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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!â€
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 |
