Blood and Frogs: Jewish Genealogy and More

Researching people born in Israel, but who moved

2012-02-12T17:00:00.000+02:00

I was reading Todd Knowles' The Knowles Collection blog, where he discusses the recently introduced Brazil, Immigration Cards, 1900-1965 collection on the FamilySearch.org web site. He uses as an example the record of Esther Abraham Precher, who immigrated to Brazil in 1957:

1957 Brazil Immigration Card for Esther Abraham Precher

My grandmother's brother spent some time in Brazil during WWII, and although he probably didn't immigrate officially, I figured I would take a look. I didn't find a record (although looking at the collection it looks like only half of the images are indexed so far), but looking at the record Todd Knowles had used as an example, I saw something very interesting. Her record shows she was born in Jerusalem. Why was a woman born in Jerusalem moving to Brazil in 1957?

Of course, I can't be certain as to why she moved, but I can make an educated guess. If you look closer at the immigration card, you can see that she was born in 1898 in Jerusalem, but that her passport had recently been issued in Cairo. It would seem that while she was born in Jerusalem during the Ottoman period, she at some point (perhaps when she got married) moved to Egypt. Her immigration occurred just a few months after the 1956 Sinai War, where Egypt fought a war against Israel (along with Great Britain and France). While being Jewish in most Arab countries was difficult after Israel was founded, it was probably particularly dangerous to be in Egypt after they had just fought another war with Israel. Over half the Jewish population of Egypt were forced out of the country in this period, and were forced to leave all their asset behind. Even if she had wanted to go back to Israel where she was born, it probably was not possible given the political situation, so she probably went wherever she could get a visa for, which in this case was Brazil. Interestingly enough coming after my last article on Food as Genealogy – Iraqi Kubbe, this was much the same motivation for the many Iraqi Jews and Jews from all Arab countries that were forced to flee their homes for Israel, the United States or elsewhere. This was not a good time to be Jewish in any Arab country (and unfortunately the situation has not improved since – Egypt and Iraq both had flourishing Jewish communities dating back to the 2nd Temple period, and both have less than 100 Jews each today).

If you search for records in the Brazil collection, you would find there are actually 243 records that list a birthplace for the person as Israel. You could widen your search to all mentions of Israel in all databases on FamilySearch, and you'd find that there are 8728 records (as I write this article) which list Israel as a location in the record. Of course, if you were trying to find someone in a record that was created before the State of Israel came into being, it would not list Israel. You could therefore search for Palestine which was used as a place name by some (although people would also say Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Turkey or Turkish Empire), where you would find 13,892 records (as I write this). You could also search for specific cities, such as Jerusalem (5650 records), Tel Aviv (434 records) or Haifa (337 records). Some of the Jerusalem results will probably be records from other towns called Jerusalem (did you know there was a Jerusalem, Ohio?). Jaffa, for example, came back with over a million records, which doesn't make much sense. If you search for Jaffa, Palestine, however, you get 9489 results which at first glance seem mostly Jewish.

Anyways, the Brazil Immigration Cards database is a very interesting collection for those with connection to Brazil, but for anyone who knows they had family in Israel at some point in the past but may have moved elsewhere, this is an interesting way to search for records that may help you in your research.

Food as Genealogy – Iraqi Kubbe

2012-02-07T22:19:00.000+02:00


Kubbe Selek (Beet)	Kubbe Dlaat (Pumpkin)

When one thinks of family, invariable thoughts run to family meals – celebrations with family over holidays or other special events. Many times one serves certain family recipes at these meals, and sometimes a specific recipe is associated with a specific holiday every year. However, it seems to me that recipes also have a way of getting lost over the years. How many of us make the exact same recipes that our families made in previous generations? Sure, many of us make 'ethnic' recipes from the countries our families came from, but how many are actual family recipes and how many came from cookbooks or web sites? In many cases those original recipes were lost not because they were forgotten, but because modern conveniences like microwaves and food processors, as well as a desire to fit in to their new communities, changed the way our families cooked, and simpler recipes replaced more complex 'authentic' recipes they had made when they first arrived on new shores. Convenience played another role in changing recipes, as sometimes the ingredients available one place were not available in one's new home, and ingredients were substituted, forever changing the recipes.

With all of this in mind, it was interesting when my mother-in-law came to visit us in Israel recently and decided to teach my wife how to make Kubbe. My mother-in-law was born in Iraq, and moved to Israel as a child due to the increasing violence and discrimination against Jews in Iraq in the early 1950s. As a teenager she went to college in the United States, where my wife grew up. When my wife was growing up, her grandmother used to come and visit and make authentic foods she learned to make in Iraq. One of the spotlights of her culinary repertoire was Kubbe. When her grandmother passed away, the Kubbe stopped as her mother never made it when my wife was growing up.

Kubbe comes in many forms, and varies from country to country in the Middle East. The spelling also varies greatly in English – Kubbe, Kube, Kubba, Kibbe, etc.

When I was growing up, the only Kubbe I was aware of was the football-shaped fried Syrian variety. Iraq also has a fried variety, but it's generally larger and rounder. Iraq is also home to a boiled form, that is cooked in a soup and served over a bed of rice. The boiled form is sold across Israel as a soup in a number of different flavorings - Kubbe Selek (Beet) is a very popular one due to its sweetness and bright color, and other flavoring such as lemon and tomato exist in restaurants across Israel, brought here by the large population of Jews from across the Middle East. My wife's family from Iraq made three specific flavors of this Kubbe – Beet, Pumpkin and Okra. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, her mother let us in on a little secret – she knew how to make Kubbe, and she knew how to do it really well. She hadn't wanted to get into the stereotype of the Sephardi wife making all of these specialty foods when she was a young wife, but now she decided to make us a batch of Kubbe. My wife was in shock. That was nearly five years ago, and over the years she made it a few more times, but on this trip she decided to teach my wife the ins and outs of making Kubbe. On this trip, she made Kubbe with Beets, Kubbe with Pumpkin, and fried Kubbe, and showed my wife how to do all of them.

The genealogist in me saw this is as passing down an oral tradition, and decided to document it. Researching Jewish genealogy in Iraq may be close to impossible, but at least there is this family hisotry in the form of food that was passed down and we can continue to share. My nerdiness is your gain, as the remainder of this article is a photo-rich step-by-step guide in making Iraqi Kubbe, with either Beets or Pumpkin. If you like Okra, sorry, we don't, so we never asked how to make that one...

More or less, there are no secret ingredients used to make this dish. There are a few specialty ingredients, but these are easy to find these days. In Israel any gourmet food store or spice store will carry what you need, and in the US you can order most of this online (except maybe the Noomi Basra - more on that later). However, even without these few special ingredients, you can make this recipe and it will be pretty good, if not as tart. If you don't like tart foods, then you might want to skip some of these ingredients anyways. In general it's good to think of this as a sweet and sour dish, and if you don't have one of the sweet or sour ingredients, just substitute them with something you do have.

There are three main components to making this Kubbe – the dough, the meat and the soup. The best part about this recipe is that the two versions you see photos of at the top only differ in one ingredient – you either add pumpkin or you add beets when you get to that stage. The rest of the recipe is exactly the same.

With a little practice, from beginning to having the soup cooking should take between an hour and and hour and a half. Once it's cooking you need to stir occasionally, but basically you leave it alone for at least half an hour. So, making this can range from an hour and a half to two hours or thereabouts.

Dough

Let's start with the dough. It's a good place to start because it's easy and it needs to sit for 20-30 minutes after you first knead it, so you might as well get it over with first. The recipe is just three ingredients:

Dough
3 Cups	Farina/Cream of Wheat/Solet
2 tsp	Salt
1 1/2 Cup	Water

The main ingredient is Cream of Wheat (in the US). In the UK it's known as Farina. In Israel it's Solet. Basically a coarsely ground wheat product.

Originally in Iraq they used to grind rice for this purpose instead of using Farina. This is a change made after leaving Iraq, but is fairly universal. If I had to guess, this switch was due to the shortage of rice in Israel during the same period when most Jewish immigrants from Arab countries arrived.

This problem also led to the creation of Ptitim, known outside of Israel as Israeli Couscous, as a substitute for rice. The origin of Ptitim is quite amazing – David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, asked Osem, a major food company in Israel, to develop a wheat-based replacement for rice, since rice was a major staple of the diet of Jews from the surrounding countries. Anyways...

You mix the ingredients together in a bowl and knead until it's slightly elastic.


Knead until slightly elastic	Dough after waiting 20-30 minutes

After kneading the dough, you need to let it sit for 20-30 minutes, so set it aside and start on the next step.

The Meat

The meat is pretty simple. Basically it's chopped meat, onions, parsley, with rice and some spices.


Chopping Parsley	Finished Meat Mixture

Here's the ingredient list:

Meat Mixture
1 lb	Ground Beef
1/2 Cup	Rinsed, Uncooked Rice (Basmati is good)
1 Cup	Parsely, Finely Chopped
2	Onions (Medium), Finely Chopped
2 tsp	Baharat Spice Mixture (see notes below)
2 tsp	Salt
1 tsp	Cinnamon
1 tsp	Black Pepper, ground

Chop the onions and parsley very fine. Rinse the rice, then drain the water. Add the everything together in a bowl and mix together. You can do this step in advance if you want, and store for up to a day. However, it takes so little time you can do it in between the dough and the soup without much problem.

What, you might be asking, is Baharat? Baharat is one of the three specialty ingredients in this recipe, and it's used in both the meat mixture and in the soup. In Arabic, Baharat simply means spices. Baharat is a common spice mixture that is used across the middle east, but it varies by region. Thus Baharat in Iraq is not the same as that in Lebanon, which is not the same as that in Turkey. Indeed, the exact mixtures probably vary by family.

In Israel almost any spice store (and there are many of them) will carry Baharat – just ask for it. In the US, speciality food stores will carry some form of it, or you can look on Amazon, which has several varieties of it, even kosher-certified organic mixtures. If you don't want to, or can't, buy Baharat where you live, you can make you own with the following recipe:

Baharat (All ground)
2 Tbsp	Black Pepper
2 Tbsp	Cumin
2 Tbsp	Paprika
1 Tbsp	Cloves
1 Tbsp	Coriander
1 tsp	Cinnamon
1 tsp	Nutmeg
1/2 tsp	Carnomon

Starting the Soup

We're just going to put a few ingredients in a stock pot to get started, as they also need time. Here's what you need:

Soup Starter
2	Onions, coarsely chopped
2 Tbsp	Olive Oil
2 Cups	Beets or Pumpkin

Start out by adding the olive oil and onions to the stock pot and brown the onions. Peel and cut the Pumpkin or Beets into bite-size cubes. When the onions are browned, add the Pumpkin or Beets and let that cook too. You can leave it cooking for 10-15 minutes until you're ready to add the flavoring and water.


Adding Beets to the pot	Onions and Beets cooking

While the onions and the Pumpkin or Beets are cooking, move on to the next step...

The Soup Flavor

As mentioned earlier, the basis of both the Pumpkin and Beet soups is identical. Here's how to flavor the soup that you'll be boiling the Kubbe in.

Soup Flavoring
3	Lemons (Juice of)
1/2 Cup	Tamarind Concentrate
1/2 Cup	Brown Sugar
1/2 Cup	Olive Oil
2 tsp	Baharat Spice Mixture (see notes above)
1 tsp	Cinnamon
2 tsp	Salt
1	Noomi Basra (Black Lemon) - see notes below
14 Cups	Water, approximate

Mix the ingredients of the soup flavoring together in a bowl with 2 Cups of Water, and whisk together. Make sure the Tamarind concentrate gets fully mixed together with the other ingredients.

Tamarind is the second specialty ingredient used in this recipe. It adds a lot of tart tangy flavor to the final dish, and is highly recommended. You'll probably find other uses for Tamarind once you start using it. Like Baharat, this is fairly easy to find in Israel, and in the US you can find it in specialty stores and yes, even on Amazon. For those worried about it being kosher, the one here comes with kosher certification and the same brand is sold on Amazon, but I don't know if it kosher certified or not.


Juicing Lemons	Tamarind Concentrate

Taste the mixture for future reference – if you find the flavor of the final product is not tart enough, or not salty enough, etc. then this is a good point to check and to adjust it in the future.

Add this to the stock pot with the additional 12 cups of water. Basically you want to add enough water to have room for all the Kubbe you're going to add soon. Make sure you don't add too much water, however, or the pot can overflow when you add the Kubbe.

If you can find a Noomi Basra (literally a Basra Lemon, but it's actually a dried Lime) add this as well – it will add more tart citrus flavor. In English it's called a Black Lime. You can pierce the Noomi Basra a couple of times before adding it, or crush it and add the pieces to the soup. This is the third and last specialty ingredient in the recipe, and the hardest to find. In much of the Arab world, this is called Loomi. In Iraq, they are called Noomi Basra (Basra Lemon), after the town of Basra in Iraq. As I found out about them from my mother-in-law, I refer to them by their Iraqi name. In Israel, they're called Persian Lemons. In Persia (Iran), it's called Omani, after the country of Oman. Basically, it's a lime that is boiled in salt water, then dried out in the sun. It gives a very unique tart citrus flavor to the dish, more complex than the lemon or the tamarind concentrate by themselves.


Noomi Basra in the Market	A Noomi Basra Cracked Open

Bring to a rapid boil. The soup needs to be boiling strongly when you add the Kubbe.

Making the Kubbe (a trick that makes it easy)

For many people, Kubbe seems daunting because the idea of forming all the Kubbe balls and having them come out right seems impossible. Indeed, I don't think my wife ever expected to make Kubbe because of this fact. However, while she was learning to make Kubbe from her mother, she ran into an unexpected stroke of luck. Her cousin came to visit and her cousin, who has made Kubbe before, learned a trick for making a type of cookie that she applied to making Kubbe, making it much simpler, and the result much better. Basically, you oil a cutting board and your hands, and you take a piece of dough and make a circle about 3 inches across. Since the board and your hands are oiled, the dough doesn't stick to the board. Add the meat, pull the dough up around the meat, and roll it in your oiled hands. Perfect thin-walled Kubbe, better than many old Iraqi women who have been making Kubbe for decades can make.


Oil your workspace...	...and your hands

To make the Kubbe balls, you want to start by taking the dough that you made earlier. Knead it a little and test it out by taking a piece off and seeing if it is easy to work with. If you find it too liquidy or otherwise falling apart, you can add some plain flour to the dough to get the consistency better. If you do that, make sure to knead it all together and wait a few more minutes. If you want, you can separate the dough into pieces in advance, or you can just take pieces from the dough as you go.


Separating the dough	Spreading the dough and adding meat

As mentioned before, you now take a piece of dough, and spread it out into a circle. Add some meat. Pull the dough up around the meat and push it together. Once it's sticking, roll it in your hands to make it round. If there's hole in the dough, you can patch it with more dough.

Two more recommendations. Add additional oil the board and your hands as necessary during the process. Also, keep a bowl with some water it in nearby so you can rinse off pieces of meat or other debris from you hands as you go, otherwise you might end up with pieces of meat on the outside of the Kubbe balls. It's not a big deal, but if you're a perfectionist, having the water nearby is handy.


Pulling up the dough	Finished Kubbe balls

Repeat the process until all the Kubbe balls are done. In our case this recipe made 34 Kubbe balls.

Put It All Together

Make sure the soup is up to a rapid boil. Add the Kubbe balls one at a time into the boiling soup. Make sure the soup is boiling when you add each ball, as adding the Kubbe balls will bring down the temperature each time. So add them quickly, but wait before adding each one if the soup is not boiling yet.


Adding a Kubbe to the soup (Pumpkin)	Kubbe balls rise during cooking (Beet)

Stir the pot occasionally, and cook for about half an hour. Taste one kubbe ball to make sure it's cooked properly.

Serve over a bed of rice, or in a bowl as soup.

I'll repeat those pictures of the finished product from above:


Kubbe Selek (Beet)	Kubbe Dlaat (Pumpkin)

So special thanks to my mother-in-law for teaching my wife how to make Iraqi Kubbe. Thank you as well to my wife who put up with me taking photos with my phone while she made the Kubbe.

If you like this recipe, let me know in the comments. If you make this recipe, I definitely want to hear about it (send a picture too). Know any other interesting Iraqi recipes, please share. If anything isn't clear, let me know and I'll try to fix it.

Genealogy standards, another look

2012-02-06T19:53:00.000+02:00

Over a year ago I took a look at genealogy data standards and where they were headed in my article The Future of Sharing (Genealogical Data). In some ways a lot has changed since I wrote the article, but in some ways we're really at the same point we were then, with no clear picture of the future. This past week's 2nd annual Rootstech conference (my last article mentioned the then-upcoming 1st Rootstech) has brought some of the questions asked into focus, so I thought it was worth reviewing what has happened.

GEDCOM X

On the face of it, the biggest news to come out of the conference was the release of long-awaited successor to GEDCOM, GEDCOM X. FamilySearch, the online presence of the LDS church which was the creator and maintainer of the original GEDCOM standard, released this new standard at the conference a few days ago. FamilySearch hits a lot of the right keywords in the release – the format can be XML or JSON based, is released under an Creative Commons license, supports metadata including Dublin Core and FOAF, the development is hosted on Github, it offers both a file format (like tradition GEDCOM) and an API, and more. Yet there are also some strange decisions that seem to have been made, and no explanation seems to be given. One that stands out is the decision to base the file format MIME, a format created for sending e-mail attachements (MIME is an acronym of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). So far the logic behind many of the decisions that have been made seem very opaque. The entire development of GEDCOM X seems to have been done up to this point without any input from the industry at large, or even the well know efforts to improve GEDCOM, such as the Better GEDCOM group. Indeed, the answer in their FAQ about these efforts seems largely patronizing:

Have you heard about FHISO (BetterGEDCOM), OpenGen, ?
Of course. We've heard about them and many others who are making efforts to standardize genealogical technologies. We applaud the work of everybody willing to contribute to the standardization effort, and we hope they will continue to contribute their voices.

In other words, at least to my ears, it's saying they know other people want to improve GEDCOM, but they are going to do their own thing and maybe they'll listen occassionally (but no promises). In short, while it's great that FamilySearch has come out with a new standard, their approach to doing so does not seem geared towards gaining widespread adoption from the industry at large, or at least not in such a friendly manner.

Of course, the huge advantage FamilySearch has over just about anyone else is the very large developer network they've cultivated for accessing familysearch.org. They are essentially a non-profit organization which has many commercial companies using their current API. To the extent that they transition these existing companies from their legacy API to GEDCOM X, they will certainly have a major advantage over other efforts to replace GEDCOM.

Progress On Other Fronts

So what happened to the other efforts mentioned in my last article?

The most visible effort has been the BetterGEDCOM wiki, which is moving from an informal group to a formal organization called the Family History Information Standards Organisation (FHISO) which will now sponsor the wiki. While they have been the most active effort to create a replacement for GEDCOM, they seem to have been overtaken by the too-many-cooks problem and how they plan on coming to a consensus remains to be seen, let alone how they convince industry organizations and companies to agree with them. It will be interesting to see FHISO's response to GEDCOM X, and if they will focus their efforts on trying to implement their ideas within the GEDCOM X framework, or if they will continue to try to go it alone.

The OpenGen International Alliance, started by the people at AppleTree.com, doesn't seem to have taken off. Either for the matter has AppleTree, which may explain the why the OpenGen site hasn't been updated in the past year (and refers to an upcoming webinar last March).

APIs

One of the most interesting developments last year was the introduction of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for genealogy web sites. Indeed, the rumors around what would become GEDCOM X was that it was only an API, and not a file format, but luckily that turned out not to be true and it is both. The only APIs that had been released before my last article were Geni.com's API and OneWorldTree.com's GenealogyCloud API.

Geni seems to at least gotten some traction with their API, with future support for syncing data coming from AncestorSync. Presumably this uses Geni's API. I haven't heard of other uses of the Geni API, however. If you know of other developers using the Geni API, let me know in the comment.

I have not heard of anyone using the GenealogyCloud API. If you know any anyone using GenealogyCloud, let me know in the comments.

As I predicted in the last article, MyHeritage introduced their own API, smartly named Family Graph. I say smartly because it is clearly mimicking Facebooks' Social Graph API. They're not comparing themselves to Geni, but to Facebook, which is smart. The other very smart thing they did was introduce a contest to develop applications that use the Family Graph API. If no one uses your API, what's the point right? The winner receives $10,000. The deadline for that contest is actually in about a week from now, with judging by a panel taking place in the first half of March and the results announced on March 15th. The real test will be the quality of the applications submitted, and whether the applications were submitted by individual developers or by larger companies. If the contest results are published next month with no major applications, then this will in my estimation be a setback for MyHeritage, not an achievement.

Conclusion

It will be very interesting to see how the introduction of GEDCOM X is accepted by the genealogy companies at large that are needed to make a new format successful. FamilySearch has some key advantages in that they are a non-profit organization (even though in many ways they compete with the large commercial companies like Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com) and that they already have a large developer network. While many of the largest genealogy companies are not currently part of that developer network, if all of the ones who are start adopting GEDCOM X as their export format of choice, I think it will be hard for other companies to not adopt it. GEDCOM X's dual format/API functionality also gives it a major edge, especially if FamilySearch's legacy API is replaced by the API functionality in GEDCOM X.

Some have predicted there would never be a true replacement for GEDCOM, and others have said that technology such as AncestorSync's upcoming products would make the need for a file format unnecessary. I think both of these assertions are incorrect. There will be a replacement for GEDCOM, and it is necessary. Whether or not GEDCOM X is the ideal replacement seems to me to be a moot point. They will get the traction they need to push GEDCOM X into the mainstream. The real question is will they truly make it an open standard, or will they continue to hold it close to the chest? The real test will be when other groups insist on various features, and how they handle those demands. FamilySearch has put in all the trappings of an open and transparent development process, so let's hope they keep in that direction.

Win a Free Trip to Your Family's Homeland

2012-01-31T16:00:00.000+02:00

I don't post a lot of commercial links in my blog, except if it is to an offer for a discount I think would benefit my readers. I'm making an exception here, because, well, I think its pretty cool. Many people who research their own genealogy would love to go visit the countries where their families came from, but cannot afford to do so. However, if someone paid for your trip, you'd probably go, right?

The TV show Who Do You Think You Are? is coming back for a third season this week, and Ancestry.com (who is a sponsor of the show) is launching a sweepstakes offering free trips to three winners to go back to their ancestral homelands and uncover their family's histories. United States residents only, sorry to my many readers in other countries. They value this prize at $10,000 for each winner. The prize includes a trip for two to the winner's homeland, hotels and $2,000 cash, a six-month World Explorer membership to Ancestry.com and an Ancestry.com DNA test. No mention of any professional help when you get to your ancestral homeland - that would have been a nice touch...

One thing I need to say. Six months, really? Sorry, as much as I like the idea of the trip, what's with the six month membership? You're giving away a $10,000 prize and you can't spring for a full year membership which costs you nothing? They don't even offer six month subscriptions on their web site - a year costs $300/year and a month-to-month subscription costs $35/month.

In addition, 20 other people will win six-month World Explorer subscriptions. I guess that's valued at $150? ($149.70 according to the rules I just looked at...)

Anyways, to enter the contest, you can click on the image below. I think you need to sign up for a free Ancestry.com account, which means they can e-mail you, etc. as part of the deal, but it doesn't cost any money to enter.

Oh, and if you win, I expect a write-up of your trip to post here on this blog. That's fair, right?

New Genealogy Society in Israel (and major new website)

2012-01-15T15:31:00.000+02:00

Earlier this month a new genealogy society launched in Israel, called the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA). They are taking a new approach, with a large focus on their online presence, genealogy.org.il, which they are positioning to become a major hub of both Israeli and Jewish genealogy. In these days where so much genealogy research happens online, this new society is starting with the idea that their online presence is the center of the society's work, and is working to make their site useful not only for those in Israel researching their families, but for people around the world who have connections to Israel, or even those who can take advantage of the many unique archives in Israel that have records of interest to Jewish genealogists worldwide.

The Israel Genealogy Research Association was founded by some of the leading genealogists in Israel (including three past presidents of the Israel Genealogical Society, current and past members of the IAJGS board, and contributors to the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy), and you can expect that there will be a lot of great content on the site as time goes on (in addition to the great stuff already there). There are resource guides for different countries, videos of lectures, and live webinars are coming soon.

Some of the founders of the new society include, in alphabetical order:

Rose Lerer Cohen, co-author of The Holocaust in Lithuania 1941–1945: A Book of Remembrance, past editor of Sharsheret Hadorot and professional genealogist.
Rose Feldman, who ran the IGS website for nine years. She has lectured at IAJGS conferences, annual seminars of the IGS and their branch meetings. She will be responsible for developing databases for the new society.
Daniel Horowitz, chief genealogist of MyHeritage.com and member of the IAJGS Board of Directors. See his Resource Guide on Jewish Research in Latin America (free registration required).
Martha Lev-Zion, past member of the IAJGS Board of Directors, founder and president of the Negev Genealogical Society and past president of the Latvia SIG of JewishGen.
Esther Ramon, founding president of the Israel Genealogical Society and first editor of Sharsheret Hadorot.
Garri Regev, past president of the Israel Genealogical Society.
Jean-Pierre Stroweis, past president of the Israel Genealogical Society and member of the academic committee of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy. See his Resource Guide for researching Jewish Ancestors in Poland (free registration required), as well as a video of him being interviewed (in French) about genealogy in Israel on the web site.
Mathilde Tagger, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS), member of Founding Committee of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy, author and lecturer on Sephardic genealogy.
H. Daniel Wagner, co-chair of the 2004 IAJGS conference held in Jerusalem, member of Academic Committee of International Institute for Jewish Genealogy. See his new article Passover Break - Fifth Episode (free registration required) on the web site.

This is only a partial list of the founding members of the new society. I have also been involved in the creation of the society's web site, genealogy.org.il, which explains a bit while my posts to this blog have slowed down lately.

If you have any interest in Israeli genealogy, or even just Jewish genealogy, I suggest checking out the new site (genealogy.org.il) and registering to insure you receive updates on what is going on on the site.

If you use Facebook (facebook.com/israelgenealogy) and/or Twitter (twitter.com/israelgenealogy) I also recommend you follow the new society through those services as well. The new group tries its best to answer questions on the Facebook page, and sents out links to interesting resources through its Twitter account on a regular basis.

So do me a favor and go to genealogy.org.il, register for the site, take a look around, and let me know what you think in the comments below. Think the site needs to be improved? How? Think it's great? awful? groundbreaking? boring? Let me know.

Want to contribute something to the site? Send me an e-mail, or send a note through the site's Contact Us page.

Changes in Access to the SSDI and Vital Records

2011-12-21T18:30:00.000+02:00

I've been meaning to write this post for the past few weeks, and am sorry I did not do so earlier. There have been a number of changes in access to data of interest to genealogists in the United States going on, and in some cases this can seriously effect the ability of people to do research.

One major source of information for genealogists has been the Social Security Death Master File, usually referred to online as the Social Security Death Index (SSDI). The Death Master File is considered by law to be a public document, and lists all people who applied for a social security number (with an SS-5 form) and subsequently had their deaths reported to the Social Security Administration. Information on the SS-5 form can frequently be very useful to family researchers, as it usually lists the names of the parents of the applicant.

SSA increases delay in receiving names of parents

Last month, the Social Security Administration, without any announcement, extended the amount of time one must wait to get the names of parents on a social security application from 70 to 100 years from the applicant's birth. In other words, if last month you could order an SS-5 form of someone born in 1941 and find out their parent's names, now you will not be able to order that record until 2041. Put another way, you can only order records today for people born before 1911. In fact, the reality is worse, you can order the SS-5 and they will charge you for it, but they will just white-out the parent's names which is probably the only good reason to order an SS-5 anyways.

Reduction in State records in the DMF

Another change also took effect last month, when it was announced that some state death records would no longer be incorporated into the Death Master File, and over 4 million existing records would be expunged from the existing file. The reason for this is a claim that state records have different privacy rules, and thus cannot be incorporated into the public Death Master File. This also means nearly a million records a year will no longer be added to the Death Master File going forward (over over 30% of records that would have been added). Why this wasn't recognized for the past decades this file has been available is not mentioned. Additionally, it seems the Social Security Administration has also dropped last residence zip codes from the information they add to the Death Master File. When dealing with people with common names in large cities, zip codes are very useful in figuring out which record it the correct record.

Massachusetts tries to go against hundreds of years of open access rules

In my home state of Massachusetts, a bill (H.603) was introduced earlier this year in the state legislature to restrict access to birth records in the state. Massachusetts has always been an open access state when it comes to public records, so this would actually be the first time that access to vital records have been restricted in Massachusetts. Open access to vital records can be seen as an easy way for identity thieves to steal information, or as an easy way to prove the legitimacy of identities. This reckless attempt to restrict access to these records is not just a setback for genealogists, but will restrict access to those people looking to build a family medical history (needed for some inherited diseases) and also restrict the ability of military personnel to track down next-of-kin of soldiers, something the genealogical community has helped the military with for many years. It's also a bit of political hackery, as it doesn't actually address the issue of identity theft.

Good politics?

It's not clear to me why this has become a political issue for some, but I guess seeming to protect people's privacy (while not actually doing anything about it) is good politics. Politicians love to scare people and tell them that their identities will be stolen if the government doesn't crack down on identity theft. Except, they don't actually crack down on identity theft, such as addressing how its possible for someone to file for taxes with the social security number of a deceased person. You'd think the IRS would have access to the Death Master File, and could automatically check social security numbers against filings, but that would be too simple a solution (and would actually put the onus of checking for fraud with a government agency).

The KIDS Act of 2011

In steps Representative Samuel Johnson (R-TX) and his Keeping IDs Safe Act of 2011. This bill, also knows as the KIDS Act, would make it illegal for the government to release the Death Master File at all. Does it address fraud at all? No. Does it prevent government employees from sharing information with identity thieves? No. How about legislating 10 year jail sentences for government employees who release personal information to anyone unauthorized to view it? Regardless, this bill and some of the press coverage of identify thefts that led up to it, has scared various genealogy companies into cutting back on access to the SSDI.

My sister's story

It's worth noting a story from when I was a child in Boston. As I recall, my teenage sister had gone to get her driver's license and it was supposed to be mailed to her. Except it never arrived. Eventually she contacted the RMV and they sent her her license. What happened to the original one? Nobody knew. Well, someone knew. One day we get a call from a branch of our bank the next town over. This was when people still went to the bank to, you know, do bank stuff. A woman had arrived each day over the past several days and deposited checks into my sisters account adding up to a lot of money. Before those checks could clear, she arrived again at the teller she had been depositing those checks with, and asked to make a withdrawal. She had a driver's license with her picture on it, but my sister's name. The teller didn't know my sister, but she thought the woman looks a bit older than my sister's age as listed on the license. The teller asked the woman to wait a moment, and brought the license to the branch manager. The manager had previously worked in the branch my family went to, and actually knew my family, and knew this was not my sister. It was an interesting scam, of course. Depositing checks with the teller so the teller would associate her with depositing money into the account, then using a fake license to withdraw money from the account. If the branch manager hadn't previously worked at the branch in our town back in those days when branch managers knew their customers, the woman might have gotten away with it. In the end, I don't remember if that woman was arrested, or got away. I do remember being told they had tracked the scam back to the RMV where multiple licenses had been forged with incorrect photos. I don't know how much the RMV worker was paid to forge my sister's license, nor what the thought process was that led them to risk doing that, but presumably if there had been harsh laws against this, they would not have done it.

I'll guess most of the people reading this haven't seen the movie this comes from, but this had to be done:

That must have been when Samuel Johnson was still trying to get into the college parties...

For those who are lost, I'll share this clip from the movie Superbad:

That isn't high art, and that clip is highly edited from the original (this is a family blog after all), but I felt it necessary to insert a little comic relief here. Back to the issue at hand...

The easiest site to search SSDI online has long been Rootsweb, which is a genealogy community site that has been hosted and run by Ancestry.com for more than 10 years. The Rootsweb SSDI page just days ago changed from a site that allowed full searching of the SSDI, to the following message:

Due to sensitivities around the information in this database, the Social Security Death Index collection is not available on our free Rootsweb service but is accessible to search on Ancestry.com. Visit the Social Security Death Index page to be directly connected to this collection

If you follow the link to Ancestry.com's own SSDI search page, you can search and get results, but unless you are a member of Ancestry.com, you only get partial information. Even if you have an Ancestry.com subscription, they've further cut back on the information available in their SSDI database, as they describe:

Why can’t I see the Social Security Number? If the Social Security Number is not visible on the record index it is because Ancestry.com does not provide this number in the Social Security Death Index for any person that has passed away within the past 10 years."

This is a bit of pre-emptive work it seems, to keep the politicians off their backs.

Ancestry.com and GenealogyBank cut back on SSDI access

Ancestry.com is not the only company to cut back on access to the SSDI. GenealogyBank has eliminated the social security numbers from its database altogether. Genealogybank offers free searching of their SSDI database, but you must register for the site in order to see the results. Even if you're a subscriber, there are no social security numbers listed in their database at all now. GenealogyBank says they removed all social security numbers after people called them and explained they were erroneously in the SSDI and everyone could access their social security numbers through the GenealogyBank database. One article I read online estimated that out of the 2.8 million new entries added each year, some 14,000 entries are added for people who are still living. That seems a clear statistical estimate (half of one percent), and I have no idea how they came up with that number, nor how many of those false entries get removed from the database in subsequent revisions. I'm not saying people are not horribly effected by these mistakes in the SSDI, but maybe the solution is to fix the processes that introduce those mistakes? Any even if there are 14,000 mistakes a year, no one has shown that this has led to a single stolen identity as far as I can tell.

FamilySearch.org still offering SSDI access...for now...

FamilySearch.org still offers free searching of their SSDI database, without registration, and still shows the social security numbers of everyone in their database. I don't know how long that will last, however. Personally, I recommend everyone search the FamilySearch.org database and mark down the information they have on each person in your tree. This isn't only the social security number, but the birth date, death date, place of issuance (of the social security number), last residence, and place where last benefit was sent. All of this information can be useful in genealogy research, and while these companies are removing the social security numbers now as a pre-emptive attempt to prevent further regulation, if regulation does arrive from the legislature, as written now it would eliminate access to all of this information (not just the social security numbers). Therefore, I suggest making a list of those people in your database who were working in the US after 1935, and going through the FamilySearch.org SSDI Database and copy all the information you can, while you still can...

Also, for a comparison of the Ancestry.com and Familysearch.org SSDI databases (written before the changes), see this article from Ancestry Insider called SSDI: Ancestry.com vs. FamilySearch.org. If you have a subscription to Ancestry.com, it might be worth it to take a look at their database as well, to see if they list the ZIP code for earlier entries in the database.

Great-Grandma's Cherry Pie: An entertaining look at copyright issues

2011-12-21T15:30:00.000+02:00

The California State Genealogical Alliance (CSGA) recently launched two blogs. The first one is simply the CSGA Blog, covering genealogical issues in California.

The second blog, Csgacopyright, is of interest even to those with no connection to California, as it covers the thorny issues of copyright, as they pertain to genealogy.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

This second blog just posted a very entertaining look at what copyright issues might exist when a great-grandmother passes down her secret cherry pie recipe through various generations. It's worth a read if just to remind us of the complicated issues family sometimes find themselves dealing with...

As for the blog, I have no idea who is actually writing it, nor if they are qualified copyright attorneys, etc. so until they let people know who are authoring their articles, I guess take the legal advice with a grain of salt, or cherry pie, whichever you prefer.

Books on Sephardi Jews

2011-12-19T15:30:00.000+02:00

It won't be shocking to anyone that there are many more books in English on topics specific to Ashkenazi Jews than to Sephardi Jews. I could spend a lot of time analyzing the reasons for this, but one simple reason is that the American Jewish community is predominately Ashkenazi. It's true that some of the earliest Jewish communities in the United States were Sephardi, but over time these early communities were overtaken by the large influx of Jews from European countries which were primarily Ashkenazi.

For those who are unfamiliar with the terms Ashkenazi and Sephardi, they literally mean German and Spanish, but are more loosely used to refer to Jews who came from Eastern Europe and Germany (Ashkenazi), and those who came from Spain and the Middle East (Sephardi). Sephardi Jews are sometimes further divided into those who came from Spain and Portugal and were expelled (during the Inquisition which started in 1492) to North Africa and other lands (Sephardi) and those that lived continuously in the Middle East from olden days (Mizrachi, which literally means Eastern). While there are many community-specific traditions (leading to different prayer styles for those from Yemen and Iraq, and those from Hungary and Germany) there is a more fundamental split in customs between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, upon which these other differences are then added. The reason for this is quite simple, as the Jewish communities that became Sephardi and Ashkenazi split about a thousand years ago, before most countries today existed. While both groups of Jews certainly were connected over the past thousand years, they also settled in different areas, and in kept separate traditions.

I've collected books for more than two decades and it is more uncommon to see books specifically on Sephardi topics. It was thus very interesting to get a catalog this week from Dan Wyman Books in Brooklyn, with 200 books on Sephardi and Mizrachi Studies.

The catalog covers many very interesting topics, such as the early Jewish communities in the United States, to Jews in Jamaica, Curaçao and Surinam, to the Sephardi communities of Amsterdam, France, Greece and even India and the Balkans. The abandoned Jewish cemetery in Belize I mentioned in my post yesterday was almost certainly from a Sephardi Jewish community (although none of the books listed cover Belize, they do cover connected communities such as Jamaica). North African and other Arab countries are covered, as well as Turkey. Two little known off-shoots of Sephardi Judaism are also covered, Karaism and Sabbatianism. There is a lot there. Not all the books are in English. Some books date back to the 1700s.

For those who have family from these communities, or just are interested in reading about the many different countries that Jewish communities existed, it's worth taking a look at Dan Wyman's catalog and seeing what books he has on the many Sephardi communities that have existed over the years.

As this isn't an ad for Dan Wyman, I want to add a few other resources for Sephardi books. Broder's Books in Connecticut also has a Sephardi catalog of used books online. Henry Hollander Books in California has quite a few Sephardi books in their catalog, although I see no easy way to list just them (he has no category for Sephardi books). Schoen Books in Massachusetts has a Sephardi category, but doesn't list very many books. It's a good book store to know about, however, and he has made an effort to re-print many hard to find Jewish books (including several of the Sephardi books he lists).

For new books, you can also refer to the American Sephardi Federation's online bookstore.

For Sephardi genealogy in particular, Avotaynu sells three books on the topic: Jeffrey Malka's Sephardic Genealogy, Mathilde Tagger and Yitzhak Kerem's Guidebook for Sephardic and Oriental Genealogical Sources in Israel, and Guilherme Faiguenboim et al's Dictionary of Sephardic Surnames. Jeffrey Malka operates the SephardicGen web site and offers his own Bibliography for Sephardic Genealogy and History.

Do you have Sephardi Jewish roots? What countries does your family come from? Might any of the books on these pages help you find out more about where your family originated? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The 1940 US Census

2011-12-18T15:30:00.000+02:00

It's rare that massive new sources of genealogical information are released, and certainly rare that such sources are released for free. Every ten years in the United States, however, the census from 72 years earlier is released. In the past it has taken a lot of time to get the census made available to the public, primarily because of the massive cost in digitizing and indexing information on tens of millions of people.

On April 2, 2012, the 1940 US Census will be released to the public. Besides the obvious benefit of having information on the over 130 Million residents of the United States in 1940, there are other reasons to be excited about this release.

For one, it is the first time that the National Archives is releasing the census in digital form. In the past, companies needed to scan millions of pages of microfilm to create their own digital images of the census records. On April 2, 2012, the National Archives is releasing the entire 1940 census in digital form. There will not be an index to those records, which brings us to the second reason this release is exciting: Many genealogy companies and organizations have been planning for this release for years and it will be indexed in record time.

For starters, Stephen Morse on his great One Step website, has created with Joel Weintraub and the help of volunteers, ways of finding the 1940 Enumeration District (ED) of any address in the United States. They even have a quiz that helps you determine what the proper way to figure out the ED for where your family lived in 1940. When the census records are released, searching by ED will be the only way to find records in the census. If you know where your family listed in April 1940 (when the census was taken), then you can find the records for that address using Steve Morse's tools. FOr a very detailed look at how the process will work, see Stephen's article Getting Ready for the 1940 Census: Searching without a Name Index which appeared in the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly this month.

Next, Ancestry.com has announced that they will be making the images and their index to those records (which they will develop on their own) free through at least the end of 2013. It's unknown how long it will take Ancestry.com to index the records, but presumably their index would be available before the end of 2013.

Archives.com, which has been seeking in recent years to compete with Ancestry.com as a lower-cost service, announced that they have partnered with the National Archives to be the official host of the images that will be released on April 2, 2012. The official site the images will be released on has not yet been announced, but Archives.com has posted information on this partnership at archives.com/1940census.

More recently, it has been announced that three different genealogy companies have joined forces to index the 1940 US Census together and thus make the 1940 census searchable for free as well. These are Archives.com, FamilySearch.org and FindMyPast.com. They will be using FamilySearch.org's indexing tool (which I discussed almost exactly a year ago here) to coordinate the indexing project.

One interesting point is that it makes sense that Archives.com is involved since they are hosting the images for the National Archives (and have no public indexing tool of their own), and it makes sense that FamilySearch.org is involved (since they have the indexing tool and have previously proven themselves by indexing the 1930 US Census), but the odd man out seems to be FindMyPast.com. What's interesting is that FindMyPast.com just re-directs to FindMyPast.co.uk, as it is actually a British genealogy site. Is FindMyPast planning to move into the US genealogy market and is the 1940 census their means of doing so? or are they just planning on offering the 1940 census index to their British users as a means of tracking relatives that moved to the US? The use of FindMyPast.com in the press release instead of FindMyPast.co.uk makes this an interesting question.

Together, the three companies have set up the 1940 Census Community Project. You can check out the information on the project now, and if you're interested in helping index the 1940 US Census, you can download FamilySearch.org's indexing tool now and try it out with other projects FamilySearch.org is indexing.

In addition, one of the interesting pages the project has released is what the enumerator was supposed to ask each family when adding them to the census. This gives you a good idea of what to expect when the 1940 US Census is released.

So there you go, we're 105 days away from the release of the 1940 US Census images. Now you know how you'll be able to find your family (if they were living in the US on April 1, 1940) when the census is released.

Abandoned Jewish Cemetery in Belize

2011-12-18T15:02:00.000+02:00

My cousin who lives in South Korea sent me a link about someone who came across an abandoned Jewish cemetery deep in the jungle in Belize. Truly there are few physical boundaries today.

The pictures are not very clear, but the woman who wrote the post, Megan Wood, was traveling in Belize and came across an abandoned cemetery which had broken gravestones on the ground. I can't see it myself, but she says in real life it was clear the image engraved on the gravestone was that of a Star of David.

Broken gravestone in the jungle of Belize (from meganlwood.com)

Belize never had a major Jewish community, although some refugees from Sint Eustatius were believed to have settled there after their community was destroyed by the British military which took over that island in 1781. Jamaican Jewish traders were also know to trade at the Belize port.

The IAJGS International Jewish Cemetery Project (IJCP) lists two mentions of burial locations of Jews in Belize, adding up to only 5 graves, but certainly not this cemetery in the middle of nowhere.

The Jewish Online Worldwide Burial Register (JOWBR) lists 4 out of the 5 graves mentioned in the IJCP, but doesn't list the names on the graves.

Who were these Jews and what were they doing far into the jungle of Belize?

1st Blogiversary: The Year in Review

2011-11-25T16:00:00.000+02:00

One year ago today I started this blog. It seems like a lot longer. So much has happened in the past year, that I thought I would share a bit of my experiences from the past year, and point to some of the articles and features I've added to this site that I'm most proud.

My first post one year ago asked the question of whether I should switch from the genealogy program Reunion, which I've used for more than 15 years, to the then recently introduced Mac version of Family Tree Maker (FTM). At the time, I didn't feel it made sense. Since then I've actually taken part in beta testing the next version of FTM for the Mac (due out any day now, currently in pre-sale for 20% off). They've added the incredible feature of syncing your tree with an online tree on Ancestry.com. There are still some issues that may prevent me from switching, but they are definitely moving in the right direction. The one missing feature that may seem minor, but which just means a lot of work for me to switch (and heck, I'm lazy), is the ability to virtually crop photos when displaying them on a specific user's profile. For example, you can use one family photo that has ten people, and crop a headshot for each family member from the single photo (without having to actually crop the photo in another program). I'll hold judgement until the final version is released soon, however.

The first article that I posted of real genealogical content was the next day, when I published the article Researching Jewish Relatives Who Passed Through Belgium.That article, now very much out of date, formed the basis of the lecture 'Utilizing Belgian Archives for Jewish Research' I would later give at the IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Washington, DC this past August.

Website Features

In preparation for that lecture, I also created an index browser for the one of the record sets I discuss, located at the Felix Archives in Antwerp. This was quite a lot of work, linking over 5,000 index page images (showing over 10,000 pages) to the images on the Felix Archives website (which is in Flemish only).

The updated information provided in that lecture then formed the basis of a forthcoming article in the journal AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy. One thing I've learned in publishing in the print format, compared to publishing online, is that there's a limit on space. Maybe I'd be a better writer if I was always limited in how much I could write, but I like being able to use as many illustrations as I want online. While I will probably post a more detailed and updated version of my original second-day article to this blog, for the moment I have a page (tab also above) with all the links and resources mentioned in the lecture and article kept up to date.

In addition to the index browser I put together for my lecture, I also created several other unique resources on my site over the past year.

Click for info on Forms

Some of my most popular resources are the PDF Forms I created. These genealogy forms include an Ancestor Form (Pedigree Chart), Family Form, Sibling Form, Ancestor Location Form, and the very unique US Immigrant Census Form. What is unique about all of these forms, is that they are fillable on the computer, can be printed in Letter or A4 sizes, text entered into a field that is too long for the field will shrink to fit, and the forms can be linked to each other. Forms are linked, for example, when you fill out an Ancestor Form and want to add the siblings of the source person's parent, you just fill out a Sibling Form and write the number of the sibling form next to the name of the parent on the Ancestor Form. These forms are intended for those new to genealogy, but also for experienced genealogists who want to use them to collect information from other relatives. The US Immigrant Census Form is useful to anyone doing research on immigrants who arrived in the US between 1860 and 1930. For more information on all of these forms, go to the Forms page (also a tab on the top of all pages of my blog).

Another popular resource is my page on US Naturalizations. Besides discussing different options for retrieving US naturalization papers, I also provide the list of records available from the National Archive through their electronic ordering system. Normally you need to log into their system and start filling out the form to order before you can see what is available. My page tells you what years records exist for through the various locations around the US.

One of the features that doesn't get a lot of notice, but which I spent a considerable amount of time developing, is my B&F Enhanced Search Engine. Inspired by the Mocavo genealogy search engine, I created my very own search engine using Google tools, and it is very good at finding genealogy records connected to names you enter into it. It also has an additional benefit for people searching for information from towns in the former Austrian province of Galicia, in that it will automatically expand town names so variants of the town names are also searched. The reason it is only for Galicia is that Google restricts how many of these substitutions you can use, so I picked a small region to test it out. If you have family from Galicia (like all of my father's family) you're in luck.

Most Popular Articles

The five most popular articles on this blog in the past year were:

The most interesting thing about that list is each article is very different.

The first article, explaining how to retrieve copies of Jewish vital records from Poland, was a surprisingly popular article. It is very long, and perhaps no one had gone into that much detail on the notoriously different process of ordering records from Poland before. That article has also been published in print, over two issues of the Pineles Genealogist (actually more accurately half has been published, the other half coming in the next issue). I was also asked to publish a modified form of this article in another genealogy journal, but unfortunately did not have to the time to make the changes necessary.

The second article is a guide to Jewish genealogy mailing lists, on JewishGen, Rootsweb, Yahoo, etc. It is an attempt to be a comprehensive list of mailing lists of interest to Jewish genealogists. This article is one of several 'Basics' articles I've published in the past year, trying to help people get started in genealogy. Other 'Basics' articles include an article on the JewishGen Family Finder (critical for Jewish genealogy), Ancestral Towns (Shtetls), and the more general Historical Newspapers and Up, Down and Sideways (a look at researching through collateral relatives). In addition, I have guest-published a series of articles on the JewishGen Blog, called JewishGen Basics, which take a detailed look at some of the more important features of the JewishGen website. Some of these articles are expansions of articles that originally appeared on my own blog.

Jewish Gravestone Symbols

A very popular article, and something that seems to get consistent traffic, is my article on Jewish Gravestone Symbols. It is a very visual look at many of the symbols used on Jewish gravestones, based on a set of photographs I shot almost twenty years ago while in Poland. I was going through my old negatives and when I found my pictures from Poland, I decided I had to scan the gravestone images and turn them into an article. There are a few books on the subject of Jewish gravestone symbols, but not a whole lot online, which I suppose is why the article gets a lot of traffic.

Naturalization Petition

Finding Information on US Immigrants is one of my favorite articles, and one I almost set up as a dedicated page like the page on naturalization records. In helping others with their genealogy, one of the big brick-walls people tend to run into, especially among American Jewish genealogists, is figuring out where their ancestors were from before coming to the United States. This article attempts to help people figure out where their family is from by looking at various resources that can provide clues, such as census records, passenger manifests, military draft cards, naturalization papers and historical newspapers. I think it's the only article that I added a Table of Contents to, to make it easier to navigate quickly (as people can use it as a reference). The information in this article, combined with the US Immigrant Census Form I created, can really help people whose families came to the US in the several decades before and after the turn of the century to figure out where they originated.

Folder Organization

The last article among my top five is one about folder organization. It describes how I organize my genealogy files – what I call the B&F System. Everyone organizes their information differently, but this article describes how I try to keep track of images and documents connected to thousands of individuals. The key is being able to find exactly what you're looking for quickly, and to be able to know what you have for every individual at a glance. No system is perfect, but my system is an attempt to minimize the many compromises that emerge when organizing so many files and folders.

Lectures

As mentioned earlier, I spoke in DC this past summer at the IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, on the topic of Utilizing Belgian Archives for Jewish Research. In addition to that lecture, I've made a few other lectures here in Israel since starting this blog.

My first lecture was actually on the topic of genetic genealogy (The ABCs of DNA), which I gave in Ra'anana back in May. This lecture was based in part on my article Using DNA for Genealogy: Y-DNA and mtDNA, although the lecture also included a discussion of using Autosomal DNA for genealogy, but I still haven't written an article on that topic. I gave a version of that same lecture in Modi'in (where I live) the next month with Richard Gussow, whose personal genetic genealogy success story added a very important personal touch to the lecture. Like the nice color diagram of DNA inheritance?

Perceptions of Relationship

Speaking of diagrams (I think visually, so I like making diagrams) I recently published my own version of the famous cousin calculator table in my somewhat philosophical discussion of Perceptions of Relationship, where I try to see if how we perceive our relationship to our cousins match with an objective measure (percentage of shared DNA).

Another topic I recently lectured on twice is Preserving Family Photographs: Physical and Digital. That lecture is based in part on my article from back in January, Preserving Photographic Prints, Slides and Negatives, but also adds information on scanning photos and options for backing up your digital files. I gave this lecture last week in Jerusalem, and this week in Modi'in. A good overview of how to start with drawers full of photos and slides and organize them, place them in archival sheets and binders, and then digitize everything and back everything up. Perhaps this will make it into a screencast one day if I get around to doing screencasts - it's on my list.

Social Networks

One of the more interesting aspects of blogging isn't the blogging at all, but connecting to others through social media. Before I started blogging, I used Twitter passively as a way to follow news I was interested in, not to send anything. When I started blogging I quickly moved to using Twitter more actively, both to follow other genealogy bloggers, but also to promote my blog articles. Over the past year I've added 265 followers on Twitter (twitter.com/bloodandfrogs). Over 150 people subscribe to the blog via e-mail. Facebook, however, is where I have the most followers, with over 2500 fans (facebook.com/jewishgenealogy). Facebook is also where I am able to interact more directly with my readers, answering questions and helping people with their research if I can.

Another kind of social network is geneabloggers. A social network is, after all, just new-fangled name for a community. Geneabloggers, with Thomas MacEntee at the helm, has really helped create a community between the many people out there that blog about genealogy. Many thanks (and complete awe at how he does everything in a 24-hour day) to Thomas for working so hard to build and old-school social network among genealogy bloggers.

What's Next?

It's been a busy year, and I really have no idea what will be coming up in the next year.

Many genealogy blogs are about the person's personal genealogy. I have specifically tried to avoid discussing my own genealogy in the blog, however, as my goal was always to provide information that others would find useful in their own genealogy. I think maybe this year I will include more of my family research as a way to explain how I found certain pieces of information, on the hope that others will be able to replicate the techniques I used. In the end, however, tomorrow is promised to no one, and we'll have to wait and see...

Why We Do Genealogy

2011-11-24T16:30:00.000+02:00

This is a touchy topic I think, mainly because there are so many reasons individuals do genealogy, and moreover people have very different connections to their families, and in some related fashion connections to their genealogical work.

This article is a more general view, but if you're interesting in finding out why I, specifically, do genealogy, my recent guest-post on The Scrappy Genealogist's blog titled Philip Trauring - How He Does It - Secrets from a Geneadaddyblogger is probably the best exposition on that topic (as well as why I blog about genealogy).

This article is partly a book review, or rather it is a book review intertwined with my view as to why people do genealogy. I'm not sent books to review by genealogy or Jewish publishers, and in any event this book was published by the University of Nebraska Press, so yes I bought this book to enjoy it. The book is What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past by Nancy K. Miller. I wasn't familiar with Ms. Miller's work before, and perhaps if I had read some of her other books, including an earlier book on the death of her father, I might have had a different perspective, but I'll write my impression based on the book as it stands on its own.

Of course, nothing stands on its own. I came to be interested in the book because it related to genealogy, and specifically Jewish genealogy. That background colors my view of the book, to be certain, as does my own history.

The book's title, What They Saved, is as good as any place to start. Maybe I'm crazy, but the title strongly reminded me of Tim O'Brien's collection of Vietnam-based fictional stories, The Things They Carried. Miller is a professor of English and Comparative Literature, as well as a literary critic, so I would guess she has read the book or is at least aware of it. I am not a literary critic, so perhaps the convention used in naming both books is some know method (The Third-Person Perspective Descriptive Method - I'm kidding), but it still struck me for some reason as connected. As Ms. Miller is a literary critic, I hope she doesn't take offense at me pointing this out (or anything else I'm about to write).

So why do we do genealogy? It's a question many people reading this have probably asked themselves, but even more likely it's a question the people reading this article have been asked by others repeatedly. Why do you do genealogy? Why do you care about people who have been dead for a hundred years? What are you going to do with all this information you're collecting? The questions come in many forms, but most people who spend a lot of time doing genealogy get asked the same thing again and again.

Before answering the question, I think it's worth taking a look at why Ms. Miller decided to pursue her own family history. Her grandfather was a religious Jewish immigrant to the United States, coming with his wife and son. Her father was born in the US after her grandparents and uncle immigrated. Her father and uncle took very different paths in their lives, her father the upstanding lawyer, her uncle a gangster-hanger-on before moving out west and going through more life-role-changes than a Rockette goes through costume-changes. Ms. Miller doesn't spend much time in the book on her relationship with her father – perhaps that was covered in her earlier book. She instead spends a lot of time trying to track down what happened to the uncle she never knew who moved out west and was everything from a bar owner, to military man, to small town mayor, to seeming vagabond.

It's interesting to note that Ms. Miller's original surname, that of her father and uncle, was actually Kipnis. In her evolution to feminist activist in the 1970s she took on her mother's maiden name, Miller, and kept it after getting married. She interestingly points out a correspondence she discovers between her father and uncle on preserving the Kipnis name (her father had only daughters and her uncle's only son also only had a daughter), while also remembering that her father, the lawyer, helped her fill out the name-change form when she made that decision.

There is almost a melancholy overtone to the whole book, as Ms. Miller doggedly pursues the clues to her family's past, yet openly recognizes that since neither she nor her sister had any children, there will be no one to inherit the information she gathers. Perhaps, as she points out her uncle donating personal items to a museum to be stored, alongside items belongs to Wyatt Earp and others from his region in Arizona, as a way to perpetuating the Kipnis name, she too is seeking to perpetuate the name and her family through her book.

Ms. Miller's book did not go into a lot of detail on the genealogical side, and indeed from a genealogical point-of-view it is a bit unsatisfying. The idea of taking a few found-objects left behind by your family and using those objects to reconstruct one's family tree is a nice idea, but the amount of work needed to do that is not really described, but somewhat assumed in the book. As a family memoir it is interesting, but as a genealogy book it leaves out a few too many details. Indeed one of the simpler things I found was that whenever she would describe a truly significant item she would almost never show a photograph of that item. There are very few photographs in the book, and usually they are not particularly significant. In one instance, she shows the outside of an album which has no genealogical value (but has symbolic value) instead of showing the items she describes as being inside the album. Ms. Miller is of course a writer first, so she probably feels that it is more important to write about the objects than to show them. Perhaps that is the fault of my visual nature, a bias of mine, but it was still somewhat disappointing. Ms. Miller does add some photographs to her book's website, although not that you would know anything about the website when reading the book – I googled the book when writing this article and only came across the site by chance.

So why do people do genealogy?

Some do it out of a strong desire to know where they originated. We are the product of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents' life decisions. If my gg-grandfather had moved to Israel like his in-laws (my ggg-grandparents), his world, and indeed the world of everyone that came after him would be very different. If my gg-grandfather had decided to stay in New York like his brother, rather than returning to Europe, things would also be very different. Learning about ones ancestors, and seeing how the decisions they made affected their lives can put ones' own life choices into perspective.

Some people do genealogy as a way to connect their children or grandchildren to their past – a way of grounding them. Teenagers have a way of thinking they know better than their parents, and think everything they do is unique and their parents can't possibly understand the decisions they have to make. While your great-grandparents didn't have to worry about which cell phone would run the apps they need to communicate with their friends, or deal with injuries like Texting Teen Tendonitis, they made very real decisions on where to live, where to work, how they wanted to educate their children, etc. that can help your children realize that many decisions you made for them are not so different then the decisions that were made by their parents, or their grandparents, and one day the decisions that they themselves will need to make. The details may change, but the overall decisions stay the same.

Other people do genealogy as a way to connect them to people in the past, either famous people, royalty, or in the case of Jewish genealogists, frequently famous rabbis. Saying a descendant of the Vilna Gaon is kind of like the Jewish version of my ancestor was an indian princess (with apologies to those who are actually descendants of the Vilna Gaon).

For some, genealogy is about the detective story where you and your family are at the center. Some people read detective fiction for fun, others enjoy the detective work required to piece together one's family tree. Figuring out where to find the records you need to prove (or at least mostly prove) where and when you ancestors were born is a challenge, even under the best of situations. The challenge is a major motivator for people, and successes in finding obscure records and proving theories on where different ancestors came from can be very satisfying. Breaking through a genealogical brick wall is akin to playing golf and getting a hole in one. It doesn't happen often, and usually only happens with very experienced players (although some people get lucky), but even for the most experienced players, getting a hole in one is a reason to celebrate. So too, some genealogy is easy and some requires a lot of experience to achieve (and sometimes you get lucky), and when you find that one record that sends you back another generation, links different branches of a family that you had not previously been able to link, or directs you to an ancestral town you were not aware of, it is a time to celebrate.

I admit to not understanding every kind of genealogist. There are those who seem to have a compulsive need to add names to their family tree, but are not interested enough in the individuals they are adding to actually verify their information. If they find an online tree with some of the same people they are researching, they are likely to just download that tree and integrate it into their own, without knowing the quality of the tree they are downloading. That's one kind of genealogist I just don't understand. Sure, it's easy to copy trees from the Internet, certainly easier than adding source citations to every piece of information you add to your tree. Genealogy is one of those things where I think quality definitely beats out quantity. Partly by virtue of Ms. Miller's relatively small family, she commendably seems to have spent time trying to find as much as possible about each individual in her tree – at least on her father's side which is the focus of the book.

Ms. Miller's motivations seem to fall primarily in the first category described. This is brought forth by the sub-title of the book: Pieces of a Jewish Past. To whose past is she referring? Her past? The 'They' in 'What They Saved' presumably excludes it being her past. Her parents past? or that of her grandparents? maybe she is collectively referring to all her ancestors? She explains that her father had little to do with Judaism, and she herself left almost all vestiges of Judaism behind (including, as she feels the need to point out, that she and her sister married non-Jews). Yet, with all of this, she keeps the tefillin (phylactery) boxes she finds among her father's possession as a kind of desk ornament along with photos of her family. Did her father have a stronger connection to his Jewish faith than his daughter knew, or was this pair of tefillin kept for the same reason his daughter decided to keep them, as a kind of bridge to the past. Indeed, it's even possible the author was wrong in ascribing the pair of tefillin to her father, for he could have been keeping his own father's tefillin in the same way his daughter kept what she thought was his.

I think this motivation, of wanting to know where one came from, is ironically prevalent among many people who start looking into their family history as they reach their retirement years. I can't say for sure, but perhaps this genealogy is a form of introspection. You've lived your life and made the major decisions that put you, and possibly your children and grandchildren, in the places they are now. You start to wonder, did I make the right decisions? There's a lot to learn by looking at how each branch your family differs. If you start out a hundred years ago and look at the different choices two brothers made, and how those simple decisions determined in large part the different lives their descendants lived, you can in some fashion extrapolate those differences to the decisions you made in your family, and how those decisions will have an effect on future generations of your family.

Why do you do genealogy?

My motivation for doing genealogy is some combination of understanding how the choices we make have a profound effect on future generations, as well as enjoying the detective work. When my children are older, I suspect I will also want to use the work I've done to connect my children to their past, but my children are too young right now.

So let's continue the conversation. Why do you do genealogy? Do you fall into one or more of the categories I've described above, or do you have totally different motivations? Post a comment below and share your motivations for doing genealogy.

Paris 2012

2011-11-22T16:30:00.000+02:00

The next IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy will take place next year, July 15-18, 2012 in Paris, France. Hopefully the fact that it starts the day after Bastille Day will not be a problem. If you are planning to attend, I suggest booking your flight and hotel as early as possible.

The conference has officially opened up registration, and has set up a website to get further information, to register, and to find out information about the hotel (the Hotel Marriott Paris Rive Gauche).

The conference is being hosted by the IAJGS and the Cercle de Généalogie Juive, in partnership with the Jewish genealogical societies of Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland.

There is also a call for lecture proposals. Proposals can be submitted until April 30, and should include a 10-20 line abstract and short bio. Decisions on lectures will be made before May 30.

FamilyTreeDNA 2011 Holiday Sale

2011-11-20T13:28:00.001+02:00

I've discussed genetic genealogy a few times before (in this introduction to a previous sale, and in an article on Y-DNA and mtDNA). If you've been interested in trying it out, you can take advantage of FamilyTreeDNA's Holiday Sale through the end of December. Examples of price reductions include:

Y-DNA37 for $119 instead of $169 ($50 off) - men only
Y-DNA67 for $199 instead of $268 ($69 off) - men only

mtDNAFullSequence for $239 instead of $299 ($60 off) - men and women

FamilyFinder for $199 instead of $289 ($90 off) - men and women

FamilyFinder + Y-DNA37 for $318 instead of $438 ($120 off) - men only
FamilyFinder + mtDNAPlus for $318 instead of $428 ($120 off) - men and women
FamilyFinder + mtDNAFullSequence for $435 instead of $559 ($124 off) - men and women

SuperDNA (Y-DNA67 + mtDNAFullSequence) for $438 instead of $548 ($110 off) - men only
Comprehensive Genome (SuperDNA + FamilyFinder) for $627 instead of $837 ($210 off) - men only

No special coupon is needed. Just go to the Products page and the price reductions should already be shown.

If you've successfully used DNA testing to further your genealogy research, post about it in the comments.

Tying together my last two posts

2011-11-09T12:48:00.000+02:00

Two posts earlier, I launched into a discussion on the future of eBooks based on my interest in reading the book Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community by Eviatar Zerubavel, and if it made sense at this stage to get it as an eBook, or whether I should order it by mail.

My last post was about how we are connected to our relatives, both physically (objectively) and how we perceive ourselves to be related. How close is a first cousin once removed compared to a second cousin? Can we come up with an objective measure of such relatedness, or are such measures inherently subjective?

Now an article published yesterday contains an excerpt of the book mentioned in the first post that goes into detail on the topic I brought up in my second post. The article, published in Salon, is called Why do we care about our ancestors? and discusses how our perception of our ancestry in many ways helps define our perception of ourselves. An interesting read, it makes me look forward to reading the full book when it arrives.

Perceptions of Relationship

2011-11-01T14:18:00.000+02:00

In a project I'm working on I have been giving some thought to how we relate to others, but also how we perceive we relate to others. These are not necessarily the same. Certainly it's possible to be closer socially with cousins that are more distantly related than other cousins, but that's a choice. What I am thinking about is how we actually perceive we are related to others, and are we right? How would we judge that in any case?

I'm sure many of you are familiar with the traditional 'cousin calculator' chart, such the the one below (click to enlarge):

Traditional Cousin Calculator Chart

For those of you unfamiliar with how a cousin calculator works, you take two people and determine their common ancestor. You move in one direction (i.e. along the top) from the common ancestor until you reach the relationship of the first person to the common ancestor. You then move in the other direction (i.e. down along the side) until you reach the relationship of the second person to the common ancestor. The box where those two lines merge is the relationship between the two people. For example, if you are the great-grandchild and someone else is the grandchild of a common ancestor, you move along the top to the third column for great-grandchild, and down to the second row for the grandchild, and the box that is in the 3rd column and the second row is 1st Cousin, Once Removed.

If you take a close look, you'll notice I've color-coded the chart how I think we normally perceive relationships. Essentially, our sibling and parents are one degree away, our nieces/nephews and 1st cousins are two degrees away, and so forth. A second cousin is generally perceived as one degree further away from us than a first cousin. A first cousin, once removed is, at least to me, in the same category as a second cousin, and that's what this chart shows.

Now how can we actually determine how closely we're related? One simple method is by how much DNA we share. If we add in the percentage of DNA present between any two relatives to the chart it looks a bit different (click to enlarge):

DNA Cousin Calculator Chart

Note in the above chart that I've changed the color coding to match the percentages of shared DNA. The colors no long take a box shape around the common ancestor, but instead move out in the straight line. What we can see by looking at the numbers is that actually the degree of relationship is moving twice as fast as we perceived before. From a first cousin to a second cousin, the amount of shared DNA is one quarter, not one half. We perceive the second cousin as being twice as distant a relative as a first cousin, but from the perspective of DNA, they are actually four times as distant!

I know one of my 5th cousins, and we share just 0.049% DNA. That's a half of a tenth of a percent. Not very much. Anyways, this was just an attempt to create some kind of objective view of family relationships. Of course, nothing having to do with family is really objective, right?

The End of the Printed Book (coming soon, but not yet)

2011-10-23T22:03:00.000+02:00

So I live in Israel and while it's not too hard to get popular books from best-selling authors in English, it's a bit harder to get things like technical books, or more niche books like those that deal with genealogy. Finding ways to get English books to Israel cheaply is somewhat of an obsession with much of the English-speaking community here, and it's not so simple. Amazon.com was a long-time favorite for many years, although now-Amazon-owned BookDepository.com seems the better deal (books are a little more money, but shipping is free). Of course, with the rise of eBooks one would think eBooks are the simple solution – usually cheaper and no shipping charges. My wife recently got an iPad, and when I decided to order a book recently (Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community by Eviatar Zerubavel) I thought about getting it as an eBook. The price was almost half the printed version ($9.99 on Kindle versus $18.21 in Hardcover on Amazon) and that's without considering shipping for the hardcover.

I've been a book collector for more than twenty years, and while not all my books make it out of my library, I do lend many books out. Considering how hard it is to get niche books like an academically-published one like Ancestors and Relatives..., here in Israel I figured it would be highly likely I would be loaning out the book at some point. So how does one loan out an eBook? First I think it's worth taking a look at who the different players are in the eBook field.

So the big players in eBooks are Amazon (with the Kindle), Barnes & Noble (with the Nook), Apple (with iBooks) and Google (with Google Books). Amazon has long been the leader in this field, with both the hardware (the Kindle) and the store (Amazon.com) to provide the total package for eBook reading. In fact, Amazon is really the only company that offers software on just about every type of device (Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android, and of course their own Kindle devices) and in that they have a real advantage. When Barnes & Noble, the retail leader in book sales in the US, launched their eBook platform called the Nook, they introduced one feature which had been missing from the Kindle – the ability to lend books. Amazon quickly copied that feature and made it available on the Kindle, but with the same odd restrictions – you could only lend a book once to a friend, and only for 14 days. Sure, I wish everyone I lent a book to would return it in less than two weeks, but that's not reality. Why does it matter how long the book is lent for exactly? When a book is lent out, you cannot view it yourself, which makes sense. If I can't view it while it is being lent out, who care how long it is being lent out and to whom? Herein lies the problem with eBooks as they currently stand – you're not buying the book, your essentially leasing it. In fact, even with the lending features of Kindle and Nook, not all publishers allow books to be lent – you need to check each book when you buy it and see if lending as a 'feature' is enabled.

In the days before Apple launched iTunes and the iPod, digital music failed to take off in a major way. The reason it failed was that it was easier to freely download pirated music than it was to buy and use music from the big labels. Apple fixed that, not by eliminating all the restrictions music companies wanted on the files, but by removing enough of them that using digital music legally became easy enough that most people wouldn't bother trying to get it illegally. The big breakthrough was that Apple had the store (what Amazon and Barnes & Noble now have for books) tightly integrated, and that Apple got the music companies to loosen their restrictions so that customers could play music on multiple devices (their Mac, their iPod and their now their iPhone for example) and could even burn CDs of their music for their own use. Most people don't really remember what digital music was like before Apple, but none of that was possible. Sure, the iPod was a breakthrough device when it came out, but the real reason it was so successful was the integration with the iTunes Store and the improved licensing from the music companies.

The problem with eBooks is that none of the companies have yet hit that sweet spot of great device, great store integration and good enough licensing. It's hard to even think about licensing a book. It reminds me of a used book store I used to visit almost 20 years ago in Jerusalem that had a copy of a book that was out of print, yet highly in demand, so they rented it out. It was bizarre and I didn't rent it. I waited a little longer and I found a copy for sale elsewhere. Eventually the book came back into print and everyone could get a copy. The iPad is a great device for reading books, and the various Kindles and Nooks are also good devices. The new Kindle Fire is really trying to compete with the iPad, and is perhaps the first device that will be able to do so, but while there are devices that are great, and there is store integration which works okay (I wouldn't yet call it great on any platform), no one has gotten the licensing right yet.

It took years of battling between Steve Jobs and music companies to get the licensing right for music – and that battle included a visionary like Steve Jobs and music company executives that finally 'got it' (perhaps they were forced into 'getting it' by Jobs). How long will it take for book publishers to 'get it' is anyone's guess. It's already possible to download illegal eBooks, although I don't know if the book reading public will adopt that as quickly as the music listening public did in the days before the iPod and iTunes.

One company that seems to be getting ready for the inevitable move to eBooks is, believe it or not, IKEA. Apparently, they are creating a deeper version of their popular (some might say ubiquitous) BILLY bookcase in order to accommodate the display for physical items, perhaps larger coffee-table style books, but not actually rows of books.

Music needed easy purchasing and a liberal licensing scheme so that people could listen to their music on all their devices. Books needs the same things, but something more. People listen to the same music over and over, but they don't read the same book over and over – instead they lend it out to others. The book publishing industry needs to come to grips with this difference and make their eBooks as lendable as their printed cousins. Until that point, buying books for reading on digital devices will not be ubiquitous (not even as ubiquitous as BILLY bookcases). What's worse is that as a 'leased' product instead of an owned product, what happens if the publisher decides to change the terms after the purchase, further restricting the usage of the book. What can you do about that? Not much, other than wait for the publishers to wake up and figure out that books are not music, and they need to be treated differently.

So in the end, I ordered the book from the Book Depository web site, and will get it in a couple of weeks. It's a little pricier, but I get to own the book and lend out as often and to as many people as I like, without having to worry about what the publisher thinks. Of course, since Amazon bought Book Depository they'll still be getting my money, but at least I'm getting something tangible for that money. In the future no doubt I will be buying eBooks along with the rest of society (I do not believe my grandkids will be buying physical textbooks) but for the time being I'm doing my share to help the paper industry.

Geneadaddyblogger

2011-10-23T15:48:00.000+02:00

So a little over a week ago Jennifer Shoer, otherwise known by her nom de blog The Scrappy Genealogist, started a series she called How She Does It, Secrets from the Geneamommybloggers, getting genealogist moms to explain how they juggle being moms and doing genealogy. She gathered a whos-who of genealogist moms to post in the series, including Caroline Pointer, Jennifer Holik-Urban, Kerry Scott, Amy Coffin, Marian Pierre-Louis, and Elizabeth O'Neal. For those of you who follow genealogy blogging, you probably recognize most if not all of those names. After seeing the series start I jokingly asked Jennifer on Twitter, why no Geneadaddybloggers? To which of course, Jennifer put me on the spot and asked me to write a guest post as well. I don't think I fit into the list of other bloggers (and not just because of the Y chromosome) but I did write something, which you can read on her blog: Philip Trauring – How He Does It – Secrets from a Geneadaddyblogger. So give it a read and let me know what you think. Post comments to the original article on Jennifer's site so everyone who reads the article can read them.

A little known Facebook feature (for genealogy)...

2011-10-17T14:41:00.000+02:00

I just ran across an interesting Facebook feature that is fairly helpful for genealogy. I don't know if this has been around a long time, or if this is something they recently introduced.

Simply, if you go to facebook.com/family you can search all Facebook profiles by surname. Not only that, but the search is created using an easy to remember web address, so you can share a search result page. For example, searching for the surname Zylberman would send you to the page:

facebook.com/family/Zylberman/1

which is the first page of search results for the surname Zylberman. Similarly, if you changed the 1 to a 3 at the end of the web address, you would be taken to the third page of results. Of course, these search result pages will change as new accounts are created, or old accounts are deleted, etc. so sending a result page might show the names you want to show someone in the short term, but may not show the same names later.

In addition to searching in English, you can search in other character sets, such as Hebrew:

facebook.com/family/זילברמן

There are actually more Zylbermans listed in Hebrew than in English, but that's likely because there are less alternate spellings in Hebrew. For the same name in Hebrew, it could be Zylberman, Zilberman, Zylbermann, Zilbermann, Sylberman, Silberman or Silbermann in English (only the variation Sylbermann does not show up on Facebook).

You can also browse surnames which is interesting. One thing you can see is how many surnames are fake on Facebook. Besides that you can see lots of variations of surnames you may not have thought to search. Like in searching, you can also browse in other character sets. When browsing, Hebrew started on page 14893 of the 'Other' character set listings when I tried to find it, which you can jump to by going to this page:

facebook.com/family/directory.php?q=Other&p=14893

It may or may not be where Hebrew names start when you read this, but it's probably not too far off if you're reading this post not long after it was written. I could be mistaken, but it looks like Hebrew follows Armenian and is followed by maybe Farsi? When I searched, Hebrew names ended on page 17611, which means there are currently over 2700 pages of Hebrew names, or with 96 names shown per page, over a quarter of a million surnames in Hebrew on Facebook. I suppose its possible some of those names are actually in Yiddish and not Hebrew, but presumably the majority of them are Israeli users who have listed their names in Hebrew.

What if you want to search for names in Hebrew (or Yiddish) and don't know enough Hebrew to spell the name in Hebrew, or have a Hebrew keyboard to type it out? Try using Stephen Morse's Transliterating English to Hebrew in One Step web page, where you can type the name in English, and receive the text in Hebrew. There are slight differences in the transliteration in some cases if you choose onto the options: Sephardic, Ashkenazi or Yiddish. In the case of Zylberman, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi options return the same result (the same spelling I guessed above). Yiddish is less likely to be useful (and in this case no search results were found using the Yiddish tranliteration) for the simple reason that anyone who uses a Yiddish spelling for their name (as opposed to English or Hebrew) is not very likely to be on Facebook altogether. Once you get the text in Hebrew letters, you can copy that text and paste it into the Facebook search box.

So there you go, a super-easy way to search and browse surnames on Facebook, even using foreign alphabets.

The Fate of the Sabbatarians

2011-10-10T23:12:00.000+02:00

I don't often link to other articles online, but I read an article today that struck me as fascinating, well-researched, well-written, and which has many implications for those interested in Jewish genealogy.

The article, by Shay Fogelman in Haaretz, is titled Discovering Europe's non-Jews who kept the faith and it discusses the fascinating history of the Sabbatarian community of Transylvania (Szekler Sabbatarians). The Sabbatarians were a community founded in the late 1500s by a Christian nobleman who, fascinated by the Bible and other Jewish writings, adopted many customs of Jews such as keeping the Sabbath (thus the name Sabbatarians) and keeping kosher, etc. He spread his beliefs to his court, which slowly adopted his beliefs, but it was his adopted son and successor who really spread this new belief-system by translating Jewish prayerbooks into Hungarian for the use of his followers. They were not Jews, they were not Christians, and that created no shortage of problems for them.


Bozodujfalu, center of the Sabbatarian community

In many ways they were persecuted even more than the Jewish community in the same region, because the Christian churches which dominated the region viewed Sabbatarians not as Jews, but as Christian heretics. By 1635 when they were forced to convert to one of the four major Christian sects in the region by the government, they counted their members at 20,000 people. Driven underground the religion persisted in hiding for hundreds of years, pretending to be Christian but intermarrying either amongst themselves or occasionally with the local Jewish community. In the mid-1800s with the emancipation of the Jews, the Sabbatarian community came out of hiding (although they were still persecuted as heretics) and half of the community converted en-masse to Judaism. The community, now half Jewish, continued to pray together in the same Synagogue as before.

When WWII started and the Nuremberg laws came into force, the Hungarians who controlled the region, and the Germans who eventually took over, were not sure what to do with the Sabbatarians. At first they considered them Jews, but after protests (including by local Christian clergy) some were exempted from the racial laws that sent the Jews into ghettos and eventually to the death camps. Some who were given the opportunity to leave the ghetto remained there as they decided they would rather share the fate of the Jews (if that was what God willed). Very little of the community seems to have survived the war, although some descendants of the community still live in the area, and even in Israel.

The story is interesting from a genealogical point of view because of the history of the community. While the mass-conversion of half the community occurred within a time-period that is well documented, the previous two centuries of the community is not well-documented, and the interaction between the Sabbatarians and the Jewish community is not well known. If members of the community intermarried into the Jewish community (presumably converting to Judaism beforehand), then that is in many ways reverse intermarriage compared to the much-more-common-at-the-time marrying out of the community. It would be extremely rare at that time to find large numbers of a non-Jewish community marrying into the Jewish community.

How is this influx of the local population into the Jewish population reflected the DNA of the Jewish population? If intermarriage really started in the 16th century, the number of descendants could in fact make up a large minority segment of the Jewish population from that area. What are the predominant haplogroups of Sabbatarians? Do those haplogroups exist in any large percentage in the Ashkenazi Jewish community? Some haplogroups such as Q1b1, which is a minority among Ashkenazi Jews (5%), but which is almost all Jewish, have been theorized by some to be a remnant of the Khazarian mass-conversion (the only other large-scale conversion since biblical times that I can think of), but perhaps the Q1b1 haplogroup derives from the Sabbatarian community? or another mass-conversion which we don't know about?

It would also be interesting to document the connections between the two halves of the Sabbatarian community after the mass conversion in the 19th century – presumably there was intermingling between the two halves after the conversion (they still prayed together after all).

From the article in Haaretz it seems those Jewish descendants of the Sabbatarians identified by the author may not be interested in researching this history. We may therefore never know the full story of the Sabbatarians, and what their influence on the make-up of the Jewish people today is (perhaps significant, perhaps inconsequential).

In any case, I recommend reading Shay Fogelman's excellent article and learning about this little-known non-Jewish sect which followed many Jewish laws (although not circumcision among others).

Out of curiosity, how many of you had heard of these Sabbatarians (Szekler Sabbatarians) before this post? If so, where did you hear about them?

Ancestry.com 15 Days of Free Access and Prizes

2011-10-09T11:51:00.000+02:00

Ancestry.com is in the middle of a 15 day celebration of their 15th anniversary. They are making one data collection free each day between the 1st and 15th of October (thus they are a little over half way through) and they are giving away a prize each day, and a grand prize after the 15th (going behind the scenes of the NBC TV show Who Do You Think You Are? with Lisa Kudrow). Each collection they make available for free remains free through October 15th, so you can access all the ones made available so far:

Oct 1 - Social Security Death Index
Oct 2 - Ireland, Griffith’s Valuation, 1848–1864
Oct 3 - California Marriage Index, 1960–1985
Oct 4 - Bavaria, Germany, WWI Personnel Rosters, 1914–1918 (in German)
Oct 5 - 1920 U.S. Federal Census
Oct 6 - Australian Electoral Rolls, 1903–1980
Oct 7 - Texas Birth Index, 1903–1997
Oct 8 - Sweden, Births from the Swedish Death Index, 1947–2006 (in Swedish)
Oct 9 - World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918

More collections will be made available Oct 10-15.

Today's collection, WWI Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918 is a particularly interesting collection if your family lived in the US during WWI, as all males were registered (even if they were unable to be soldiers) and the registration cards can provide information on where the person was living, where they were born, etc. I discuss these draft cards in my article Finding Information on US Immigrants.

To access these collections, go to the Ancestry 15th Anniversary Collections page.

From that page you can also click on the link (and orange button that says Enter Now) to take you to the daily sweepstakes page where they are giving away a prize every day until the 15th (and then the aforementioned grand prize to go behind the scenes on the NBC TV show Who Do You Think You Are?).

Today's prize is an iPad 2...

36 Hour FamilyTreeDNA Sale

2011-09-26T22:37:00.001+03:00

Celebrating reaching 15,000 fans on Facebook, FamilyTreeDNA is having a 36-hour sale on their genetic genealogy tests. FamilyTreeDNA has previously had sales when they reached 5,000 and 10,000 fans. Unlike those earlier sales, there is no special code needed for this sale. Discounts are as much as $200 (for the Comprehensive Genome bundle).

I've previously written about using genetic tests for genealogy, first briefly when FamilyTreeDNA had their 10,000 fan sale, and then again in more detail in my article Using DNA for Genealogy: Y-DNA and mtDNA.

The sale ends midnight on Tuesday, September 27th (Central Time).

Their official announcement:

Thank you for helping us reach 15,000 LIKES on our Facebook page! To show how much we like you too we're offering a 36-HOUR SALE! Please help us spread the word!*

Start: Monday, September 26 (TODAY) at 12:00pm CDT
End: Tuesday, September 27 at 11:59pm CDT

For NEW customers:
Y-DNA 12 . . . $59 (was $99) (via projects only)
mtDNA . . . $59 (was $99) (via projects only)

Y-DNA 37 . . . $129 (was $149)
Family Finder . . . $199 (was $289)
mtFullSequence (FGS) . . . $229 (was $299)

Y-DNA 12 + mtDNA . . . $118 (was $179) (via projects only)
Family Finder + Y-DNA 12 . . . $248 (was $339)
Family Finder + mtDNA . . . $248 (was $339)

Family Finder + Y-DNA 37 . . . $328 (was $438)
Family Finder + mtFullSequence . . . $398 (was $559)
Comprehensive Genome (Family Finder + mtFullSequence + Y-DNA67) . . . $597 (was $797)

Upgrades & Add-Ons for CURRENT customers:
mtDNA add-on $59 . . . (was $89)
mtFullSequence upgrade (HVR1 to Mega) . . . $199 (was $269)
mtFullSequence upgrade (HVR2 to Mega) . . . $199 (was $239)
mtFullSequence add-on . . . $219 (was $289)
Family Finder add-on . . . $199 (was $289)

Prices will be automatically adjusted on the Family Tree DNA website -- no coupon code needed! Important: Promotional orders need to be paid for by the end of this sale. Visit us at http://www.familytreedna.com/ to order now.

We hope this limited-time sale will give you yet another reason to "LIKE" us!

Thank you for your support!

Family Tree DNA
___________________________________

This offer ends TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27th, 2011 11:59pm CDT.

* You do not need to be a member of Facebook to take advantage of this offer. Payment must be received at the time of your order. Valid only on products listed. No substitutions. No adjustments will be made on previous purchases. This promotion is not valid in combination with any other promotions. Family Tree DNA reserves the right to cancel any order due to unauthorized or ineligible use of discounts and to modify or cancel these promotional discounts due to system error or unforeseen problems. Subject to change without notice.

Have you used genetic tests for genealogy from FamilyTreeDNA or other companies? What has been your experience, good or bad? Have you made connections to cousins using genetic genealogy? Share your experiences in the comments.

A new addition to my family tree

2011-09-22T10:52:00.002+03:00

Last night my wife and I were overjoyed to have a new baby girl.

As such I will likely not be posting regularly for a little bit, but I will try to respond to questions on the Facebook page as much as I can, and I hope to return with new articles soon.

How do you do genealogy online?

2011-09-18T14:56:00.001+03:00

I have three simple questions for all the readers of this blog:

1) Do you use one or more online family tree websites such was MyHeritage.com, Geni.com, Wikitree.com or Ancestry.com (their family tree features, not necessarily their databases)? If so, which one(s) do you use?

2) If you use a family tree web site, list what you like best about it - and what you like least. Also, for sites that offer subscription plans, do you pay a subscription or only use their free features? If you don't use any family tree website, is there a reason you don't - and is there something that would change your mind (i.e. if they only offered X I would use their site)?

3) How do you interact with other relatives when doing your genealogy research? If through a website listed above, how does that work? If you intact in a different way, such as via e-mail, explain how well that works.

I hope you will share your experiences with the various services available online, so others can learn about how different readers of this blog are using those services, successfully or less so.

If you have a twitter account, please tweet this post to your followers so we can get as many responses as possible. You can find my tweet of this post at twitter.com/bloodandfrogs and re-tweet it.

Please post your answers in the comments to this post on the blog.

Volunteer Opportunity at the JDC

2011-09-08T22:38:00.000+03:00

Back in May, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (known as the JDC, or simply the "Joint") launched an online archive web site called Our Shared Legacy which contained scanned documents from the JDC archives with over 500,000 names. Those documents included lists and cards that showed how the JDC helped Jewish refugees during and after the Holocaust to immigrate to various countries around the world (in addition to other relief efforts, including before WWII). See my article from the launch in May for more information on the online archive itself.

Since May the JDC has continued to scan and index more files from their physical archives and add them to the archive web site. In order to assist in getting these records up quicker, the JDC is looking for volunteer indexers who can contribute a day or half-day per week in time, in the JDC offices in either New York City or Jerusalem, to help with the indexing effort.

This is a really great opportunity if you'd like to help make these genealogically significant records available online. The JDC has really created a unique resource, going far beyond what most similar organizations have provided online. It is particularly impressive that they have made all of the high-resolution images available to download on their web site. If you live in or near New York City or Jerusalem and you'd like to help make these records available to people online, this is a great way to give back to the genealogical community and the Jewish community as a whole.

The full request for volunteers follows. Contact Naomi Barth at the e-mail address below if you're interested in volunteering. Let her know you heard about it here.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is seeking Indexing Project Volunteers for an exciting opportunity to help with a forward- thinking archive endeavor to index historic lists. The volunteer will have the opportunity to engage with primary source material regarding The Joint’s work since 1914.

This project is perfect for those with an interest in genealogy, Jewish or general history, transnational migration, the non-profit sector, library science or archival work.

Position Requires:
• Interest in history and the treasures of the JDC archives
• Working as a reliable team player
• General computer skills
• Foreign language skills helpful but not necessary

A full day or half day per-week time commitment is required. Volunteer work must be completed on site at JDC’s NY or Jerusalem offices. All training and supervision will be provided.

Please send inquiries to:
Naomi.Barth@jdcny.org
Indexing Project Coordinator

Please enter “JDC Archives Indexing Project Volunteer” in the subject line.