedule carefully for the exact time and location of each program.
For first half hour of each program, you'll have an opportunity to network with other JGSMD
members and discuss your personal research problems.
Past Programs for JGSMD:
Zoom information will be sent out the week before the meeting to JGSMD members.
Many people engaging in researching their family history find difficulty in not having their Belarus family records online. Until those records go online, research must be done inside the Belarus Archives, mainly in Minsk and Grodno. Traveling to Belarus being a burden for most people, along with not being fluent in Russian, requires engaging with professional archivists. London based and non-profit, The Together Plan's Archives Group offers an excellent way to continue family research, along with supporting The Together Plan's numerous efforts on the ground in Belarus to support the Jewish Communities there. In this presentation, along with an all important Q & A, attendees will learn the process for initiating archives research, along with the process and proper expectations. Importantly, examples of previous results will be shown.
Carl Kaplan, who lives just outside of Boston, is an amateur genealogist, and member of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston. Carl Kaplan engaged with The Together Plan in 2020 to research his family roots in Minsk. The resulting research was so successful that Carl became a volunteer case worker for The Together Plan, guiding new clients through the process, and interfacing with members of The Together Plan in Belarus. Besides his family research and volunteering with The Together Plan, Carl is also a certified historical tour guide in Boston (including the Jewish north End of Boston), and participates with his dog, Buster, as a therapy dog team, visiting hospitals and schools.
Vasily Zaitsau is located in Minsk Belarus and coordinates heritage and archive projects. He interfaces between The Together Plan's Archive Services case workers and the team of archivists, who do the day-to-day research in the Belarus archives. Having a coordinator on the ground in Belarus, who speaks English and Russian, is instrumental in moving the research process ahead. Vasily enjoys traveling and hiking.
Zoom information will be sent out the week before the meeting to JGSMD members.
Marlene Trestman will discuss the resources she used in writing "Most Fortunate Unfortunates: The Jewish Orphans' Home of New Orleans" (LSU Press, 2023), the first comprehensive history of the nation s earliest purpose-built Jewish orphanage, and in sharing stories of some of the 1623 children and 24 widows who lived there between 1856 and 1946. Trestman will offer suggestions for pursuing information about former residents of America s fifty other Jewish orphanages, specifically including Baltimore s Hebrew Orphan Asylum.
Orphaned at age 11, Marlene Trestman grew up in New Orleans as a foster care client of the Jewish Children s Regional Service (JCRS), the social service agency that succeeded the Jewish Orphans Home of New Orleans. Marlene is a former special assistant to the Maryland Attorney General, where she devoted her 30-year legal career. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate and former trustee of Goucher College, she earned her MBA from Loyola of Maryland where she later taught law. For her writing, she has received funding from the Supreme Court Historical Society, Hadassah Brandeis Institute, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Jewish Archives, Texas Jewish Historical Society and Southern Jewish Historical Society. Marlene lives in Baltimore and enjoys frequent visits to New Orleans, where she is guest curating a special exhibit about the Home to open in 2025 at the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience. Her first book, Fair Labor Lawyer (LSU Press, 2016), is the biography of trailblazing New Deal attorney and Supreme Court advocate Bessie Margolin, who grew up in the Home. Learn more about Marlene and her work at www.marlenetrestman.com.
Zoom information will be sent out the week before the meeting to JGSMD members.
Doing family research for records in Israel can be daunting. More records are available now than ever before. Much of your research can now be done online. Understand the kinds of records possible to locate and where you may want to focus your efforts. Consider alternatives to vital records and learn how you can create a vivid picture of how your ancestors lived in Israel.
Garri Regev has lived in Israel since 1978 and has been doing genealogical research for over 25 years. She has taught seminars, webinars and courses in Genealogy to a variety of adult and teen groups. In addition, she has spoken at eleven IAJGS Conferences and was involved in programming and running the 2015 IAJGS Conference in Jerusalem. Garri is a founding member and immediate past-president of IGRA (Israel Genealogy Research Association). Garri currently volunteers at the Genealogy Center at the National Library of Israel and the Central Zionist Archives and serves as a Director and Vice-President on the Board of LitvakSIG.
Zoom information will be sent out the week before the meeting to JGSMD members.
Did you finally find your ancestor's birth record from Galicia, Austrian Empire, and get it translated? Were you confused by finding s/he was illegitimate? Did your confusion get worse when you saw that different surnames were being used by that ancestor's siblings and parents? Many birth, marriage and death records in the Jewish community use terms like illegitimate and ritual marriage. Punitive and restrictive laws in the Austrian Empire resulted in the Jewish community finding ways to circumvent these. Originally instituted to curtail the size of the Jewish community and create boundaries, the communities themselves changed and found ways to work around the laws. Sometimes our ancestors had multiple surnames, or even hyphenated surnames. This session will discuss these and the insight we can gain about the lives of our ancestors.
Dr. Janette Silverman is a professional genealogist, heading up a team of 11 researchers specializing in Eastern European and Jewish genealogy at AncestryProGenealogists the division of Ancestry.com that does private client research.
Janette began her journey into her own family's history more than 40 years ago, with her dad, hoping to answer some questions about their family's early days in the U.S., never thinking that they would be able to trace parts of the family back to 18th century Europe. What began as a hobby turned into an obsession and ultimately led to a shift in her career from Jewish education to genealogy. Her doctoral dissertation, "In Living Memory" was based on her genealogical research into four branches of her own family, putting into historical context their experiences as they made their way from Eastern Europe to settle in the U.S. from the 1880s until the 1920s.
She was previously the chair of the Phoenix (Arizona) JGS, lead co-chair of the 2016 IAJGS conference in Seattle, Washington, and a JewishGen volunteer. She speaks virtually and in-person at conferences and for smaller groups all over the world, has been published in Avotaynu, APGQ, Tennessee Historical Quarterly, The Galitzianer, and Genealogy at a Glance. She is looking forward to publication of her book, Stories They Never Told Us, in 2024.
Zoom information will be sent out the week before the meeting to JGSMD members.
So you have your stack of documents. How do you make them "come to life"? What hints do they hold that allow you to "see" your ancestors and understand them? Lisa Belkin is a longtime journalist, who began with a few documents a decade ago and used them to write Genealogy of a Murder, a book spanning four families, three generations, and... one murder. "It reads like fiction" reviewers say, and yet every word is documented and true. If your goal is not just to fill the tree, find the facts, break the brick wall, but also to weave what you learn into a compelling narrative tale, Belkin will show you where to look and how to start.
Known for tales that are deeply researched and artfully told, Lisa Belkin s career spans nearly three decades at The New York Times (mostly at the Magazine, also as creator of the Life s Work column and Motherlode blog) and four narrative non-fiction books (including her latest, GENEALOGY OF A MURDER, and also SHOW ME A HERO, which became an Golden Globe award winning HBO miniseries.) When not writing narrative non-fiction, she is teaching it, at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Zoom information will be sent out the week before the meeting to JGSMD members.
During this talk I will help define what Litvak research is, show tools to locate your shtetl, and discuss various record sources which are available through both LitvakSIG and other sources to get a better picture of the lives of your Litvak ancestors. I will give examples of the types of records you can find and how to get them translated. This will be an overview of the plethora of data both online and in the archival sources.
Jody has been studying her family since she was a 6 year old girl, spending time with extended family in Middletown and Cincinnati Ohio. So began a lifelong fascination with piecing together the puzzle of who belonged where on the tree. Her formal genealogy research began in the early 1980 s after teaching a unit for the 7th graders at the religious school of her synagogue.
She attended the Institute for Foreign Language and Culture at the University of Erlangen, Germany, where she studied Russian and Spanish, then spent a year at the University of Barcelona, Spain. As an adult she earned a degree in Anthropology and Geography at Indiana University. These areas of study combine to create the perfect backdrop for genealogical research.
After a successful career in the travel industry as a corporate travel manager, she retired and devoted more time to volunteer work and genealogy. She is an administrator and founder of the Facebook Group Genealogical Translations, a moderator of the Suwalk-Lomza Facebook page, Coordinator of the Suwalki and Siauliai District Research Groups of LitvakSIG, on the program planning committee for the NE Indiana JGS, and a board member and current president of LitvakSIG. Her hobbies include drawing, quilting, baking, and caring for her grandchildren.
GenealogyIndexer.org is a free website for searching 2 million+ pages of historical European directories (business, address, telephone), yizkor books, Galician secondary school reports, Polish and Russian military documents, community histories, and more. Containing tens of millions of personal names often with towns, street addresses, and occupations, and sometimes with genealogical details such as patronymics, maiden names, or vital dates most of the 4,000+ sources are not searchable elsewhere. This talk will provide an overview of all sources, with a focus on recently added sources and search techniques. The use of directories in the Warsaw property restitution process will also be discussed briefly.
Logan Kleinwaks is JewishGen's Research Director for Danzig/Gda?sk, a former Board Member of Gesher Galicia, and creator of online genealogy research tools. His website GenealogyIndexer.org received the IAJGS 2012 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Jewish Genealogy via the Internet, Print or Electronic Product, and was one of Family Tree Magazine's 101 Best Websites for 2015-2023. He received JewishGen's Susan E. King Volunteer of the Year Award in 2022. During the war in Ukraine, Logan has worked to support Ukrainian archives' needs and facilitate preservation of Jewish genealogical documents in Lviv.
Zoom information will be sent out the week before the meeting to JGSMD members.
A primer on how to find synagogue records, what they look like, and the genealogical material they include. Finding synagogue records can be problematic and time consuming as there are errors in catalogs and a variety of ways materials are described. JewishGen s Shul Records America is a new finding aid pointing to the location of American synagogue records. Launched in fall 2022, it has grown to over 660 collections held at 60 repositories or websites, with about 20% including URLS for digitized materials. Not only a historical resource but important as modern-day synagogues merge or close, Shul Records America encourages congregations to preserve records with genealogical value.
Ellen Kowitt (pronounced KO-witt, like KO-dak) is founder and principal genealogist at Sole Searching Genealogy & Historical Research. Specializing in American records and Jewish ancestry, she lectures at national conferences and has published articles in Family Tree Magazine and Avotaynu: The International Journal on Jewish Genealogy. Ellen received her B.A. from Alfred University and spent twenty-five years working in marketing management and communications before transitioning into full-time research. Ellen has completed ProGen and several genealogical institutes, and she is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists. She has volunteered in a variety of leadership positions throughout the genealogy community and currently serves as Director of the JewishGen USA Research Division as well as DAR National Vice Chair of Jewish Specialty Research. Originally from New York, Ellen resides in Colorado with her family. For more information, visit www.EllenKowitt.com.
Zoom information will be sent out the week before the meeting to JGSMD members.
Chava Lefand (1797-1884) lived in a time when we'd expect a woman to not be well-represented in documentation. And in fact, looking at traditional genealogical documents gives little information about Chava and the life she lived. But Chava's story shows how much can be learned by looking at non-traditional documentation to learn about an individual and the context in which they lived. Chava had already lost two children to mandatory conscription into the Russian Empire, and she refused to lose another. The widowed mother filed a series of petitions throughout the 1850s which went as high as two Czars and the Governing Senate (the Russian Empire's Supreme Court equivalent). In doing this, she generated a genealogical gold mine (telling of secret marriages and where various relatives were living or hiding from the draft) and gave her perspective on family and community gossip and conflict.
While this is the talk about one woman (the speaker's 5th great grandmother), her hundreds of pages of petitions and appeals tell her perspective of how Jewish families dealt with mandatory conscription of their young children, how conscription caused strife within the Jewish community and formed a hierarchy (she felt she wasn't part of the cool kids' clique), and how relatively simple Jewish families were able to generate a significant amount of documentation in the mid-1800s.
Lara Diamond began researching her own family around 1989. She has traced all branches of her family multiple generations back in Eastern Europe using Russian Empire-era and Austria-Hungarian Empire records. Most of her personal research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. She has done client research leading to their ancestors in many parts of the former USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and more. She is president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland and is JewishGen's Subcarpathia Research Director. She has lectured around the country and internationally on Jewish and Eastern European genealogy research as well as genetic genealogy. She also runs multiple district- and town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns. Lara blogs about her Eastern European and Jewish research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.
Zoom information will be sent out to members mid-week before the meeting. NOTE: WE ARE IN OUR NEW MEMBERSHIP YEAR! IF YOU HAVE NOT RENEWED FOR THIS MEMBERSHIP YEAR, PLEASE DO SO ASAP!
Throughout the past year, we ve featured entertaining and informative presentations by speakers, but now it s time for our group members to take a turn. Please join us at the meeting and bring something to share
All of our members are invited to bring something related to their own family history or research to share with the group. Perhaps you ve inherited your grandmother s candlesticks or Seder plate. Maybe your grandfather s tallis was passed down to you. Or possibly you have a portrait of an ancestor or a snapshot taken long ago at a family gathering. You may have found documents relating to your family's past in Europe centuries ago. Even if you don t possess any keepsakes from your ancestors, you may be able to show us a printout of their Ellis Island passenger manifest or a picture of the shtetl in which they lived.
A team of panelists who are experienced in Jewish genealogy research will give advice on research strategies as you try to break through a brick wall. Please submit your questions by October 5 to JGSofMD@gmail.com; a selection of those questions will be addressed by the panel.
Please be specific in what you are looking for and what you have already tried. Give as much background information as possible, so that our panelists can guide you on ways to move forward in your research. And please include a short summary that we can use to introduce your query to other members.
Whether you have a question or not, come learn about resources and techniques that our experts will mention that might help with your own research!
If time permits, we ll also have an open floor at the end of the program for additional questions.
NOTE: You may want to watch "Three Minutes: A Lengthening" before; instructions were sent to our mailing list.
"Three Minutes in Poland" tells the extraordinary story of a 1938 home movie, once merely a travel souvenir, now celebrated worldwide as a memorial to the lost Jewish culture of Poland. Shot one year before the outbreak of World War II by David Kurtz, the author s grandfather, the three minutes of footage show ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town. Of the three thousand Jews who lived there, fewer than one hundred would survive the Holocaust. David Kurtz s film is the only moving imagery of this community prior to its destruction.
"Three Minutes in Poland" traces Glenn Kurtz s decade-long journey to identify the people in his grandfather s haunting images. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, "Three Minutes in Poland" transforms this fragmentary record of a town on the brink of catastrophe into a memorial to the individuals and the vibrant culture annihilated in the Holocaust. Now the basis of an award-winning documentary, "Three Minutes: A Lengthening," these few minutes of film have connected survivors, descendants, local residents in Poland, and viewers worldwide in a living community of remembrance, becoming a testament to memory, loss, and improbable survival.
Zoom information will be sent out later this week to JGSMD members.
As stewards since 1892 of the American Jewish experience, legacy, and impact, the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), the oldest ethnic, cultural archive in the United States, holds a remarkable range of resources to support genealogists and the enrichment of the historical record. The presentation will include examples and links for relevant materials, such as the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, Landsmanshaftn records, the National Jewish Welfare Board, family papers, and other holdings. Participants will learn about the organization and accessibility (both online and in-person, should you find yourself on a visit to New York!) of AJHS' diverse collections and how to navigate and see samples of historical material on AJHS' relaunched website (www.ajhs.org).
Tamar Zeffren is the Director of Archival Partnerships at AJHS, where, among other activities, she serves as the dedicated contact for foundations, organizations, and individuals who are exploring donating their records to AJHS; provides education, consultation, and outreach services; and maintains oversight of all proposals, policies, and workflows to facilitate the transfer of collections for long-term stewardship and access. She consults locally and internationally and volunteers with a host of professional associations.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Do you call noodle pudding kugel or kigel? Do you prefer sweet or savory gefilte fish? Did you grow up eating shlishkes or bourekas? These are just some of the Jewish food customs that can provide you with a glimpse into your ancestry.
Join Caryn Alter and Stephen Cohen, founding members of the Mercer County Jewish Genealogy Society at Beth El Synagogue and coauthors of What s in a Name? A Young Person s Jewish Genealogy Workbook, for an eye-opening, mouth-watering Jewish heritage journey. Sprinkled throughout the presentation will be tips from Caryn, a Registered Dietitian, on how to make some of these traditional Jewish foods healthier. Take a gastronomic trip back in time, and perhaps discover your roots in the process.
Caryn Alter and Stephen Cohen are founding members of the Mercer County Jewish Genealogy Society at Beth El Synagogue and are coauthors of What s in a Name? A Young Person s Jewish Genealogy Workbook. They have given presentations on Jewish genealogy throughout New Jersey, and both sing with the Jewish choir Sharim v Sharot.
Caryn started doing research on her ancestors from Ukraine, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Israel, and the United States when she was in college. She has a Master s Degree in Nutrition and Public Health and is a Registered Dietitian in the community wellness and cardiac rehabilitation departments of CentraState Medical Center in Freehold. She has also written articles for newspapers, magazines, and journals.
Stephen serves as the Treasurer of the Midwest Jewish Studies Association. He has presented and published papers on numerous Jewish Studies topics. His research on over 4,500 family members from Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the United States, Canada, and Israel goes back nearly 250 years. Stephen, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry, has written several books, is a Judaic calligrapher, and raised his children speaking Yiddish.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Jewish tombstones are an invaluable source of genealogic information. Tombstone inscriptions can provide the deceased's Jewish religious ("Hebrew") name(s), original or alternate versions of family surnames, maiden surnames, the names of the deceased’s parents, his or her place of birth, age, profession, rabbinic lineage, community activities, even the names of living family members. But there are common problems that make it difficult for researchers to accurately translate and interpret Jewish tombstone inscriptions. Using examples from Jewish tombstones, the presentation will focus on building skills in understanding an inscription's context, determining the accuracy of the information presented, Jewish naming conventions, recognizing Kohain and Levite status and symbols, identifying rabbinic status, interpreting honorifics, and understanding Hebrew calendar dates and abbreviations. The presentation will also suggest best practices for on-site cemetery visits and tombstone photography.
An attorney and genealogist, Robin assists families in obtaining legal records, discovering nontraditional information sources, and interpreting documentary evidence. Robin is an administrator of “Tracing the Tribe: Jewish Genealogy on Facebook,” co-founder of the Jewish Community of the 15th Ward, Syracuse New York Facebook group, Associate Producer of the documentary films “Stories from the Syracuse Jewish Community” and “People and Places of the Syracuse Jewish Community,” and a former vice-president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington (JGSGW). She lectures on topics in Jewish genealogy and research methodology and has appeared on the cable television program “Tracing Your Family Roots.” Robin has written articles on Jewish genealogy and local history appearing in several publications, including Avotaynu, Mishpacha, The Galitzianer, and the Jewish Observer of Central New York.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Wondering why your immigrant ancestor chose to live in Pittsburgh, not Cleveland? Little Rock, not Los Angeles? Memphis, not Miami? The answers might lie in the records of the Industrial Removal Office, a scary name for a good organization. The IRO, founded in 1901, assisted immigrants in finding employment and better living conditions, and helped assimilate them into American society. IRO agents often worked in partnership with Jewish fraternal groups, spread around the USA to secure jobs, and then send immigrants to those locations to establish a new life.
Records of the IRO, housed at the American Jewish Historical Society, include ledger books, case files and correspondence, as well as reports by local agents on the newly settled immigrants. The presentation demonstrates how to utilize the IRO documents to locate illuminating information on the American journeys of immigrants.
Ren e left the public policy world for professional genealogy, finding that researching dead people is easier than working with Congress. Her background in government and cultural anthropology brings an unique perspective to locating and interpreting records.
Ren e is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington, the JewishGen Latvia Research Group. Ren e passionately advocates for historic preservation and records access. To that end, she is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists Advocacy Committee and serves as policy advisor to the RecordsNotRevenue.com campaign.
Ren e worked as a researcher for Season 2 of PBS Genealogy Roadshow and served as lead researcher for Season 3. She regularly researches at the National Archives, Library of Congress, and U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum. You can find Ren e online at EasternEuropeanMutt.com.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Learn what vital records are available in New York State and New York City - and what advocacy work is being done to make more available!
Alec Ferretti is a New-York-City-based professional genealogist, who works for the Wells Fargo Family & Business History Center, researching family histories for high net worth clients. Alec specializes in the genealogy of 20th century immigrants to the United States. He is a regular lecturer at genealogical societies and conferences. He serves as the President of the New York Genealogy & Technology Group, serves actively on the Board of Directors of the Association of Professional Genealogists, and on the Board of Reclaim the Records, a nonprofit dedicated to wrangling public records from obstinate government agencies.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Many of us have had a surprise or two in our DNA results. It's important not to panic and adopt a methodology for investigating your surprising results. Using real-life scenarios, this presentation will provide appropriate strategies to tackle common surprises and apparent inconsistencies found in autosomal DNA results. Topics will include ethnicity estimates, navigating unrecognizable matches, and discussing how endogamy and pedigree collapse realistically affect your DNA results.
Dr. Adina Newman, EdD, the creator of My Family Genie, is a professional genealogist and educator. Her specialties include Jewish genealogy, genetic genealogy, social media, and New England, and she presents on these topics in a variety of venues, from major genealogy conferences to local genealogy societies. Her findings have received international media attention, including mentions in The Daily Mail, AP News, and The Times of Israel, and she has made appearances on several news outlets such as NPR and I24NEWS. She co-founded the DNA Reunion Project at the Center for Jewish History, a program to raise awareness about the potential of DNA testing within the Holocaust survivor community and provide survivors and their children with commercial DNA tests. She volunteers as a moderator for a Jewish genetic genealogy Facebook group and on the program committee for her local Jewish genealogical society. She was also a 2020 recipient of the AncestryProGenealogists scholarship. You can find her on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok as @MyFamilyGenie.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members. If you have not renewed your membership for the 2022-2023 membership year, please send your dues ($20 for an individual, $35 for family) ASAP to 5701 Oakshire Rd, Baltimore, MD 21209 to make sure you receive the link.
Founded in 1897, the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) was the leading Yiddish language newspaper in the United States throughout the 20th century. Most of this newspaper is available to browse digitally for free through the online Historical Jewish Press database. This lecture will examine hidden genealogical gems within this newspaper, some of which can be found with minimal Yiddish skills. The emphasis will be on the personals, which were daily sets of inquiries submitted by readers seeking information on their relatives, and the Gallery of Missing Husbands." This lecture will also cover the historical and cultural context of the newspaper, which will help evaluate its relevance to a researcher s individual family history.
Michael Morgenstern is a native of Los Angeles, California. He has been an avid genealogy researcher since he was in high school in 2006. Since 2014, he has worked as an educator at Holocaust Museum LA. He frequently volunteers genealogy research for Holocaust survivors, focusing on those who do not have any prewar family documents or photographs. Michael has presented at IAJGS Conferences and on Uniworld's Jewish heritage themed European river cruises. His latest project has been researching the "Forverts" (Jewish Daily Forward) and translating "The Gallery of Missing Husbands" for JewishGen.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Thousands of Jews fled war-torn Europe by traveling eastward via Japan and/or Shanghai. Mark will trace the very interesting journeys of survival of four refugees from Europe to safe harbor in the United States two in the New York area and two in the Los Angeles area. Two refugees were from Poland, one from Lithuania, and one from Bulgaria.
Most Jewish genealogists know about the exploits of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Lithuania who issued transit visas to over 2000 Jewish refugees. Only one of these four refugees used a Sugihara visa. All the stories are compelling and worthy of documentaries. Along with providing their interesting narratives, Mark will share many of the research sources and practices used to document their journeys.
In his professional career, Mark worked for an International Company for 32 years including overseas assignments in Denmark, Hong Kong and Japan. In 1996, while on business in Poland, Mark visited Bialystok, his mother's birthplace, and became interested in his Galician and Polish roots. Now retired, Mark works with JRI Poland, JewishGen, IAJGS, and Jewish Genealogical and Archival Society of Greater Philadelphia (JGASGP) helping others research their roots. Mark is on the Board and Executive Group of JRI-Poland, is the founder of BIALYGen, the Bialystok area Jewish Genealogy group, and is the past President and current Program Chair for JGASGP. Mark chaired the program committees for the 2009 and 2013 IAJGS Conferences, served as advance coordinator for the 2018 Warsaw Conference, and served on the Program Committees for the 2018, 2021, and 2022 Conferences. Mark was honored in 2018 with the IAJGS Lifetime Achievement Award.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
On January 2, 1920, Henry Silverstein began his first day as a census enumerator by turning left instead of right. Things went downhill from there, and within days he became so overwhelmed that he resorted to an illegal scheme to finish the job. Through this shocking story and the painstaking detective work that uncovered it, you'll come to see the census and your ancestors' presence or absence in it in a whole new light. You'll laugh at Henry's misdeeds, and you'll grow your census research skills. (Based on the viral hit, When Henry Silverstein Got Cold: Fraud in the 1920 Census.)
Tammy Hepps is a historian of the Jewish experience in Western Pennsylvania. She combines in-depth historical research with techniques from technology and genealogy to reconstruct overlooked stories from the past in an engaging way. She has presented her findings around the world, including the Library of Congress and the International Jewish Genealogy Conference in Jerusalem. Her best-known research is into the history of the Jewish community in the former steel-making center of Homestead, PA (see HomesteadHebrews.com). Tammy earned her AB in computer science from Harvard and is a Wexner Heritage Fellow.
Zoom information will be sent out to members mid-week before the meeting.
Throughout the past year, we ve featured entertaining and informative presentations by speakers, but now it s time for our group members to take a turn. Please join us at the meeting and bring something to share!
All of our members are invited to bring something related to their own family history or research to share with the group. Perhaps you ve inherited your grandmother s candlesticks or Seder plate. Maybe your grandfather s tallis was passed down to you. Or possibly you have a portrait of an ancestor or a snapshot taken long ago at a family gathering. You may have found documents relating to your family's past in Europe centuries ago. Even if you don t possess any keepsakes from your ancestors, you may be able to show us a printout of their Ellis Island passenger manifest or a picture of the shtetl in which they lived.
This year, since it may be hard for members to see the item you hold up to the camera, we would like you to send us a photo of the item, in advance of the meeting, so we can prepare it for display during your presentation and later publish it in our newsletter s photo gallery. If you wish, you can also send a photo of yourself--any picture that you like, as long as it shows your face clearly so that members can match the item to the face when they see it in the newsletter.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
If you have a perplexing question related to Jewish genealogy, please submit your question by August 18 to JGSofMD@gmail.com; a selection of those questions will be addressed by the panel. Please be specific in what you are looking for and what you have already tried. Give as much background information as possible, so that our panelists can guide you on ways to move forward in your research.
This is your chance to get other eyes on your question (and to learn from answers to others). The deadline for submissions is Thursday, August 18.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Jack Williams was a father and grandfather who seemed to have no clear background. His descendants wanted to know where he came from. Did he have family? Was he really all alone in the world?
Watch how basic DNA tests and research of paper records can reveal the identity of a man who left his family and birthplace in the early 20th century to create a new life in another part of the country.
Lauren Shulsky Orenstein is a professional genealogist based in New York City. She has been researching family histories for almost 30 years, dating back to a time when finding a census entry was an arduous process involving city directories and endless scrolling through microfilm. She has been working professionally for over 12 years solving probate, property, DNA and family history questions.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
The landscape of Canada is extensive, and so are our genealogy resources! In this presentation we'll take a look at accessing some of the most common Canadian genealogy documents available online including census, immigration, military, and vital records. We'll also explore the abundant number of Canadian Jewish specific resources including archives and heritage organizations, newspapers, and digitized books.
Kaye Prince-Hollenberg is a professional genealogist based in Hamilton, Ontario Canada. She specializes in Jewish Genealogy, Holocaust Research, and Genetic Genealogy. A Librarian by day, Kaye can often be found hosting genealogy workshops, helping others with their research, and acting as a Search Angel for Canadian adoptees. She is the JRI-Poland town leader for Korolowka and Zaleszczyki, and is currently working on a multi-year project to trace and document Jewish families and Holocaust survivors from the town of Korolowka.
Website: https://www.kayeprincegenealogy.com/
Twitter: @GenealogyKaye
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
The Germany where our ancestors lived is not the Germany of today. Its boundaries have changed several times. Before its unification in 1871 it was more a concept than a state, composed of dozens of kingdoms, duchies and principalities large and small. Each of these states had its own laws and attitudes toward Jews.
To do research in Germany one must know which places belonged to which state at a given time, the legal status of Jews there, and the records that they kept. Germany has an enormous wealth of records pertaining to Jews, especially after 1800, but there are no simple, global rules for using them.
My talk will work backwards from today s Germany to the early 19 th century. It will focus on key historical events, their impact on Jewish life and the way records were kept.
Roger Lustig is a genealogical researcher based in Princeton, NJ. Since 2002 he has specialized in the Jewish families of Prussian Poland, especially Upper Silesia and West Prussia. He has done research in archives in the US, Germany and Poland. As research coordinator for GerSIG (German Special Interest Group) he is developing databases, including NALDEX (Name-Adoption List index), W rttemberg Family Registers and the Hessen- Gatermann database. He has also contributed over 25,000 Prussian records to the JRI-Poland database. He has given presentations at 13 IAJGS conferences, scholarly conferences in Germany and Poland, and various genealogical societies in the US and Canada. He moderates the GerSIG group on Facebook, and is one of 4 admins of the Tracing the Tribe group one of the largest Jewish genealogy groups on Facebook.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
The U.S. 1950 census will become public on April 1, 2022, just 5 days after you hear Joel s talk!! If you, your family, or other persons of interest were alive on April 1st, 1950 and a resident of the U.S. and its territories, you should expect to see their name(s) on the 1950 population schedule. Joel will provide advice on what you can do to prepare for this once every ten year event before the opening. He will cover who uses the census, census caveats, who was enumerated and who will appear on the rollout (not necessarily the same group of people), how the 1950 census was taken and whether you could have been a 1950 enumerator, enumerator instruction manuals, census sampling, and 1950 population and housing forms and large city block summaries for Baltimore. The National Archives for the first time will have on April 1st a preliminary name index to the Population Schedules based on Optical Character Recognition and Artificial Intelligence which can read handwritten names. Another crowdsourcing project led by FamilySearch and Ancestry.com, who are going to OCR/AI all columns of the Population Schedule will start after the rollout but the completion of that index won t be completely done for several weeks. No one knows how robust the OCR/AI indexes will be. They will need proofing and updating. It s a good idea not to rely strictly on the name indexes but find your census district number now using locational tools. Joel will discuss such tools (his area of research) including the National Archives census map collection (available online), and his and Steve Morse s 1950 locational tools at the One-Step (stevemorse.org) website, the US Census section, and the Unified Tool. The One-Step 1950 utilities took almost 8 years to produce with the help of about 70 volunteers, involve 230,000 or so searchable 1950 census district definitions with about 79,000 more small community names added, and street indexes for over 2,400 1950 urban areas that correlate with 1950 census district numbers.
Joel Weintraub, a New Yorker by birth, is an emeritus Biology Professor at California State University, Fullerton. He became interested in genealogy over 20 years ago and volunteered for 9 years at the National Archives in southern California. Joel helped produce location
tools for 1900 through 1950 federal censuses, and the NY State censuses for NYC (1905, 1915, 1925) for the Steve Morse One-Step website. He has published articles since retiring on the U.S. census and the 72-year rule, the name change belief and finding difficult passenger records at Ellis Island, searching NYC census records with the problems of NYC geography, and a revision of the biography of naturalist Adolphus Heermann. He has a YouTube channel with his genealogy and field biology talks at JDW Talks . His interests include birding, and collecting interesting exhibits for his PowerPoint talks.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Russian Empire records exist both online and in archival locations across Eastern Europe. These records include traditional genealogical records like vital records and censuses, but there are many other record types as well that can help understand ancestors and other family members. This talk will look at research into one family, starting with their life in the United States, and tracing their family back well into the 1700s. A wide variety of documents on this
family will be discussed and will demonstrate the breadth of information available for understanding one's family--if you are persistent and follow the clue that they left.
Lara Diamond began researching her own family around 1989. She has traced all branches of her family multiple generations back in Eastern Europe using Russian Empire-era and Austria-Hungarian Empire records. Most of her personal research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. She is president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland and is JewishGen's Subcarpathia Research Director. She has lectured around the country and internationally on Jewish and Eastern European genealogy research as well as genetic genealogy. She also runs multiple district- and town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns. Lara blogs about her Eastern European and Jewish research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.
Because newfound cousins may have information and records one never imagined were available, finding new cousins can help us break open new lines of research and lead to discoveries of previously unknown ancestors. Building out family trees with branches of distant cousins also enables us to spot where new DNA matches fit into one s family tree. Through formerly unknown cousins Lynn learned her grandmother s maiden name, discovered two completely unknown branches of her family, and found new connections to several branches of her father s family. Through case studies and a discussion of easily available tools, Lynn will discuss creative methods for locating and effectively using a wide range of resources in the search for unknown cousins. She will also discuss strategies for engaging newfound cousins in one s own research and for creating a dynamic family conversation.
Lynn Diamond is on the board of the Jewish Genealogy Society of New York (JGSNY) and is co-founder of Central Synagogue of New York s Discover Your Roots group. She is a retired attorney with a previous career in the jewelry industry as a magazine editor and marketing executive and has a B.A. in Linguistics from Cornell University. Lynn has been researching her family s history for more than 30 years, ever since an offhand comment from a great aunt about the family s town of origin in Lithuania propelled her to the NY Public Library s map room long before the internet to find its location in Eastern Europe. Her own focus is on Belarus and Lithuania, and in the U.S. one of her key areas of concentration is Baltimore, to which her second great grandfather emigrated in 1895. Lynn extends her areas of research to as many of her cousins as she can interest in the subject of genealogy, which was the impetus of this talk.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Hi there, I’m Gil Bardige, a genealogist for over 40 years and genetic genealogist for more than a dozen years. I’ve tested at all 4 of the major DNA companies… Did you get your autosomal DNA results? Do you, like me, have tens thousands of matches that the testing companies tell you are close relatives, only to find that they don’t share a surname or town in common? Confused? Frustrated? You are not alone.
So, take a deep breath and join me in understanding your results of ethnicity and matches; how to prioritize them and reduce the thousands of matches to numbers you can actually contact and research and maybe find, like I did, keys to expanding your genealogy family tree. Find the matches who know what you don’t know about your tree.
This class is for beginners and all others who are just stuck and don’t know what to do next. Maybe you need a restart? I will share with you the processes and techniques that I use to prioritize matches despite endogamy, to get organized and feel like you can accomplish something and know what to do next. In the end, you will be able to say, “Now I understand, I get it, I know what to do.”
Gil Bardige lives in the Columbus Ohio area. A graduate of the New York Institute of Technology, Gil is recently retired after a long career in Air Conditioning and Refrigeration most recently as a National Business Development Leader for Trane.
At the “instruction” of his mother, Gil began his genealogy adventure in 1979 with 54 people in his tree. Today his family tree including Mishpocha, is over 2000 people tracing 4 branches back to his 5 th great grandfathers born about 1740. His families arrived in Chicago in the early 20 th century.
For the last 13+ years Gil has expanded his knowledge base to Genetic Genealogy, testing at each of the four major DNA companies and currently manages three Y-DNA projects at Family Tree DNA as a Volunteer Administrator. He loves to help people manage their expectations and begin to remove confusion from the DNA results whether it’s, Y-DNA, mtDNA, or Autosomal DNA.
Gil is the new Chair of the Genealogy Committee of the Columbus Jewish Historical Society (JGS). He had spoken at a number of local events and international conferences, including at IAJGS in Orlando, Cleveland, Virtual San Diego and Virtual Philadelphia.
Gil is a firm believer that you can use DNA results as a tool in your genealogical research as it generates clues that can help people confirm/deny relationships. His speaking style is high energy (you won’t be bored) and he loves to take questions. People have said of his presentations, “Thank you, Gil, I am no longer confused!”
Zoom information will be sent to members the middle of the week preceding the meeting.
Throughout the past year, we ve featured entertaining and informative presentations by speakers, but now it s time for our group members to take a turn. Please join us at the meeting and bring something to share!
All of our members are invited to bring something related to their own family history or research to share with the group. Perhaps you ve inherited your grandmother s candlesticks or Seder plate. Maybe your grandfather s tallis was passed down to you. Or possibly you have a portrait of an ancestor or a snapshot taken long ago at a family gathering. You may have found documents relating to your family's past in Europe centuries ago. Even if you don t possess any keepsakes from your ancestors, you may be able to show us a printout of their Ellis Island passenger manifest or a picture of the shtetl in which they lived.
Please show your item to the group (and this year, it could even be something valuable or fragile that you wouldn't ordinarily bring to a meeting!), and tell us a little bit about the person it belonged to or how you received or discovered it.
Please present just one item and limit your talk to just a minute or two!
This year, since it may be hard for members to see the item you hold up to the camera, we would like you to send us a photo of the item, in advance of the meeting, so we can prepare it for display during your presentation and later publish it in our newsletter s photo gallery. If you wish, you can also send a photo of yourself--any picture that you like, as long as it shows your face clearly so that members can match the item to the face when they see it in the newsletter.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members. Note that our new membership year starts October 1. Reminder to all those sending in dues: please clearly indicate the name of the member and preferred email.
Alex Krakovsky is a Jewish Ukrainian born in Kyiv. He is using the Freedom of Information laws and the court system in Ukraine to force archives to allow him to scan records. Alex became interested in learning about his roots after his mother s death in 2011. He found references to his grandfather, whom the family knew almost nothing about in a book and some documents at the archive in Zhytomyr. He was asked to pay 116,000 hryvnia (about $4,600) for copies of the documents! He refused and continued to refuse until the archives decreased the fee to $2, which he paid. Alex later sued the archive, winning back his $2 plus an additional 100 hryvnia ($4) for the hassle the archive put him through.
The case also changed Alex's life. With no formal legal training, he has become a litigation machine a hero of sorts to frustrated researchers and genealogists. Alex has sued more than a dozen archives with the goal of bringing Ukraine s archives up to European standards. Among other things, he advocates for the publishing of inventories online so that people know what is in the archives. This would also help prevent the illegal sale of archival materials, which he suspects is ongoing. He also agitates for the right to freely photograph documents.
Alex has not lost a single case to date. He often wins, citing constitutional precedent. Recently, he faced his most powerful adversary. Alex filed suit against Ukraine s Ministry of Justice. The Ministry has the state archives under its wing and issued a June 2018 order barring the copying of documents larger than letter-size, files thicker than 1 inches, old printed books, listings of documents, and basically anything a researcher or genealogist might need to see.
About Alex Krakovsky: Alex was born at a very young age in 1982 in Kyiv. He graduated from the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in 2005 with a degree in Flexible Computer Systems. He has been actively doing genealogy since 2011.
Alex has been digitizing records in Ukrainian Archives, including Jewish metrical books and other vital records, school records, revision lists, poll tax censuses, and more. He then posts the records online to a wiki page which yields a massive amount of raw data for those interested in Ukrainian research. Alex uses high resolution scanning equipment to scan virtually all records in an archive. He has spent a great deal of time and his own money doing this important work and he is constantly battling a very difficult government system. Alex has received donations for the purchase of state-of-the-art scanners, which are now in use in most Ukraine archives.
Collecting These Times: American Jewish Experiences of the Pandemic is one project of a larger initiative by the Council of American Jewish Museums that aims to document the Jewish experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jewish communities in 18 cities throughout the United States are leveraging an innovative oral history platform, TheirStory, to preserve stories of this time and make our experiences accessible for the genealogists that will follow in our footsteps. Join this session to learn more about the project and how you can get involved.
Zach Ellis is the Founder & CEO of TheirStory (www.theirstory.io) -- a remote interviewing platform used by over 50 institutions to remotely record, transcribe, index, and make accessible their community members' stories -- now and for future generations. Zack founded TheirStory after recording his parents telling their life stories over video calls while Zack was in San Francisco and his parents were in Rochester, NY. Prior to TheirStory, Zack worked in Silicon Valley for 6 years at several technology startups -- ranging in industries from API Management, to Home Care, to Education Technology. He has a BA in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
Maggie Hoffman serves as the archivist at the Jewish Museum of Maryland where she manages several contemporary collecting initiatives, including JMM s Collecting These Times project. Previously, she has worked and volunteered in government, museum, university, and community archives. She is committed to generating thoughtful conversations about how communities can learn from history to envision a better future. Her interests include environmental history, creative outreach, and archival access. She is an active member of the Society of American Archivists, where she co-founded the Career Services Commons in 2020. Maggie holds a BA in History from Reed College and an MS-LIS in Archives Management from Simmons College. She can be reached at mahoffman@jewishmuseummd.org
A great many Galician researchers have acquired copies of family records from repositories in Poland and Ukraine or online images provided by the State Archive or Genealogical organizations. Over the last twenty years, the
work of Jewish Records Indexing - Poland and Gesher Galicia has made these records more readily available to all Galician researchers. This session offers an in-depth examination of vital records along with a strategic framework to help researchers in acquiring Galician records to further their research. We will provide a historical perspective covering the regulations that governed Jewish recordkeeping. We will make sense of the regulations covering civil marriages that impacted the legitimacy and surnames of children. Close examination of sample birth, marriage, and death records will reveal the information contained in the records, identify the records having the most genealogical value, and discover surprises found in many of these records.
While on business in Poland, Mark became interested in his roots. Now retired, Mark works with JRI Poland, JewishGen, IAJGS, and Jewish Genealogical and Archival Society of Greater Philadelphia (JGASGP) helping others research their roots. Mark serves on the Board and Executive Group of JRI-Poland, is the founder of Bialystok Area Jewish Genealogy Group, is on the Advisory Board of Gesher Galicia, and is past President of JGASGP. Mark chaired the program committees for the 2009 and 2013 Conferences and served as advance coordinator for the 2018 Warsaw Conference. Mark was honored in 2018 with the IAJGS Lifetime Achievement Award.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Jewish Records Indexing Poland is now 24 years old. It now contains about 6.2 million entries for 600 cities and towns in today s Poland and sections of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania that were formerly part of Poland.
This session will deal with Jewish records and research in the four historical areas of Poland Congress Poland, Galicia, Grodno Gubernia (Pale of Settlement), and Prussian Poland. Participants will learn how to find out what records exist for your town. Sample birth, marriage, death, and census type records will be examined revealing the information contained in the records and identifying the records having the most genealogical value. And, JRI-Poland s database search functionality will be demonstrated.
While on business in Poland, Mark became interested in his roots. Now retired, Mark works with JRI Poland, JewishGen, IAJGS, and Jewish Genealogical and Archival Society of Greater Philadelphia (JGASGP) helping others research their roots. Mark serves on the Board and Executive Group of JRI-Poland, is the founder of Bialystok Area Jewish Genealogy Group, is on the Advisory Board of Gesher Galicia, and is past President of JGASGP. Mark chaired the program committees for the 2009 and 2013 Conferences and served as advance coordinator for the 2018 Warsaw Conference. Mark was honored in 2018 with the IAJGS Lifetime Achievement Award.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
J-Roots is a Russian language Jewish genealogy portal that is a trove of genealogical information. This talk will demonstrate how an English speaker can navigate this site and demonstrate the types of successes that can be had on J-Roots. For the speaker, this included extending one branch of her family back to 1776, finding ancestors' signatures and detailed information about their lives.
Lara Diamond began researching her own family around 1989. She has traced all branches of her family multiple generations back in Eastern Europe using Russian Empire-era and Austria-Hungarian Empire records. Most of her personal research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. She has done client research leading to their ancestors in many parts of the former USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and more. She is president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland and is JewishGen's Subcarpathia Research Director. She has lectured around the country and internationally on Jewish and Eastern European genealogy research as well as genetic genealogy. She also runs multiple district- and town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns. Lara blogs about her Eastern European and Jewish research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Dr. Fessenden will take us on a virtual tour of the Baltimore Immigration Museum, which is located in the Locust Point neighborhood of Baltimore City. His talk will cover the many ethnic groups that arrived in America through the port of Baltimore. He will then focus on Jewish immigration to Baltimore, notably the German Jews who arrived in the mid-19 th century and the wave of Eastern European Jews in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Nick Fessenden (Yale, B.A., Columbia, M.A. and Ph.D.) taught history at Friends School from 1972-2010, as well as at the Maryland Institute College of Art on an adjunct basis during 1981-2000. After retirement from Friends School, he has become involved in immigration history, helping to found the Baltimore Immigration Museum in 2016 and teaching immigration history courses at the Osher Institute of Towson and Columbia and CCBC/Owings Mills and Essex. He has also given lectures on immigration history to various genealogical, civic, hereditary, educational, and business groups.
The Museum website is immigrationbaltimore.org.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
In this presentation, Kira details her research on the Heinemanns who lived in B ckeburg, a small town in the principality/former state of Schaumburg-Lippe, for nearly 120 years. While Jews have lived in the area for centuries and many records exist, few records are easily available for inexperienced researchers in Schaumburg.
Kira provides examples through her research using state archives, registry offices, books, the Leo Baeck Institute, and other websites for her ancestors in B ckeburg, Steinhude and other towns in northwestern Germany. Originally not knowing the names of her Heinemann great-grandparents, she now has traced her grandfather s ancestry to 1640. She was also able to reunite with the descendant of a cousin who escaped the Holocaust and coincidentally happens to also live in Maryland.
Kira Dolcimascolo has actively researched her Jewish-German and Sicilian roots since 2014; her knowledge of her ancestors from Germany/Prussia now extends to the 17th and 18th centuries. When not obsessively researching her family s genealogy, she works as a school-based occupational therapist and assists her husband with their painting and decorating business. She has lived in Baltimore for over 30 years.
Fred Blum will give a talk titled, How to Locate Individuals Through Genealogy Research . He will cover the techniques he used to find members of his own family. He will also discuss his volunteer work with the International Red Cross Tracing Service and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, finding survivors who were children during the Holocaust.
Frederick A. Blum, after founding his own firm in 1971 to provide services to attorneys, became president of B & R Services for Professionals, the Philadelphia area s largest service company providing court filings, court reporting and process serving, locally, nationwide and worldwide.
In 1988, Fred obtained his Private Detective license.
Using his investigative skills, in June 1988 he started research on his family. He has constructed a family tree with over 1,200 family members from around the world, dating back to 1810.
In 2005, Fred became a volunteer for the International Red Cross Tracing Service. For that work he has received local and international volunteer of the year awards. In 2007, he was elected president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Philadelphia. He is the immediate past president of the JGSGP. In 2008, Fred was elected to the board of the Philadelphia Jewish Archives and is now serving as vice
President. Fred is now serving as co-host of the 2021 IAJGS conference scheduled for August 2 to 5 in Philadelphia.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Probate, which includes wills and estate records, is an interesting topic because it s not a source people immediately think about, but the files are rich with genealogical information that can provide routes around research roadblocks.
In a virtual presentation, researcher and historian Allan Jordan explores the ins and outs of probate research. He will discuss what is a Probate file; how to determine if someone was likely to have Probate records; how to go about finding the record; and what you may find searching in a Probate record.
Along the way, Allan will share examples of the typical records and the information they contain, as well as the unique finds he has located in his quest through the courts.
He will review how to get started to find your family files, including what is available online and how you can work remotely with courts to obtain the details left behind by your family members.
Allan first got involved with genealogy working to build his family tree which today dates back to the 1700s. He has followed his family from Courland and Ukraine to the United States, Scotland, Egypt, South Africa, Switzerland, Argentina, Australia, and Israel. He applies his research skills as a historian and became what he likes to call a "professional amateur" genealogist. He enjoys sharing his experiences with fellow researchers and also helps people seeking research in the New York area or extra skills in building their family tree.
Throughout the past year, we've featured entertaining and informative presentations by speakers, but now it's time for our group members to take a turn. Please join us at the meeting and bring something to share! Instructions on how to participate are below.
All of our members are invited to bring something related to their own family history or research to share with the group. Perhaps you've inherited your grandmother's candlesticks or Seder plate. Maybe your grandfather's tallis was passed down to you. Or possibly you have a portrait of an ancestor or a snapshot taken long ago at a family gathering. You may have found documents relating to your family's past in Europe centuries ago. Even if you don't possess any keepsakes from your ancestors, you may be able to show us a printout of their Ellis Island passenger manifest or a picture of the shtetl in which they lived.
Please show your item to the group (and this year, it could even be something valuable or fragile that you wouldn't ordinarily bring to a meeting!), and tell us a little bit about the person it belonged to or how you received or discovered it.
Please present just one item and limit your talk to just a minute or two! This year, since it may be hard for members to see the item you hold up to the camera, we would like you to send us a photo of the item, in advance of the meeting, so we can prepare it for display during your presentation and later publish it in our newsletter's photo gallery. If you wish, you can also send a photo of yourself--any picture that you like, as long as it shows your face clearly, so that members can match the item to the face when they see it in the newsletter.
**** If you'd like to participate in the program, please email Sue Steeble by Tuesday, November 17, with your name, a short description of your item, a photo of the item, and, optionally, a photo of yourself. ****
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, to JGSMD members.
Libby Copeland's book, The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are, explores the rapidly evolving phenomenon of home DNA testing, its implications for how we think about family and ourselves, and its ramifications for American culture broadly. The Wall Street Journal says it's "a fascinating account of lives dramatically affected by genetic sleuthing." The Washington Post says The Lost Family "wrestles with some of the biggest questions in life: Who are we? What is family? Are we defined by nature, nurture or both?"
Libby Copeland is an award-winning journalist and author, who writes about culture, science, and human behavior. She was a staff reporter and editor for The Washington Post for 11 years, and, as a freelance journalist, she writes for such media outlets as The Atlantic, Slate, New York, Smithsonian, The New York Times, The New Republic, Esquire.com, and The Wall Street Journal. She has made numerous appearances on television and radio. She lives in Westchester, NY, with her husband and two children.
Sunday August 23, 2020
A team of panelists who are experienced in Jewish genealogy research will give advice on research strategies as you try to break through a brick wall. Panelists include Lara Diamond, Brooke Ganz, Tammy Hepps and Jennifer Mendelsohn! Please submit your questions by August 18 to JGSofMD@gmail.com; a selection of those questions will be addressed by the panel.
Please be specific in what you are looking for and what you have already tried. Give as much background information as possible, so that our panelists can guide you on ways to move forward in your research.
If time permits, we ll also have an open floor at the end of the program for additional questions.
Although Tony is involved in several different town research groups, he will focus on how his core team developed numerous projects for the town of Skala Podolskaya, Galicia. The purpose of this presentation is to encourage other town research groups to pursue such projects.
The projects include:
Tony Hausner has a Ph.D. in Social/Community Psychology from the University of Kentucky and worked for 26 years for the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services involved in Research and Policy Projects. He has played a leadership role in 14 town research groups, particularly Skala Podolskaya in Eastern Galicia, where his mother was born. He spent several weeks visiting all of his ancestral towns and other relevant places and has published articles on his trips. He has given several talks about the trips and other JewishGen topics.
Rachel was born in Patras, Greece and emigrated to the United States with her parents and 3 older siblings in 1956 at the age of 8. Although missing their life in Greece, the Velelli family was grateful to HIAS, the JOINT and the Jewish community of Baltimore for the opportunity to have a new start in America , following all of the sadness and personal losses they suffered during the Holocaust in Greece.
In America, Rachel became active in Jewish life, attending Hebrew school, the Baltimore Hebrew College high school, and a Zionist Hebrew speaking camp, where she met her future husband, Rick Glaser. Throughout her career, Rachel has combined her love of children and Judaism. She received her undergraduate degree in Education and Psychology and teacher s license from Goucher College, while also attending the Baltimore Hebrew College and teaching in various Hebrew schools in the area. She received her Master s Degree in Education and Special Education from Loyola University, and a second Master s Degree in Jewish Studies from the Baltimore Hebrew University, as well as her National Hebrew Teacher s License.
After teaching many years in several Hebrew schools, Rachel became the Director of Habonim Camp Moshava, a position she held for 25 years, and the Education Director of Beth Israel Hebrew school, a position she held for 26 years.
Upon her retirement, Rachel received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Baltimore Center for Jewish Education.
Currently, as Beth Israel s Director of Education Emeritus, Rachel continues to teach Jewish children, teens, B nai Mitzvah students, and adults, speaks to various groups in the community, and is still involved with Habonim camp. She is also active in various local organizations, including the Advisory Committee on Jewish Camps, SHEMESH--a network serving Jewish children with special needs, the Holocaust Remembrance Commission, the Baltimore Chavurah, and the Baltimore Jewish Film Festival Committee.
Rachel and Rick have 6 beautiful and active grandsons, ages 9 to 14, and 2 beautiful granddaughters, a 2-year-old and the newest, 8 months old.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the week before the meeting, to JGSMD members.
Dick Goldman began researching his family s history in 1954. He continued that interest in later years with the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland. He served the group as president from 1999 to 2003 and became founding president of the revived organization starting in 2013. He has also taught many courses in general and Jewish genealogy as an adjunct professor at the Community College of Baltimore County. He is the former General Manager of the The Associated s Pearlstone Conference Center. Now retired and living in South Florida, he will be coming to us via Zoom.
Zoom information will be sent out midweek, the week before the meeting, to JGSMD members.
JewishGen.org offers both archival and networking components that are relied upon by thousands of people each day. In this presentation, Avraham Groll discusses common challenges that people encounter when researching their family history, and how JewishGen can help.
Avraham Groll is the Executive Director of JewishGen. He is passionate about connecting people with their Jewish roots, and helping them experience what it means to be part of the Jewish people
He holds an MBA from Montclair State University, an MA in Judaic Studies from Touro College, a BS in Business Administration from Ramapo College, and a certificate in Executive Leadership from Columbia University. Avraham spent two years studying at Yeshiva Ohr Yerushalayim in Israel and is a frequent lecturer on a variety of Jewish genealogical and historical topics.
Members have been sent information on how to join remotely.
Descendants Day at B nai Israel is simultaneously an extensive genealogical and history project and a unique community-building initiative, connecting people to their heritage and drawing fresh attention and energy to the historic Jewish community of Jonestown. B nai Israel Congregation partnered with the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland and the Jewish Museum of Maryland to research the living descendants of Jewish families involved in B nai Israel and the Jonestown community, going back into the late 19th century. The project s goal is to update the existing historical record with new and inclusive information about the people who lived, worked, and worshipped there and to identify their descendants. The Descendants' Day project is an ambitious multi-year undertaking, with the first year culminating in the first B'nai Israel Descendants' Day Shabbaton on March 20 22, 2020.
This project is an example of reverse genealogy; instead of primarily looking into the ancestry of a research subject, we are attempting to identify living descendants. Sources and strategies for this type of genealogical research will be discussed.
Richard Gwynallen is the Director of Special Projects for B nai Israel Congregation. Just prior to his position at B nai ple to their heritage and drawing fresh attention and energy to the historic Jewish community of Jonestown. B nai Israel Congregation partnered with the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland and the Jewish Museum of Maryland to research the living descendants of Jewish families involved in B nai Israel and the Jonestown community, going back into the late 19th century. The project s goal is to update the existing historical record with new and inclusive information about the people who lived, worked, and worshipped there and to identify their descendants. The Descendants' Day project is an ambitious multi-year undertaking, with the first year culminating in the first B'nai Israel Descendants' Day Shabbaton on March 20 22, 2020.
This project is an example of reverse genealogy; instead of primarily looking into the ancestry of a research subject, we are attempting to identify living descendants. Sources and strategies for this type of genealogical research will be discussed.
Richard Gwynallen is the Director of Special Projects for B nai Israel Congregation. Just prior to his position at B nai Israel, he spent thirteen years working in community development in West Baltimore. He writes essays on his own family s history and has done extensive genealogical research as a passion.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to JGSMD membership fee) after their first meeting. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
This overview of genealogy resources available for Jewish genealogy will include online sources and documents not yet online for both the United States and Europe; she will also cover some basic knowledge critical to researching one's Jewish roots.
Lara Diamond has been researching her family for 25 years, starting as a middle school student. She has traced all branches of her family multiple generations back in Europe using Russian Empire-era and Austria-Hungarian Empire records. Most of her research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. As she is an Ashkenazic Jew, she gets to have particular fun with her completely endogamous genome. She is president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland, leads JewishGen's Subcarpathian SIG, and is on JewishGen's Ukraine SIG's board of directors. She also runs multiple district- and town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns. She blogs about DNA and her Eastern European research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.
All of our members are invited to bring something related to their own family history or research to share with the group. Perhaps you ve inherited your grandmother s candlesticks or Seder plate. Maybe your grandfather s tallis was passed down to you. Or possibly you have a portrait of an ancestor or a snapshot taken long ago at a family gathering. You may have found documents relating to your family's past in Europe centuries ago. Even if you don t possess any keepsakes from your ancestors, you may be able to show us a printout of their Ellis Island passenger manifest or a picture of the shtetl in which they lived.
Please bring your item to show to the group (of course, don t bring anything that s extremely valuable or fragile), and tell us a little bit about the person it belonged to or how you received or discovered it.
Please bring just one item and limit your talk to just one minute!
****If you d like to participate in the program, please email ssteeble@gmail.com by Wednesday, Dec 11, with your name and a short description of your item.****
More and more Russian Empire records are becoming accessible online, but few are indexed. But for those who don't speak Russian, browsing through the records in old-style Russian handwriting can be daunting. This talk will focus on how to identify, within various types of Russian Empire records, records relating to a researcher's family, in spite of not having any Russian language background. The talk will also cover various sources for online Russian Empire documents and discuss how to leverage these for one's own research.
Lara Diamond has been researching her family for 25 years, starting as a middle school student. She has traced all branches of her family multiple generations back in Europe using Russian Empire-era and Austria-Hungarian Empire records. Most of her research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. As she is an Ashkenazic Jew, she gets to have particular fun with her completely endogamous genome. She is president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland, leads JewishGen's Subcarpathian SIG, and is on JewishGen's Ukraine SIG's board of directors. She also runs multiple district- and town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns. She blogs about DNA and her Eastern European research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.
In this presentation, Kira Dolcimascolo tells the story of her great-grandmother Emma Heymann, and her 10 siblings from Greifenberg in Pomerania and Berlin. Members of this unusual family include not only circus strongwoman Katie Sandwina, but a boxer, a soap opera actor, a dancer, a sausage man, a hobby-dentist, Shanghai refugees, and descendants around the globe. As a result of her research and social media, she reunited with Heymann family members in Berlin in 2019.
Kira will provide a short history of Jews in Pomerania and background on the Heymann family s origins in Posen, West Prussia, and Pomerania, today all part of Poland. She shares her research techniques using Polish archives, web sites, and books specific to Pomeranian research, as well as research tips for small Jewish communities in the German Empire.
Kira Dolcimascolo has actively researched her Jewish-German and Sicilian roots for the past 6 years; her knowledge of her ancestors from Germany/Prussia now extends to the 17th and 18th centuries. When not obsessively researching her family s genealogy, she works as a school-based occupational therapist and assists her husband with their painting and decorating business. She has lived in Baltimore for 30 years.
The One-Step website started out as an aid for finding passengers in the Ellis Island database. Shortly afterward, it was expanded to help with searching in the 1930 census. Over the years, it has continued to evolve and today includes about 300 web-based tools divided into 16 separate categories, ranging from genealogical searches to astronomical calculations to last-minute bidding on eBay. This presentation will describe the range of tools available and give the highlights of each one.
Stephen Morse is the creator of the One-Step Website, for which he has received both the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Outstanding Contribution Award from the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, Award of Merit from the National Genealogical Society, first-ever Excellence Award from the Association of Professional Genealogists, and two awards that he cannot pronounce from Polish genealogical societies.
In his other life, Morse is a computer professional with a doctorate degree in electrical engineering. He has held various research, development, and teaching positions, authored numerous technical papers, written four textbooks, and holds four patents. He is best known as the architect of the Intel 8086 (the granddaddy of today's Pentium processor), which sparked the PC revolution nearly 40 years ago.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Please be specific in what you are looking for and what you have already tried. Give as much background information as possible, so that our panelists can guide you on ways to move forward in your research.
If time permits, we ll also have an open floor at the end of the program for additional questions.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Many of our ancestors came from Lithuania and while 96% percent of Lithuania s Jews were murdered in the Shoah, it is possible to travel in their footsteps in present day Lithuania. In this presentation Sara Ani will share with you what she saw on her trip to Lithuania this past summer. One can not only see the mass killing sites and memorials to victims of the Shoah and their decimated communities, but also find the ghostly remains of Jewish life before World War II, even her Great Great Grandmother s grave! You will follow in her footsteps to see what life was like in the Shtetls of Lithuania before the war, the remnants of Jewish homes, shops, synagogues, cemeteries and Yeshivot as well as the places that marked the mass destruction of the Litvak community. You will hear pertinent information on how to find some of the more obscure locations of mass graves and forgotten cemeteries as well as helpful hints concerning getting around in Lithuania, finding a guide, where to stay, pray and eat for those who keep kosher.
Sara Ani will share some of the research she did that made my travels more meaningful and more productive and will discuss the question: "Where do we go from here?"
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to JGSMD membership fee) after their first meeting. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
It is not well known that some 10,000 Jewish soldiers fought in the Civil War, about 7,000 for the North and 3,000 for the South. This film discusses the different allegiances of these soldiers, some as slave owners, others as ardent abolitionists, occasionally from the same family. Special attention is paid to the case of Grant s egregious Order No. 11 expelling Jews from several states, as well as to the case of Judah Benjamin, sometimes referred to as the brains behind the Confederacy. Also covered are two well-known Jewish spies, one for the Union and one for the Confederacy.
Anita Knisbacher has advanced degrees in instructional technology and has been a platform instructor both here and in South America since her teens. Since retirement, she has continued to facilitate learning via educational positions with the National Council of Jewish Women in Sarasota, FL, and here in Baltimore with the Beth Tfiloh Sisterhood, where she conducts regular Shmooze and Learn programs among other activities. She will lead a discussion after the film.
Jeff Knisbacher is a former professor of linguistics, translator, and government analyst. Since retirement, he has leveraged his languages to research his family roots in both branches of his family: the paternal in Galicia and the maternal in Ukraine. He will conclude the presentation with a brief discussion of the genealogical aspects.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to JGSMD membership fee) after their first meeting. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Does your family have bubbe meises that have defied genealogical documentation? What steps should be taken to understand them and determine the truth? In this presentation, Emily Garber explores exhaustively researching our stories by evaluating and melding paper documentation with DNA results.
Emily H. Garber has been researching her own family s history and her family s towns since 2007. Her academic background is in anthropological archaeology with degrees from Vassar College and the University of New Mexico. She has earned a certificate from Boston University s Genealogical Research course. She is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists.
Emily s blog, The Extra Yad, is at: https://extrayad.blogspot.com. Her KehilaLinks (town) webpage for her family shtetl can be found at: http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/yurovshchina/index.html.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to JGSMD membership fee) after their first meeting. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
This genealogy search began with a challenge from Pete Wambach s father to his children to research his family history and ancestry. His father was an only child whose father died when he was only 4 years old. So, he knew very little about his father. He wanted to touch the hand of a living, breathing relative. This talk describes this search that extended to 3 continents and its eventual outcome.
Peter Wambach was born in Harrisburg, PA, and was the 6th of 14 children of Peter and Margherita (Zarbo) Wambach. Educated in the parochial school system in central PA, he graduated from Penn State University with a BS in 1970.Wambach worked in the open hearth of Bethlehem Steel Corporation, in real estate sales, as a lobbyist and an executive in a construction firm. He retired in 2006 after a 36-year career with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, having served as an employee in the House of Representatives, Revenue, Property and Supplies and General Services departments. In addition, he served 12 years as a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives from 1980-1992. He is an eleven-year member of the Board of Trustees of Harrisburg Area Community College.He resides in Harrisburg with his wife Urszula, and is the father of 2 children, 2 step-children and 3 grandchildren.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to JGSMD membership fee) after their first meeting. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
This presentation will illustrate the availability and use of the many databases that can assist
Jewish people in researching their ancestors. The speaker will do this by telling of how he
searched for information about his grandfather (Zeyde), an immigrant from Eastern Poland,
whose long life contained a number of episodes that cried out for further exploration and
explanation.
Saul Lindenbaum is a retired clinical psychologist who has been researching his family history
for more than forty years. In 2000, he traveled to Poland and Ukraine to visit his ancestral
villages. In 2004 he self-published a family history and distributed copies to nearly one hundred
relatives. He is presently working on an updated edition.
This talk will lay out how 25 years worth of journalism experience has helped to guide the speaker as a genealogist and taught her to conduct productive searches. We ll talk about using the Law and Order method (follow the dun duns! ) to track down information and how relying on a simple principle like Occam s Razor that the most likely scenario is the least complicated can help you get further in your searching. Using the scheme of a logic puzzle, we ll go over pitfalls like not blindly using Ancestry hints, assessing the credibility of sources, not being wedded to spelling, and why genealogy is like playing Concentration: you always have to remember the cards you ve seen and turned over.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to JGSMD membership fee) after their first meeting. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
This introduction to genetic genealogy-related DNA testing will cover the types of tests available (autosomal, yDNA and mtDNA) and discuss the types of genealogical questions each can help to answer. The pros and cons of testing with various companies (particularly for autosomal testing) will be covered, as will strategies for transferring results from one company to others. You will learn what results will look like with each type of test and what your initial steps should be once your results are in. This talk will also discuss the reliability of ethnicity estimates.
Lara Diamond has been researching her family for 25 years, starting as a middle school student. She has traced all branches of her family multiple generations back in Europe using Russian Empire-era and Austria-Hungarian Empire records. Most of her research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. As she is an Ashkenazic Jew, she gets to have particular fun with her completely endogamous genome. She is president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland, leads JewishGen's Subcarpathian SIG, and is on JewishGen's Ukraine SIG's board of directors. She also runs multiple district- and town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns. She blogs about DNA and her Eastern European research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to JGSMD membership fee) after their first meeting. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Tracing the facts of that history remains a more difficult task. Having engaged in extensive research on both her husband s background and her own, Manuele will focus on the particular challenges of Sephardic genealogy in comparison to Ashkenazi genealogy. She will discuss the field of Sephardic research in general and the available resources. She will provide insights as to why this particular topic can be fraught with pitfalls. By looking closely at the issues of Sephardic genealogy, we can all be made aware of the importance of documentation when researching our ancestors pasts. Thus, issues in Sephardic genealogy can be more broadly applied to all our genealogy quests.
Manuele Wasserman is a member of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland. She was born in Egypt and is a Sephardic Jew. She and her husband are avid genealogists and have embarked on numerous projects exploring the different branches of their respective families in an effort to discover how it came to be that a nice Jewish boy from Baltimore married a girl from Egypt. Their family tree now numbers over 1500, with some branches reaching back as far as the early 1600s. As an adjunct to this project, they have traveled to numerous countries to do on-site research, thereby learning in depth the local history of their Jewish ancestors.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to JGSMD membership fee) after their first meeting. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Sarina Roff , author of Branching Out From Sepharad, outlines the history of Jews in Spain, the 1492 expulsion, their history in Syria, and their immigration to the Americas. She will discuss the ancestry and significance of the Kassin rabbinic dynasty, which dates to the 12th century, and the 50-year leadership of Chief Rabbi Jacob S. Kassin, who led the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn. At the same time, she solves a Converso mystery. Rabbi Kassin s ancestors arrived in Aleppo in 1540. Sarina solves the mystery of the time gap from 1492 to 1540.
Sarina Roff is a professional genealogist, editor of DOROT, and founder of the Sephardic Heritage Project. She is also the author of Backyard Kitchen: Mediterranean Salads, a cooking app called Sarina s Sephardic Cuisine, available in the Apple Store, as well as hundreds of articles. She is responsible for the translation and databasing of marriage and brit milah records on JewishGen. While on the Board of Governors of JewishGen, she acquired several databases of Sephardic records, including cemetery records from Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, and Argentina. Sarina presents often at IAJGS conferences and has completed over a dozen genealogies, through her genealogy consulting business, Sephardic Genealogical Journeys. She is Co-chair of the Brooklyn Jewish Historical Initiative, the first organization to document Brooklyn s Jewish past.
Records in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum help us to document the experiences of individual survivors and victims of the Holocaust. They usually include dates and places of birth and, less often, the names of parents and spouses; they are of obvious interest to genealogists. The International Tracing Service (ITS) collection is richer for persons persecuted in Western Europe than those who were persecuted in Eastern Europe. It nevertheless remains the single largest collection of records that allows us to document the fates of individuals during the Holocaust. This talk will demonstrate how the ITS collection and other collections at USHMM can be of value to genealogists and especially those researching ancestors from Ukraine and Galicia.
Jude C. Richter received his PhD in Russian history from Indiana University. From 2002 through 2006 he worked for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany conducting research in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) to document Holocaust survivors claims. Since 2006, he has worked for USHMM. He is currently a Research and Reference Specialist in the Museum s Survivors and Victims Resource Center.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
A team of panelists all members of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland who are experienced in Jewish genealogy research will give advice on research strategies as you try to break through a brick wall.
Please submit your questions by August 19 to Susan Steeble at ssteeble@gmail.com; a selection of those questions will be addressed by the panel.
Please be specific in what you are looking for and what you have already tried. Give as much background information as possible, so that our panelists can guide you on ways to move forward in your research.
If time permits, we ll also have an open floor at the end of the program for additional questions.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
In this presentation, Kira Dolcimascolo tells the story of her great-great-grandparents, Jacob and T ubchen Lewin, who lived K nnern, a small town in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, in the late 19th century. She provides some background for each of their families in small towns in Poland (Pinne) and Germany (Gr bzig), and recounts the fates of Jacob and T ubchen s seven children, their spouses, and their grandchildren as they successfully and unsuccessfully sought to escape the grip of rising Fascism in Germany. She will share resources for German/Prussian Jewish genealogy and will describe creative techniques for finding Jewish-German ancestors in small towns in Germany and around the globe.
Kira Dolcimascolo has lived in Baltimore for 29 years. She has actively researched her Jewish-German and Sicilian roots for the past 5 years; her knowledge of her ancestors from Germany/Prussia now extends to the 17th and 18th centuries. When not obsessively researching her family s genealogy, she works as a school-based occupational therapist and assists her husband with their painting and decorating business.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Cousin bait is the public information trail you leave for people researching the same ancestors as you to find you. Making connections to fellow researchers is every genealogist's dream, not only because it gives you a research buddy, but also because each new buddy can provide you with information you may have never found otherwise. But in the Internet age, creating that trail means understanding how search engines work. Content that may seem intriguing to you as a genealogist may fail to meet the criteria of content search engines. This talk will begin with a basic introduction to SEO, search engine optimization, to demonstrate the qualities your digital cousin bait will need to have. The bulk of the talk will cover specific examples from different, popular techniques for posting content online to evaluate the likelihood of their making your content findable. Finally, safety considerations around making your content findable will be discussed.
Tammy A. Hepps is a technologist, genealogist, and storyteller. The creator of Treelines.com, a family story-sharing website and winner of the RootsTech Developer Challenge, she lectures internationally about combining creative research, cutting-edge technology, and meaningful storytelling to make family history more engaging. She is also conducting original research into the Jewish community of Homestead, PA, once the leading steel town in the United States. Professionally, she has nearly two decades of experience managing the entire product and software development life cycles in a diverse range of industries for companies ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 corporations.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Many historical Jewish newspapers are now available online, with more being added regularly. Most are on free sites. This presentation gives an overview of what is online and where it is, suggests access strategies, discusses what to do if you don t read Hebrew or Yiddish, and shows sample search results.
Janice M. Sellers is a professional genealogist specializing in Jewish, black, dual citizenship, and newspaper research. She edits two genealogy publications and serves on the board of San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society. She is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, the Genealogical Speakers Guild, the Council for the Advancement of Professional Genealogy, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon, and the California Genealogical Society. Her Web site is ancestraldiscoveries.com.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Tired of being told by archives, libraries, and government agencies that the genealogical records you want are unavailable ? We were, too, so we figured out how to do something about it. We re Reclaim The Records, a new not-for-profit activist group of more than 5000 genealogists, researchers, historians, and journalists. We use Freedom of Information laws and sometimes even lawsuits to obtain copies of previously inaccessible archival record sets, which we then put online for free public use. We ve won the first-ever public and online access to more than twenty million archival records, including the New York City marriage license index (1909 1995), the New York State death index (1880 1956), and the New Jersey marriage index (1901 2016), and we have an ongoing lawsuit for the Missouri birth and death index (1910 present), and more. This presentation will explain how we accomplished this, as well as the history and legal basics of Freedom of Information laws, and will teach researchers how to file requests for any records that may help their own family tree research.
Brooke Schreier Ganz is the founder and president of Reclaim The Records, and the first genealogist to successfully sue a government archive for the return of records to the public. Her work has helped non-profit organizations like the Israel Genealogical Research Association and Gesher Galicia publish over 1.5 million unique genealogical records online for free use. Her personal genealogical interests include Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, and New York City.
Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of
World War II, Glenn Kurtz s grandfather, David Kurtz, captured three
minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in
Poland on 16-mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years
later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home
movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community an
entire culture annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in
Poland traces Glenn s four-year journey to identify the people in his
grandfather s haunting images. His search took him across the United
States, to Canada, England, Poland and Israel, to archives, film
preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield.
Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and
artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and
surprisingly intertwined stories of seven survivors and their Polish
hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz s home movie
became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of
catastrophe. Pursuing the significance of this brief film became a
riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival.
Glenn Kurtz is the author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost
World in a 1938 Family Film, which was selected as a "Best Book of 2014" by
The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and National Public Radio. He is a
graduate of the New England Conservatory-Tufts University double degree
program and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University. His writing has been
published in The New York Times, Salon, and elsewhere. He has taught at
Stanford University, California College of the Arts, and New York University.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to
membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments
will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and
for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Throughout the past year, we ve featured entertaining and informative presentations by speakers, but now it s time for our group members to take a turn. Please join us at the meeting and bring something to share!
All of our members are invited to bring something related to their own family history or research to share with the group. Perhaps you ve inherited your grandmother s candlesticks or Seder plate. Maybe your grandfather s tallis was passed down to you. Or possibly you have a portrait of an ancestor or a snapshot taken long ago at a family gathering. You may have found documents relating to your family's past in Europe centuries ago. Even if you don t possess any keepsakes from your ancestors, you may be able to show us a printout of their Ellis Island passenger manifest or a picture of the shtetl in which they lived.
Please bring your item to show to the group (of course, don t bring anything that s extremely valuable or fragile), and tell us a little bit about the person it belonged to or how you received or discovered it.
Please bring just one item and limit your talk to just one minute!
****If you d like to participate in the program, please email ssteeble@gmail.com by Wednesday, Feb 14, with your name and a short description of your item.****
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
W. Todd Knowles AG, is a member of the International Patron Services team at the Family History Library in Salt lake City, Utah. After being introduced to family history at the age of 12, he soon discovered his Jewish roots. The journey to find these Polish Jews has led to the creation of the Knowles Collection (knowlescollection.blogspot.com), 6 databases that as of May 1, 2016, contain the genealogical records of over 1.4 million people. Todd has spoken throughout the world and his articles have been widely published.
Following this research project over two decades, the presentation will demonstrate how genealogical resources have evolved over time and how persistence can help overcome brick walls. As an added bonus, it will serve as a travelogue describing trips to New Orleans and Alsace Lorraine, both areas rich in Jewish History. These voyages retracing the footsteps of their ancestors have brought genealogy and Jewish history alive for the Wasserman family.
Manuele Wasserman Ph.D. is an avid genealogist. For more than twenty years she and her husband, Richard Wasserman, have been actively researching their family histories. Intrigued by how a Sephardic Jewish girl born in Egypt came to marry a nice Jewish boy from Baltimore, they embarked on a roots project tracing the past migrations of their respective families across the globe. This led to the creation of a family tree which now numbers well over 1500 members reaching back as far as the early 1600 s. As an adjunct to this project, they have traveled to numerous countries to do on-site research thereby immersing themselves in the local history of their Jewish ancestors.
Professionally, Manuele serves as a wealth advisor at Morgan Stanley. Genealogy is a hobby, but it intersects well with her previous training as a historian. She holds a Ph.D. in European History from Columbia University.
Tyler Anbinder is a professor of history at George Washington University, where since 1994 he has taught the history of American immigration and the U.S. Civil War. He is the author of three award-winning books: Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (1992); Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World s Most Notorious Slum (2001), and City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (2016). He has won fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and held the Fulbright Commission s Thomas Jefferson Distinguished Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht. His research has won awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Columbia University School of Journalism, the editors of Civil War History, and the New York Society Library.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
For centuries, Jews have sought their yichus by connecting themselves to rabbinical families, either through marriage, or by paper trail. Thanks to recent advances in genetic genealogy and DNA technology, this is now possible to do for many more individuals of Jewish descent than ever before.
The goal of Dr. Paull s Y-DNA research studies is to identify the Y-DNA genetic signatures of some of Jewry s most renowned tzaddiks and historic rabbinical families. Anyone who matches one of these Y-DNA genetic signatures shares a common paternal ancestor with them. Identifying that common ancestor would enable one to link to a pedigree and paper trail that may be many centuries old.
This presentation covers the following topics: why the study of the world s historic rabbinical lineages and dynasties is so important to Jewish genealogy; how Y-DNA and traditional genealogy work together in the process for identifying the Y-DNA genetic signature for a rabbinical lineage; the results of Dr. Paull s many pioneering rabbinical heritage Y-DNA studies of historically significant rabbis, rabbinical lineages, and tzaddiks; and how these studies can enable people to rediscover their own family s lost Jewish heritage.
After reviewing the basic principles of how the Y-DNA genetic signature of a lineage is identified, Dr. Paull will briefly discuss the results of his Y-DNA studies of the Baal Shem Tov, the Shpoler Zeida, the Katzenellenbogen and Polonsky rabbinical lineages, and the Savran-Bendery and Twersky Chassidic dynasties, and explain how such studies will enable many people to rediscover their family s heritage.
Learn about the history of the Jews in Lithuania, plus resources for researching Jewish genealogy in the former Jerusalem of the North. Ellen Cassedy will cover the seven centuries of Jewish history in Lithuania, including the arrival of the Jews at the invitation of two grand dukes, the daily life of our ancestors in the age of the shtetl, the Vilna Gaon, urbanization, the Holocaust and the Soviet years, and today s Jewish community. She ll direct us to resources we can use in further research.
Ellen Cassedy is a frequent speaker on Jewish culture and Yiddish who traces her Jewish roots to the town of Rokiskis in northeast Lithuania. She is the author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust (2012) and is a co-translator from Yiddish of Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel (2016). Her piece Out of the Vilna Ghetto: Dust and Determination, was published in the Huffington Post. At the Vilnius Yiddish Institute Summer Program, she has given talks on the history of Jewish Vilna, how Lithuania is encountering the Holocaust today, and Yiddish songs and blessings. The Jewish Roots page on her web site (www.ellencassedy.com) offers information about Lithuanian archives, how to find a tour guide, help with translating Yiddish letters and other treasures, and how to learn Yiddish.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
A team of panelists all members of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland who are experienced in Jewish genealogy research will give advice on research strategies as you try to break through a brick wall.
Please submit your questions by August 20 to Susan Steeble at ssteeble@gmail.com; a selection of those questions will be addressed by the panel.
Please be specific in what you are looking for and what you have already tried. Give as much background information as possible, so that our panelists can guide you on ways to move forward in your research.
If time permits, we ll also have an open floor at the end of the program for additional questions.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Our research can generate a huge mass of names, places, dates, stories, photographs, and even video and audio recordings. Using examples of genealogies housed in the Library of Congress, Mindie Kaplan will showcase different ideas for presenting your work and making that collection of information accessible to others.
Mindie Kaplan has been involved in Jewish genealogy for more than 20 years and has a family tree consisting of more than 3500 individuals. When printed, her Splaver Family Tree is 197 pages long, including photos, biographies, stories, and references. Her Entes Family Tree is 110 pages. She gave a presentation in 2016 at the IAJGS conference in Seattle and has presented programs in the past for both the Maryland and Greater Washington Jewish Genealogy Societies. In addition, she has attended nearly every annual IAJGS conference since the 2003 conference in Washington, DC.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Looking for "Harry Glassman" in NYC? How do you know that you found the right ship manifest? This session will present case studies of how to research common names in different cities and time periods in the U.S. and how to confirm your findings with traditional methods, as well as new ones such as DNA. You'll walk away with a list of concrete techniques that can help you find that elusive ancestor.
Mindie Kaplan has been involved in Jewish genealogy for more than 20 years and has a family tree consisting of more than 3,500 individuals. When printed, her Splaver Family Tree is 197 pages long, including photos, biographies, stories, and references. Her Entes Family Tree is 110 pages. She gave a presentation at the IAJGS conference in 2016 as well as presentations for both the Maryland and Greater Washington Jewish Genealogy Societies, in addition to attending nearly every IAJGS conference since 2003 in Washington, DC.
Suzan Wynne was the founder of Gesher Galicia and a founding member of The Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington. She has written two books about researching our Jewish ancestors in Galicia, the most recent entitled, "The Galitzianers: The Jews of Galicia, 1772-1918.
We hope to see you there!
In this presentation Todd will show how to access the collection and how best to apply it to your own family research.
W. Todd Knowles AG has been on staff at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah for almost 20 years. After being introduced to family history at the age of 11, he soon learned of his Jewish roots. This discovery has guided him over the last 40 years has he has first sought to discover his family and then to help others discover theirs. Todd is married with 7 children and 2 grandchildren. He currently serves as President of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Utah.
Many genealogists are disappointed in the outcome when they spend money with testing companies without a concrete goal or question in mind. Successful testing begins with posing questions and then selecting the correct tests and testers to answer those questions. Learn how to set testing goals and how to navigate the testing and analysis processes.
Rachel Unkefer, based in Charlottesville, VA, has been a genealogist for more than 30 years and a genetic genealogist for nearly 10 years. She has published several articles in "Avotaynu: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy" and has spoken on genetic genealogy at international genealogical conferences.
If you have Jewish ancestry and have taken a DNA test, you'll have noticed that you have a lot of matches that are predicted to be relatively close matches--but to whom you can find no geographic or surname similarities. That's because Jews are an endogamous group--all of us descend from a small group of ancestors hundreds--and even thousands--of years ago, making us seem much more closely related than we are.
Individuals with endogamous ancestry get many more matches than testees in the general population--including false positives. This talk shows why endogamy makes genetic genealogy more difficult and will give real-world examples of why false positives happen and depict how endogamy looks in practice. It will also give some strategies to show how genetic genealogy successes are still possible when you're from an endogamous group.
Lara Diamond is President of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland (JGSMD) and has been researching her family for over 25 years, since she was too young to have a driver's license and had to rely on her mother as a chauffeur. She has traced all branches of her family back to Europe and most multiple generations back in Europe using Russian Empire-era and Austria-Hungarian Empire records. Most of her research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. She recently took over running JewishGen's Subcarpathia SIG and in addition runs several town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns. She blogs about her mostly Eastern European research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
More than twenty years before Israel Pickholtz began doing serious genealogy, his father sent him a postcard with three bits of family information. One of those was that Israel's great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz had an uncle Zelig. That information was very important in Israel's research over the last two decades, research that was helped along by traditional sources and more recently by genetic genealogy.
But even as he was progressing in his research, Israel could not shake the question "Why did my father know this?" Israel says "My father was eight years old when his grandfather Hersch Pikholz died and they never had any real conversation. None of the cousins knew about Uncle Zelig, even the older one who lived in the same house as my great-grandfather. My father himself did not recall why he knew this."
And did it even matter? Israel tells the story of his great-great-great-uncle, what he learned about his family and why now he thinks he knows how his father knew. And yes, it matters.
Israel Pickholtz, a native of Pittsburgh, made aliyah in 1973 from Chicago and now lives in Jerusalem.
He has done serious family research for nearly twenty years. His flagship work is the Pikholz Project, a single-surname project to identify and reconnect all Pikholz descendants.
Alongside his work as a professional genealogist, taking clients in Israel and abroad, he became heavily involved in genetic genealogy in 2013. He manages test kits of over eighty family members, at last count. Last summer he published a book ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People, available at http://www.endogamy-one-family.com/
He blogs at http://allmyforeparents.blogspot.com/ and receives mail at IsraelP@pikholz.org.
Lara Diamond will take you on a voyage of discovery through what was Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary when her ancestors left--but which is now all in Ukraine. From the farmlands of Volhynia (where her family members are still remembered) to the cemeteries in the middle of Podolia forests; from the rural villages of the Carpathian Mountains to modern Lviv, Lara will show you what modern-day Ukraine looks like, what is left of Jewish Ukraine, and what she discovered relating to her own family.
Lara Diamond is President of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland (JGSMD) and has been researching her family for 25 years, since she was too young to have a driver's license and had to rely on her mother as a chauffeur. She has traced all branches of her family back to Europe and most multiple generations back in Europe using Russian Empire-era and Austria-Hungarian Empire records. Most of her research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. She recently took over running JewishGen's Subcarpathia SIG and in addition runs several town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns. She blogs about her mostly Eastern European research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available
Throughout the past year, we ve featured entertaining and informative presentations by speakers, but now it s time for our group members to take a turn. Please join us at the meeting and bring something to share!
All of our members are invited to bring something related to their own family history or research to share with the group. Perhaps you ve inherited your grandmother s candlesticks or Seder plate. Maybe your grandfather s tallis was passed down to you. Or possibly you have a portrait of an ancestor or a snapshot taken long ago at a family gathering. You may have found documents relating to your family's past in Europe centuries ago. Even if you don t possess any keepsakes from your ancestors, you may be able to show us a printout of their Ellis Island passenger manifest or a picture of the shtetl in which they lived.
Please bring your item to show to the group (of course, don t bring anything that s extremely valuable or fragile), and tell us a little bit about the person it belonged to or how you received or discovered it.
Please bring just one item and limit your talk to just one minute!
If you d like to participate in the program, please send a short description of your item to Susan Steeble in advance (ssteeble@gmail.com).
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Dick will share his perspective on the trip that he and his children recently took to visit ancestral homes in Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus. Before leaving, he carefully reviewed his 60 years of genealogical research to confirm the towns to be seen, the ancestors who lived there, and the three centuries of history his forebears experienced. When he got there, what he discovered was not only unexpected but, in one case, literally beyond belief! It called into question decades of research. What he learned provides a valuable lesson for each of us, regardless of our family origins. At this program, you will see remnants of our Jewish past and views of contemporary Eastern Europe, and you ll hear how an experienced genealogist could be so wrong about so many things and for so long. Dick will also discuss how you can plan a similar trip, possibly connected with the IAJGS Conference being held in Warsaw in 2018.
Dick Goldman currently serves as Vice President of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland and has twice been its President. He is adjunct faculty at CCBC, teaching courses in genealogy, and was a presenter at the IAJGS conference in Seattle this summer. He lectures frequently on genealogical topics.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
In this program, Joyce Dreyfuss, a professional Book and Paper Conservator, will discuss: When did paper ingredients change from linen and papyrus to wood pulp? Why does acid matter? How should rare materials be stored? What kind of environment do we need? and How should we handle a rare or delicate object? She will also provide a hands-on demonstration.
Joyce Dreyfuss is currently a freelance Book and Paper Conservator to both museums and private clients. The field comprises hands-on craftsmanship with intellectual rigor and education. She apprenticed for a year with Mr. Johannes Hyltoft of Denmark at the Book Conservation Lab for The Smithsonian Institution rare book libraries. Many people are not aware that The Smithsonian has several small rare book libraries with priceless collections of everything from Leonardo DaVinci s anatomical drawings to rare stamps from the Soviet Union to Sigmund Freud s collected letters. After her apprenticeship with Mr. Hyltoft, she spent another year in Israel, where she worked on Holocaust art work from the concentration camps at Yad Vashem Museum. She then returned to The Smithsonian Institution, where she worked under Mr. Hyltoft until 1987. Subsequently, she moved to Baltimore and began to freelance.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings. The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
In this presentation, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) historical records expert Marian L. Smith will showcase late 19th and 20th century US immigration and nationality records. She will also discuss how using a timeline can help one predict what immigration and naturalization records may exist for a given immigrant, and how to request records from USCIS. Though the examples feature Jewish immigrants, the records and process discussed will be of interest to all.
Marian Smith has been an historian and historical records expert for US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS, formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service) for nearly thirty years. She specializes in the history and uses of immigration and naturalization records, and brings her experience to genealogical researchers to help them to help them understand what records may or may not exist for an immigrant, and why. Her research primarily involves official immigration agency records held in the National Archives in downtown Washington, D.C. Marian shares that research in a bi-monthly USCIS History and Genealogy Webinar and occasional in-person presentations.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings. The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
What do you do when the hard proofs just aren t there, but you are as sure as you can be what they would show if you could find them? If you fold your hands and wait, you may never get anywhere with your research, but if you accept your suppositions as fact, they may never be questioned again not by you and certainly not by your research heirs. This presentation will use examples from the east Galician single-surname Pikholz Project to consider when what you know is beyond a reasonable doubt and if that is indeed good enough.
Israel Pickholtz, a native of Pittsburgh, made aliyah in 1973 from Chicago and now lives in Jerusalem.
He has done serious family research for nearly twenty years. His flagship work is the Pikholz Project, a single-surname project to identify and reconnect all Pikholz descendants.
Alongside his work as a professional genealogist, taking clients in Israel and abroad, he became heavily involved in genetic genealogy in 2013. He manages test kits of over eighty family members, at last count. Last summer he published a book ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People, available at http://www.endogamy-one-family.com.
He blogs at http://allmyforeparents.blogspot.com and receives mail at IsraelP@pikholz.org.
We ll cover the proven steps that will get you started with atDNA, and on the path to determining Common Ancestors with your Matches. Experienced how-to guidance on: Robust Trees; Patriarch List; Standard email/message; Communicating with Matches and sharing; finding and proving Common Ancestors; Tracking info. Learn the principles of triangulation, and how to do it with FTDNA and 23andMe results and at GEDmatch. No genealogy or biology required the perfect tool for everyone, and particularly adoptees and anyone with brick walls.
Jim Bartlett has been an active genealogist since 1974. He has been the Administrator of the BARTLETT-DNA Project (over 400 participants) since 2002 and has established 23 different lines using matching Y-DNA. He has been using autosomal DNA tests from all three main vendors since 2010 and currently has over 5,000 matching cousins who descend from most of his ancestry. He has determined Common Ancestors for over 2/3 of his DNA. He is an avid fan of these powerful, new DNA tools that will expand your genealogy, and enjoys teaching them to other genealogists. The DNA test is easy to take, fairly simple to use, and relatively inexpensive. No biology required!
Because of the rise and fall of empires and the centuries of wars and invasions in Eastern Europe, genealogical research in Poland must include consideration of the western parts of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine as well as nearby countries that were once part of Galicia in the Austrian Empire. After a brief survey of the major political, geographical, cultural, and religious influences that are significant for genealogy, we will cover the following topics, with particular emphasis on information most relevant to Jewish genealogy: 1) the Polish language: how to decode and transliterate places and names, including immigration records; 2) gazetteers: why we need them; some especially helpful examples; relating gazetteers and maps; 3) vital records and censuses: existence, location, and language; resources; and 4) Polish archives: catalog; digitization project; communicating with the archives.
Mary Ann Evan s first taste of family history was as a child in Cleveland, listening to the stories that her grandparents, immigrants from Poland, told about life in the old country. As time went by, she was able to trace her grandparents lines back to the 1700s, visit all four ancestral villages, and contact many family members still in Poland. Mary Ann has volunteered at the Kensington Family History Center for more than 15 years, assisting people from diverse backgrounds in their genealogical research. She has made research trips to Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic and is presently facilitating an Eastern European Focus Group at the Kensington FHC. In her professional life, Mary Ann taught for 25 years and then moved into the world of computers, where she has worked for more than 25 years, most recently in IT security.
Many researchers, once they have discovered the town from which their ancestors left Eastern Europe, assume that their families must have lived in that town or the vicinity for many generations. While this was true for some families, there was significant movement through broad swaths of Europe by many Jews for a variety of reasons. The speaker will demonstrate the breadth of some families movements with examples from her own research and will discuss the types of documents used to trace those families travels.
Lara Diamond is President of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland (JGSMD) and has been researching her family for 25 years, since she was too young to have a driver s license and had to rely on her mother as a chauffeur. She lives in Maryland. Lara has traced all branches of her family back to Europe and most multiple generations back in Europe using Russian Empire-era and Austria-Hungarian Empire records. Most of her research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. She runs several town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns. She blogs about her mostly Eastern European research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting.
Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
JewishGen.org offers both archival and networking components. In this presentation, Avraham Groll will discuss common challenges that people encounter when researching their family history, and how JewishGen can help.
Avraham Groll is the Senior Director of Business Operations for JewishGen. After studying in Israel at Yeshivat Ohr Yerushalayim, he received a BS from Ramapo College, and an MBA from Montclair State University. He is currently pursuing an MA in Judaic Studies at Touro College.
Please send questions to JGSofMD@gmail.com by January 17; a selection of those questions will be addressed by the panel. Please be specific in what you are looking for and what you have already tried. Give as much background information as possible. In addition, we ll have an open floor at the end for additional questions.
Our panelists are:
Mark Halpern is a member of the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of Jewish Records Indexing Poland. He is responsible for the AGAD Archive project for records of eastern Galicia and the Bialystok Archive and is the main contact for JRI-Poland s cooperation with the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. He is active in the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Philadelphia as Vice President of Programs and formerly the Society s President. Mark has served as Program Chair for the 2009 IAJGS Conference in Philadelphia and the 2013 Conference in Boston. He is currently leading a team to develop a Conference in Warsaw, Poland, in 2018. Mark has been researching his Bialystok and Galicia roots since 1996.
Rena Rotenberg always knew that her late husband spent 9 years in China. What she did not know were many of the details about those years. After he died, as she was preparing to move to an apartment, in the corner of a closet, she found a large box containing documents, pictures, letters, report cards, and more--things she had never seen before.
This collection is now held by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which was especially interested in the facts that he went to China as a child and that the family did not live in Shanghai, where most of the Jewish families in China lived at that time.
The artifacts, documents and letters which were translated from German to English at the Museum, demonstrate the experience of Jews in Berlin after the Nazis took over, much about the Jewish experience in China (his, and his family, in particular), his schooling (he attended the Tientsin Jewish School, where he learned British English, an interesting part of the story) , and then finally about coming to the US.
GenealogyIndexer.org is a free website enabling full-text and Soundex search of more than 700,000 pages of historical business, address, and telephone directories from primarily Eastern and Central Europe, more than 150 Yizkor books, Polish and Russian military documents, community and personal histories, Galician secondary school reports, and more. Containing millions of personal names often with towns, street addresses, and occupations, and sometimes with vital dates or patronymics this huge collection is mostly comprised of data not searchable elsewhere. This talk will focus on newly added sources and new search functionality. Recipient of the IAJGS 2012 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Jewish Genealogy via the Internet, Print or Electronic Product and one of Family Tree Magazine's 101 Best Websites for 2015.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Throughout the past year, we ve featured entertaining and informative presentations by speakers, but now it s time for our group members to take a turn. Please join us at the meeting and bring something to share!
All of our members are invited to bring something related to their own family history or research to share with the group. Perhaps you ve inherited your grandmother s candlesticks or Seder plate. Maybe your grandfather s tallis was passed down to you. Or possibly you have a portrait of an ancestor or a snapshot taken long ago at a family gathering. You may have found documents relating to your family's past in Europe centuries ago. Even if you don t possess any keepsakes from your ancestors, you may be able to show us a printout of their Ellis Island passenger manifest or a picture of the shtetl in which they lived.
Please bring your item to show to the group (of course, don t bring anything that s extremely valuable or fragile), and tell us a little bit about the person it belonged to or how you received or discovered it.
Please bring just one item and limit your talk to just one minute!
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
The meeting will be held at Hadassah, 3723 Old Court Rd., Suite 205
European Jews have always married mainly within the tribe. Whether
our numbers five hundred years ago in Europe were four hundred or four
hundred thousand, the pool was limited. As a result, the members of
the tribe today are all related to one another, multiple times. This
phenomenon, known as endogamy, makes Jewish genetic genealogy very
difficult, often impossible. There is a similar phenomenon in some
other population groups. The speaker was convinced that this brick
wall is not as impenetrable as it seems, at least in some
circumstances.
The speaker used his own family as an example, and was able to utilize
DNA to clarify multiple family relationships. He steps through how he
did this in hopes that it will encourage and inspire other researchers
of their European Jewish families and other endogamous populations to
say "I can do this!"
Lara Diamond is President of JGSMD and has been researching her family for 25 years, since she was too young to have a driver's license and had to rely on her mother to drive her to the National Archives. She has traced all branches of her family back to Europe and most multiple generations back using Russian Empire-era records. Most of her research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. Her genealogy blog is at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.
In February 1918, an eighteen-year old American Jew named William Z. Porter left his home in Philadelphia to join the 39th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers the Jewish Legion. Over the next several years, as he moved with the 39th from Windsor, Canada, to England, Egypt and pre-Mandatory Palestine, William corresponded extensively with Brill's maternal grandmother. Nearly one hundred years later, these collected letters,
postcards, photographs and souvenirs form a remarkable record of a young man s experience fighting with the Judeans. They also cast a fascinating light on subjects ranging from relations between Jewish and non-Jewish soldiers, to the vibrant Zionist youth culture of Philadelphia, to ordinary soldiers impressions of the Zionist leaders of the day. Brill's grandmother kept these
documents her entire life because she recognized their historic significance. In this presentation Mr Brill describes the collection in detail, and also discusses how he used JewishGen s resources to find William s descendants.
He will offer a portrait of East European Jewish society and culture in a moment of rapid transition and transformation, with particular attention to:
In this fun and informative talk, Sherlock Cohn, the Jewish genealogy sleuth, will explore how and why it is important to find the clues our ancestors left us in their photographic portraits. The program leads off with a definition of photo genealogy and explodes common myths about dating Jewish photos. Participants will learn what clues an expert looks for, how to organize your approach to dating and interpreting photos, and how to match photo information with vital records.
Sherlock will present two of her challenging cases to show how accurate dating, photo identification, knowledge of fashion, and matching records can shed light on our relatives lives and the social context in which their photos were taken.
There will be time at the end for members to have Ava analyze family photos only one photo per person, please! (Should there be more photos than Ava has time to analyze in an hour, we will randomly choose which photos Ava will examine.)
Ava Cohn brings a lifelong experience with heirloom photos and a multidisciplinary approach to photo dating and interpretation. A native of upstate New York, currently residing in the Chicago area, she has a degree from Brandeis University with coursework in decorative arts, art history, and costume history at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Recognizing the need for accurate dating of Jewish family photographs, combined with specialized knowledge of immigrant and Eastern European culture and traditions, she devotes her work, almost exclusively, to Jewish family photographs. Cohn is a speaker and writer whose articles have appeared in many Jewish genealogy publications.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.
Ken will be speaking to us on Why the New York Times is Wrong - Using Basic Genealogy Tools and Methodsto Show That Your Family Name Was Not Changed At Ellis Island. The origins of this talk begin with an obituary appearing in the New York Times in late 2009 asserting that the deceased s father s name was changed at Ellis Island. Ken emailed the Times pointing out that names were not changed at Ellis Island and suggesting that a simple Google search would bring up a number of reliable articles pointing out the error in the Times reporting. When the Times did not respond, Ken followed up with additional emails and, finally, did the research showing the original family name when the family arrived. He shared that research with the Times. Bottom line, the Times never did correct the error.
Ken then decided to search the digitized New York Times for other examples of similar reporting. That research, while in no way exhaustive or complete, quickly revealed four similar obituaries plus a letter to the editor in which the writer asserted that her grandfather s name had been changed in this manner. He researched each of the obituaries and the grandfather mentioned in the letter to the editor and was able to show that none of the names were changed at Ellis Island.His talk will explain his exchanges with the Times and how he did the research.
Ken Bravo is the Vice President of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies ( IAJGS ) and a Past President of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Cleveland. He served as a co-chair of the 2014 IAJGS International Conference in Salt Lake City. Ken has been searching his own roots since the mid-1970s and is a frequent lecturer on a variety of genealogy subjects. He is also a member of the Ohio Genealogical Society, the East Cuyahoga Genealogical Society, and the Association of Professional Genealogists. Ken also has his own business, The Nuts & Bolts of Jewish Genealogy, to assist others in finding their family histories.
At the end of 2012, Ken retired as a partner in the Cleveland based law firm of Ulmer & Berne LLP after a 45-year legal career, which included 12 years with the United States Department of Justice prosecuting major fraud and organized crime cases. After he left the government in 1979, Ken s career in private practice focused on business litigation, securities arbitration and the defense of white-collar criminal matters.
Ken and his wife Phyllis have been married 50 years and are the parents of four children and eight grandchildren.
Panel members are (in alphabetical order):
Lara Diamond: Lara Diamond is President of JGSMD and has been researching her family for 25 years, since she was too young to have a driver's license and had to rely on her mother to drive her to the National Archives. She has traced all branches of her family back to Europe and most multiple generations back using Russian Empire-era records. Most of her research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. Her genealogy blog is at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.
Dick Goldman: Dick is immediate past President (2013-14) and prior past President (1996-2002) of JGS Maryland and is the current Vice President. He has attended eight IAJGS conferences since 1996 and has made three trips to the Family History Center in Salt Lake City and countless trips to Archives in New York City and Washington. His serious family research began 60 years ago and he now has more than 9,700 individuals in his family tree. Dick served as the JewishGen coordinator for groups with roots in KUTNO, Poland and SWENCIONYS, Lithuania. He is a frequent lecturer on Jewish Genealogy and has taught courses at the Pikesville Senior Center, the Myerberg Center and for Brandeis Women. This spring he will be adjunct faculty at the Community College of Baltimore County teaching genealogy at the Owings Mills and Hunt Valley campuses as well as the JCC.
Carol Rombro Rider: Carol Rombro Rider has been interested in researching her family once she discovered that almost no one else in the world shared her surname. Forty years later using every conceivable resource she has discovered the difficulty but delight in research. Learning to "think outside the box" has made all the difference in the world, whether looking for the surname "Cohen" or any other one. A native of Baltimore, her research includes Baltimore, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Mexico, Israel and Romania. A trip to Romania several years ago was the highlight of her research.
Barry will be giving a presentation which will include photos of the ships his ancestors came over on, share a replica manifest, and offer his book for sale after the program.
Barry Nove s fascination with the Ellis Island experience began when work and hobby aligned and he organized the first family re-enactment tour of Ellis Island in the mid-1990s. In planning the program he met with the museum archivists, arranged period clothing for the participants, and learned about the experience his grandparents, great grandparents and relatives went through when they arrived in America. The tour of the Ellis Island Museum (120 people of all ages) was filmed by PBS as part of Ancestors, a 10-part series, which aired in 1997.
Lara Diamond will give two mini-talks:
M. Hirsh Goldberg is an award-winning public relations consultant who has served as press secretary and speech writer for government officials. He has written several other books: The Jewish Connection, The Jewish Paradox, The Blunder Book, The Book of Lies, and The Complete Book of Greed. He is also the author of authorized biographies of noted Baltimore individuals and families, including philanthropist and builder Joseph Meyerhoff and real estate developer Jack Pechter. Mr. Goldberg is a frequent contributor of Op-Ed pieces and articles to the Baltimore Sun, The Baltimore Jewish Times, and other publications. All of Mr. Goldberg s writings, books, and talks combine extensive research with fascinating stories, revealing information, and provocative insights.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD) after their first meeting. Refreshments will be available.
The LDS Church-sponsored Family History Center in Hampstead and the one in Columbia have free access to a number of premium internet sites, including Ancestry.com, Heritage.com, and Findmypast.com. In addition, any of the thousands of microfilms from the Salt Lake City genealogical library can be ordered online and reviewed at the local centers. Both centers have computers, film readers, printers, and internet access, which are available free of charge.
Jim Schollian is a retired naval officer, electrical engineer, and home improvement contractor. Although he has no formal training in family history research, he has more than 30 years of personal experience. He has been a family history consultant for the Church for over 15 years and is currently the Director of the Hampstead Family History Center.
George Harman is a retired environmentalist for the State of Maryland and is presently the Republican Party candidate for Baltimore County Executive. John Graves is a retired electrical engineer.
Throughout the past year, we ve featured entertaining and informative presentations by speakers, but now it s time for our group members to take a turn. Please join us at the meeting and bring something to share!
Part 1: Show-and-Tell!
Part 2: Translations
"Looking Beyond the Basic Records"--Take a journey through two family's histories to discover the genealogical resources available beyond the Federal Census and Vital Records. Learn how archives such as probate, property, newspapers and landsmenschaften can expand your research and offer a better understanding of the lives your ancestors lived.
Lauren Shulsky Orenstein has been researching family histories for more than 20 years, dating back to a time when finding a census entry was an arduous process involving city directories and endless scrolling through microfilm. She is comfortable in archives of every size and type, including libraries, tax departments, surrogate's and civil courthouses, universities and cemeteries. She works to venture outside the "usual" research venues to succeed. Her work in genealogy is, in many ways, an extension of her academic work in archaeology, making her uniquely qualified to dig through records, new and old, to find the information needed.
First, Lara Diamond will talk through some strategies used to get documents from in Ukraine, to include hiring researchers privately, crowdsourcing research for specific towns, and utilizing the Family History Library's resources. These strategies should be applicable to much of Eastern Europe.
Then: Notebooks filled with scribbled notes. MyHeritage. Ancestry. FamilySearch, TreeLines.com etcetera ad infinitum. Great tools for every genealogist to organize those scribbled notes in with or without added stories and comments. But - to make those dry notes come alive, to see and hear and smell their world, to tug at the heart strings of family, friend and even strangers, you ll need something more. Join Hanna Berger, founder of Bat Ami Strul Productions, in exploring how video can bring to life that world long gone.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD). Refreshments will be available.
Tammy Hepps is a nationally-recognized genealogy speaker, teacher, and writer. As the creator of Treelines.com, she won the RootsTech Developer Challenge. Her experience combines fourteen years managing web technology for digital media companies in New York City with more than two decades researching her family tree. She received her AB in Computer Science from Harvard and serves on the boards of the Philadelphia Jewish Archive Center and JewishGen.
Calling All Readers: A Literary Trove for Jewish Genealogists
Ellen Cassedy, author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust, will introduce us to an array of literary treasures that will educate, inspire, and entertain us as we pursue our Jewish family roots fiction, memoirs, genealogical journeys, children s books, and a few odd findings she promises you ve never heard of. Be ready to add your own suggestions. You ll come away with a list of terrific reads, as well as blogs and websites for further browsing.
The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to membership fee when a visitor joins JGSMD). Refreshments will be available.
Refreshments will be available. Hope to see everyone there!
Understanding the context in which our ancestors lived brings them to life and help us visualize their activities as well as understand their hopes and dreams. In Eastern Europe there developed a deep division between two committed Jewish groups who responded very differently to the worlds in which they lived. This informed and shaped their language, dress, food, customs and religious practices. We will learn how this occurred and and as part of this program experience some of those differences for ourselves.
Dick Goldman is Co-President of JGS Maryland and has been immersed in Jewish genealogy for more than fifty years. He is part of a "mixed marriage"; his wife's family is from Galicia and his is primarily from Lithuania, something they didn't know when they first married! He did his graduate work in Jewish Education at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City and has taught numerous workshops and classes on Jewish genealogy, history and culture.
Refreshments will be available. Hope to see everyone there!
Born in Germany, Professor Robert Shapiro was raised and educated in New Jersey and Maryland. Shapiro held fellowships at the Max Weinreich Center of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has taught at Baltimore Hebrew University, Yeshiva University, the University of Maryland, the National Yiddish Book Center and the Ramaz School in New York City. He has been at Brooklyn College since 2002. His published books include Holocaust Chronicles (KTAV and Yeshiva University Press, 1999),Why Didn't the Press Shout (KTAV and Yeshiva University Press, 2003), and Lodz Ghetto: A History (Indiana University Press with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006). His latest book is The Warsaw Ghetto Oyneg Shabes-Ringelbaum Archive: Catalog and Guide(Indiana University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, 2009)
Refreshments will be available. Hope to see everyone there!
So please join us to learn how to get started in genetic genealogy! We'll discuss the goals & benefits of DNA testing, the core types of tests that are available and how each one is used to make genealogical connections, which companies offer the tests, how much the tests cost and much more.
We'll also discuss some common challenges that Jewish genealogists face, such as young surnames and changed surnames, and how to make the most of your genetic genealogy experience amidst those challenges.
Zev Griner, Program Chair, will then offer an in-depth look at how Yad
Vashem records can aid in your research--even if your immediate
relatives weren't in Europe during the Holocaust.
Speakers are:
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