Blood and Frogs: Jewish Genealogy and More

Introducing Lexigenealogy – a new blog

2013-05-19T15:27:00.001+03:00

I've started a second blog, called Lexigenealogy. This new blog is about my convergence of interests into Lexicography, Genealogy and Technology. I will be using the new blog to look into what it takes to build a dictionary of names, from the technology needed to organize research, to how to properly format it for printing. This will be a long process, and I hope people will find it interesting. For more information about the impetus for starting this new blog, see my first post there Combining interests in Lexicography, Genealogy and Technology.

I will continue to write for both blogs, but will keep the more technical and Lexicography-oriented posts on Lexigenealogy. I will keep the more Jewish-oriented and traditional genealogy posts here on Blood and Frogs: Jewish Genealogy and More. As the dictionary I am working towards involves Jewish given names, there will invariably be some overlap, but if something is particularly interesting for both sites, I will link between them.

So I invite you to go check out Lexigenealogy and see what you think. The current post looks at digitizing print books to make them accessible on your computer and tablet. It's just the beginning, but I have much more planned.

What does New Zealand have against Justice?

2013-05-02T18:36:00.002+03:00

Recently, I read about New Zealand's policy of preventing parents from naming their children certain names, particularly offensive names. Now, the rules in New Zealand are not overly strict compared to some other countries, such as Denamrk where parents have to choose from a list of 7000 pre-selected names, or Germany, where the gender of the child must be determinable by the name, but it still seemed a bit restrictive. Perhaps the most restricted is Iceland, which makes people choose from 1712 male names and 1853 female names listed in the Personal Names Register, or appeal to a special committee that usually says no (see the recent story of one teenage girl trying to appeal).

I was interested to see that the most rejected name was actually Justice. To me Justice seems very similar to traditional names like Prudence or Charity. Certainly those names are not banned. I've never met anyone named Justice, although I do remember the character Justice played by Shannon Elizabeth in the 2001 comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back:

"Justice" played by Shannon Elizabeth

I then wondered how many people named their babies Justice in the United States. Luckily that's easy enough to figure out (at least approximately), the Social Security Administration publishes the top 1000 names for both boys and girls in their system, dating back to 1880 (while Social Security started in 1937, the list is indexed by birth year, so the names go back much further).

Here are the results for the past 10 years for boys and girls:

So in the past ten years, Justice ranked somewhere between 332nd and 556th most popular name for boys and girls. What seems a bit strange is that if you go back to the beginning, the name as used for females only goes back to 1994, and the name for males shows up the first year (1880) at rank 993 (almost out of the ranking), then doesn't show up in the top 1000 until 1992, when it shows up in rank 821. What caused the surge in popularity as a male name in 1992, and introduced the name for girls in 1994? If you have a theory, post it in the comments.

In case you're wondering why the name is banned in New Zealand, it's because one of the rules states that a name cannot be used that "is, includes, or resembles, an official title or rank." This prevents names like King, Prince, Princess, Constable, etc. as well as Justice. The other names on the list were either judged as offensive, too long, or a punctuation mark. Letters and initials that don't stand for a real name seem also to have been banned.

Here's the list (as reported by CNN), with the number of rejections, from 2001 through the present:

Justice:62
King:31
Princess:28
Prince:27
Royal:25
Duke:10
Major:9
Bishop:9
Majesty:7
J:6
Lucifer:6
using brackets around middle names:4
Knight:4
Lady:3
using back slash between names:8
Judge:3
Royale:2
Messiah:2
T:2
I:2
Queen:2
II:2
Sir:2
III:2
Jr:2
E:2
V:2
Justus:2
Master:2
Constable:1
Queen Victoria:1
Regal:1
Emperor:1
Christ:1
Juztice:1
3rd:1
C J :1
G:1
Roman numerals III:1
General:1
Saint:1
Lord:1
. (full stop):1
89:1
Eminence:1
M:1
VI:1
Mafia No Fear:1
2nd:1
Majesti:1
Rogue:1
4real:1
* (star symbol):1
5th:1
S P:1
C:1
Sargent:1
Honour:1
D:1
Minister:1
MJ:1
Chief:1
Mr:1
V8:1
President:1
MC:1
Anal:1
A.J:1
Baron:1
L B:1
H-Q:1
Queen V:1

Jewish names, red herrings, and name changes

2013-04-15T20:58:00.002+03:00

The study of one's family history includes a large amount of dealing with names. Surnames. Given names. Maiden names. Married names. Nicknames. Name changes. While many of the articles I've written in the 2+ years of this blog have dealt with names in some fashion, here's a look at the articles that focused specifically on them:

Religious marriages, civil marriages and surnames from mothers

January 9, 2011

A look at the introduction of surnames in the Jewish community two centuries ago in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the government bureaucracy which forced many Jews to take the names of their mothers instead of their fathers, forever confusing their descendants researching their family history. A look at a specific case in my own family where birth certificates show the truth of what happened.

Name Changes at Ellis Island

May 10, 2011

A look at names changes in NYC and the reasons behind them, as well as the myth and history of name changes at Ellis Island (or in my family's case, Castle Garden). A look at a very interesting book documenting names changes in New York, and a interesting story of a family that lived and had children under the wrong name for years, before changing it later.

Animals and Name Pairs in Jewish Given Names

May 17, 2011

This article is a brief look at two common historic Jewish naming patterns, and how they intersect. The first naming pattern is the use of animal names from Hebrew and/or Yiddish. The second pattern is giving two related names to a child.

This article also looks at the historical role of the shem kodesh (Jewish religious name) and the kinui (secular name) among Jews.

Variations in Jewish Given Names

June 17, 2011

A look at how given names of the same person can change over time, particularly if they moved between countries. This article has a great table of Jewish given names that shows the names in English, Hebrew, Transliterated Hebrew (i.e. Hebrew in Latin letters), Tranliterated Yiddish, and Polish.

This article also lists and reviews a number of important books on Jewish given names, and provides information on the Given Names Data Bases (GNDBs) at JewishGen.

Pursuing Genealogical Red Herrings

March 21, 2013

Plane crashes, bigamy and global law firms – this article has it all! Seriously though, this article takes a look at how sometimes you can spend years pursuing a lead that turns out to have been a typo. Examples include a newspaper article that detailed a plane crash in Guatemala, a Rhode Island state census that shows a man with the same name, birth year and birth country as my gg-grandfather who is married to a different woman, and a global law firm that somehow seems to spell their own name wrong on occasion. In all three examples, a family whose name was Traurig was erroneously printed or displayed as the much more rare name Trauring, leading to endless pursuits of families that it turned out were not related at all.

How surnames change – research into one name over two centuries

April 15, 2013

Whereas the above article looked at three cases where a family named Traurig was erroneously listed as Trauring, this article looks at four families whose surnames started out as Traurig, but actually changed their names to four different surnames – Trauring (two families), Vesely and Smutny (one family), and Al Yagon (one family).

The article looks at families that started out with the name Traurig, and changed their names in Poland, in Australia, and in Israel.

I hope you like these articles. Let me know what you think. Is there anything else you'd be interested to hear about Jewish name, or names in general, let me know and I'll see about adding a new article to this list in the future.

How surnames change – research into one name over two centuries

2013-04-15T14:23:00.003+03:00

From sadness to happiness and wedding rings.

While my last article looked at changes from the surname Traurig to Trauring which were mistakes, this article looks at changes in the name Traurig that actually did happen – leading to Trauring, Vesely, Smutny, and Al Yagon.

This article is a fairly long look at how names, or more specifically one name, changed over the past two centuries, using a number of sources including JRI-Poland (covers Poland), Genteam.at (Austria), Yad Vashem (Israel), Historical Jewish Press, FHL Microfilms, old-fashioned gumshoeing, and a bit of luck. While not so many people reading this article may be interested in what accounts to a one-name study of sorts, I think the research methods and family situations discussed would be useful for anyone trying to track down members of their family whose surnames in past centuries might have changed.

The Original Name

About 150 years ago, my family's surname was Traurig. Traurig in German means 'sad'. My family lived in the small town of Kańczuga, in the Galicia region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the town is now in Poland). Only about 50 years earlier, most people in Galicia didn't have surnames. Surnames were introduced in Galicia after its consolidation into the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a way to make it easier to tax citizens, and conscript them into the army.

Why Change?

When surnames became required, why would a family choose a name that meant sad? Family legend has it that indeed they didn't choose the name at all, but rather were assigned it by an antisemitic local bureaucrat. The story goes on that this bureaucrat actually was something of a joker, and named two brothers differently – Lustig and Traurig, or in English – Happy and Sad. The chronicler of this family legend (a distant cousin) even mentioned some members of the Lustig family that were related to us, including the owner of the famous NY restaurant chain Longchamps – which I found out was founded by one Henry Lustig with funding from his brother-in-law Arnold Rothstein. Yes, that Arnold Rothstein. I've never been able to make a direct connection to the Lustig family, but interestingly enough I did find an Abraham Joseph Lustig in records that came from Kańczuga Abraham Joseph was actually a very popular name combination in my family from Kańczuga so that's another connection. Maybe there's something to that legend...

My Family's Name Change

Our family changed their name within a generation or two to Trauring, which means 'wedding ring'. I suspect it was simply to avoid the negative meaning of their original name. It's not clear exactly when the name change occurred, but certainly by the 1880s my family was using the Trauring name. I suspect in fact that they used it much earlier, but only changed it officially once leaving Kanczuga and venturing out to other nearby towns. It is only in other towns that the name Trauring begins to show up, even while the Traurig name continued in Kańczuga until much later.

My original discovery of the name change came when I found my great-grandfather's older sister's birth record when searching on JRI-Poland. Kreindel Blime (later known as Katie) Trauring was born in 1882 in Rzeszów, a larger city not too far from Kańczuga. I didn't then know the connection to Kańczuga and actually thought my family was originally from Rzeszów. When I ordered a copy of the birth record, however, it clearly showed that her father Isaac Trauring was born in Kańczuga. When I tracked down the birth records from Kańczuga (also through JRI-Poland) I was surprised to find there were no Traurings at all. There were, however, a lot of Traurigs. One Traurig was an Isaac Traurig born in 1862. So Isaac Traurig was born in 1862 in Kańczuga, and his first child was born 20 years later in Rzeszów with her father's name listed as Isaac Trauring.

Detail of Kreindel Blime Trauring's birth record from 1882

Let me be clear that just finding a person with the same name about the same age in a town does not make them the person you are seeking. I later went on to find many other documents that backed up this record, showing the same town and the same birthday for Isaac Trauri(n)g.

I'll save you from the details, but another branch of the family shows up in Lancut, also nearby, also went by the name Trauring, and can also be traced back to Kańczuga originally. This probably either indicates that the name change was much earlier than documented (since two separate branches changed their name) or that the two branches coordinated the name change even after they were split between different locations.

Are All Traurigs Related?

With our family name having been Traurig for only for a few decades, and being a fairly common word in German (and a much more common surname than Trauring), I always suspected that that while there are lots of Traurigs out there, none (or few) were related to my family. Indeed, many of the Traurigs I've come across have been Cohanim (Jewish priests who receive that status via patrilineal inheritance). Strictly speaking, since my family are not Cohanim (Hebrew plural of Cohen), it should be impossible to be related to Traurigs who are Cohanim (since it is inherited patrilineally).

I said strictly speaking, since it's not actually true, as many people in Galicia received their surnames from their mothers – as I have discussed in two previous articles: Religious marriages, civil marriages and surnames from mothers and Name Changes at Ellis Island. Thus perhaps one branch received the Cohen status from their father, but their surname from their mother. That said I've never found a connection beyond the Traurigs that originated in Kańczuga.

Other Family's Changes

Since it's possible some Traurigs are related to my family, I continue occasionally to look into Traurig records, and see if I can find any connection. In doing so I've run into something interesting. While my family changed their name well over a hundred years ago, other Traurigs have also changed their names. Indeed I've run into at least three other Traurig families that have changed their names.

Ferdinand Traurig (I)

If you look at the list of people on Schindler's Lists (I use the plural here because there were in fact more than one version of this famous list) you'll find one Ferdinand Trauring. JewishGen gives some background on these lists, and has two versions of the list included in their Holocaust Database. One version of the list is one that was published in 1944 in Hebrew in the now-defunct newspaper Davar.

While I've only mentioned it in passing before, one very important resource for Jewish genealogy is the Historical Jewish Press web site. A joint project of Tel Aviv University and Israel's National Library, it is slowly scanning many Jewish newspapers from around the globe and making them searchable online. Many of these newspapers are from Israel and are in Hebrew, but of the 35 newspapers currently scanned, the languages also include English, French, German, Hungarian, Judeo-Arabic and Yiddish, as well as papers from Algeria, Austria, France, Hungary, Prussia, Morocco and Russia. One of the papers available on the site happens to be Davar. Searching for טראורינג (Trauring in Hebrew) indeed finds the Davar-published copy of Schindler's List with an entry for Ferdinand Trauring born in 1892:

Schindler's List Published Sep 3, 1944 in Davar

You might be wondering why I'm talking about a Ferdinand Trauring and not Ferdinand Traurig. Well, Schindler's List was my introduction to this man, but not the end of the story. I didn't know how this Ferdinand Trauring was connected to my family, if at all.

There were other Traurings I couldn't find a connection to either, including a couple named Israel Wolf and Netti/Nelli (Wachtel) Trauring. I was introduced to this couple by accident. Another researcher who was looking into the Traurig family had received photographs from a researcher in Poland who had photographed graves of Traurigs in a certain cemetery. Except the photographs were not of Traurigs at all, but of Traurings. Since she didn't think the photographs were relevant to her, and we had connected online to discuss possible connections, she had mailed me the photographs. I haven't been able to locate the photos of the graves that were sent to me more than a decade ago, but the same graves are shown in records from JRI-Poland:

Cemetery records of Ignatz/Israel and Netti/Nelli Trauring (JRI-Poland)

In the cemetery records, there are two listings for Israel/Ignatz and Netti/Nelli using each variation of the first name. Nelli's maiden name is given as Wachtel. Both died in 1910.

Later, while searching the site Genteam.at, an amazing resource for families that had relatives living in Austria, I found by chance the birth record of Ferdinand Trauring. Genteam.at, for those who don't know about it, is a volunteer effort that has already indexed more than 7 million records from Austria, including many Jewish records. Here's the record as listed in Genteam.at:

Birth record for Ferdinand Trauring from Vienna in 1892 (Genteam.at)

Two important things to notice in the record. First, his parents are the aforementioned Israel Wolf and Netti (Wachtel) Trauring. Second, Ferdinand's last name is listed as both Traurig and Trauring. I've never seen a record before that listed two last names on a birth record, so this is interesting. Presumably, since we know that Israel Wolf and Netti, as well as their son Ferdinand, later went by the name Trauring, the use of both names indicates that the family name was previously Traurig.

Digging a little deeper, using the information from the Genteam.at index, I searched through the FHL Catalog of microfilms to see if they had made copies of birth records in Vienna from that period. I found a series of microfilms dealing with births, marriages and deaths from the Jewish community of Vienna called Matrikel, 1826-1943, and among those films is film 1175374, titled 'Geburten 1890-1892'. Gerburten is German for Births, so that seems like the right film.

Using the information from the Genteam.at record, and the film umber I had found in the FHL catalog, I submitted a request on Genlighten.com, where you can request document retrieval from researchers who have access to various archives and libraries, including the FHL. A researcher, whom I can't name not because I don't want to, but because he's no longer on Genlighten and it doesn't show the names of previous service providers, looked up the original birth record of Ferdinand Traurig/Trauring for just $10. For that he retrieved not only the original birth record, but all the index cards that contained the surname Traurig or Trauring as well, which was on a different film (it's good to hire someone familiar with the records you are trying to access). Here's the index card that matches the record from Genteam.at above:

Index card of the birth of Ferdinand Trauring from FHL microfilm

You'll note all the same information, although here the double-surname is listed for the father Israel Wolf, not for the surname on the birth record. That might be explained, however, by the fact that there is a second card in the index:

Index card of the birth of Ferdinand Traurig from FHL microfilm

Note that all the information is exactly the same (birth date, parents names, etc.), except in this card it only shows the surname as Traurig. They both reference the same ledger line (115). So what does the ledger, which is the original record, say?:

Ferdinand Traurig birth ledger entry (click to enlarge)

You may need to click on the image to enlarge it if you want to see it. Ferdinand is unquestionably listed as Ferdinand Traurig, as is his father Israel Wolf, who comes originally from Pilzno apparently. So where did the Trauring name come from at all? Well, the record continues onto the next page where you can see a note at the far right that mentions the Trauring name:

Ferdinand Traurig birth ledger entry, part 2 (click to enlarge)

Okay, so we have a Trauring which was originally Traurig, except they're from Pilzno, not Kanczuga. Are they related to my family? Not sure. Possibly this is an independent change from Traurig to Trauring by another family. One additional piece of information that can be gleaned from the birth record is that it actually gives a file number and date for when the surname was changed (presumably in Pilzno). The date of the name change was April 1, 1873 (almost exactly 140 years ago).

I contacted the archive in Pilzno about the name change record and was told all Jewish records were destroyed in the war. Not sure how a name change record is a 'Jewish' record. Indeed it seems strange that name change records would be divided by religion at all. It's very possible no name change records exist from 1873 in Pilzno, but I wouldn't rely on the response from the archive there to determine that for sure. Whether this is worth pursuing beyond this point is not clear to me. If this is a member of my family, the date of the name change would be consistent with my own family, which was Traurig in 1862 but Trauring in 1882.

Ferdinand Traurig (II)

There's another Ferdinand Traurig, except he doesn't become a Trauring, but rather he becomes a Vesely. This is a much simpler story, thankfully spelled out by Ferdinand's niece in a comment on Yad Vashem's photo archive. If you're not familiar with Yad Vashem's photo archive, it's a great resource. Yad Vashem teamed up with Google in 2011 to make their massive photo archive searchable online. Searching for Traurig there returns several results, including this photo of one Ferdinand Traurig:

Ferdinand Traurig from Prešov, Czechoslovakia (Yad Vashem)

One of the great features of Yad Vashem's archive is that visitors can add comments to the photos. In this case, someone named Vanessa (in fact it seems there are two comments merged together from two people) added the following comment to the above photo:

Ferdinand was someone who I loved being around and learnt alot from. A great man who fought the Nazi's during the Holocaust and fought for Judaism after the war in Australia by setting up a synagogue and raising his child and grandchildren in a Jewish home. May his memory live on through the Judaism that his family practice for many many more generations to come.A wonderful man whom I am proud to call my uncle. Ferdinand was one of 12 children of Yitzhak and Malvina Traurig. Both of his parents and 5 of their children survived World War 2. The list of bothers and sisters were Heinrich, Izidor, Zigmund, David (my father) Ferdinand, Shanyi, Manu, Esther, Annus, Ruzena, Hugo and Josef .Together with their parents, Izidor, Zigmund, David, Ferdinand and Josef survived the war. Many of the other children were married with families who all perished during the Shoah. The family has and is a proud family of Kohanim. The parents and the surviving children [except for Zigmund who remained in Czechoslovakia and was a distinguished scientist ] moved to Australia after the war. The family remains an orthodox Jewish family with a proud heritage. After the war parts of the family changed their family name. Traurig in German means "melancholy or sad"--my father David together with Ferdinand and Josef changed the family name to" Vesely" meaning in Slovak "happy". Zigmund changed his family name to "Smutny" which is the Slovak equivalent to "sad" The children, grandchildren and now hopefully the great grandchildren of the surviving brothers still keep in close contact and we try to fulfill the hopes and aspirations of those who have gone before us.This is a photo of my grandfather, Ferdinand Traurig. Passed away in 1997 in Sydney Australia. Ferdinand fought with the partisans during the war, his wife Ruzena (née Junger) was in a labour camp and then in hiding, with their only child placed in the care of a non Jewish family. Both Ferdinand, Ruzena and Judith (my mother) survived the war and came to Sydney to rebuild their lives with the remnants of their family.
May 29, 2011, 1:50 p.m.

From the comment we see that Ferdinand Traurig in this photo survived the war with his parents and several brothers, and most of them changed their surname to Vesely, which is Slovak for Happy. One brother changed his name to Smutny which is Slovak for Sad (keeping with the original meaning of the name in German). Here we have a real example of brothers with surnames that mean both Happy and Sad, and it wasn't something forced upon them.

Doing a quick search online brings a bit more of the story, showing how the Traurig family arrived in Coogee, Australia (a suburb of Sydney) and started a new synagogue there that exists today.

No Sorrow

The Traurigs who made it to Australia were not the only ones to flip the meaning of their name in a new country after the Holocaust.

I originally came across information on this family in 2004 in the run up to IAJGS Int'l Jewish Genealogy Conference in Jerusalem. I had been in Israel less than a year at that point, and was not actively involved with genealogy in Israel yet, but I had volunteered to lay out the souvenir conference journal, and had met many of the people who were running the conference. For the conference, the local genealogy society had prepared a database of name changes that had been published in an official government paper between the years 1921-1948 (corresponding to the time of the British Mandate). This database was original created by Avotaynu, the Jewish genealogy publisher, and put onto microfiche. The database distributed at the conference was created by transcribing the images of the microfiche pages. This database was later put online (although it seems not to fully work now – oddly it seems the original surnames are missing from the search making it impossible to use for its intended purpose), but at the conference it was released on a CD to conference participants. Here is an image from the original microfiche:

Traurig name changes in British Mandate Palestine (click to enlarge)

I'm not clear on the first name change to Weinberger. That happened in 1946. It could of been because she married, or perhaps because she was taking the name of a different parent now that we was in another country. It's probably not, however, an ideological name change.

The next three names, however, are a family that changed their name together in 1947 from Traurig to Al Yagon. Al Yagon in Hebrew means No Sorrow. Very similar to the change to Vesely by the Traurig family in Australia.

Another interesting change in the change of given name from Roza to Shoshana. A Shoshana in Hebrew is, you guessed it, a Rose.

After finding out about this Al Yagon family I tried to find them and indeed located descendants of those mentioned in these name change records. What happened next is an important lesson for genealogy researchers. As I was writing this article I decided to look back at my correspondance with the Al Yagon family. After a few e-mails back and forth confirming they were the ones whose family name was originally Traurig, I realized why the correspondance had ended. I was told there was an expert in the family history and I should contact him for more information. I was given his name – Meir Eldar – and his e-mail address. I had e-mailed him but not received a response. As I probably thought this family was not related to mine, I probably didn't notice the lack of response and didn't follow up. Maybe I had been given the wrong e-mail address, maybe my e-mail was swallowed by a spam filter, I really don't know. What I do know is that I forgot about the e-mail in 2004 and I never reached this family history expert on the Traurig family. Now in 2013 while researching this article, I corresponded with another Traurig researcher, who informed me that her cousin, the same Meir Eldar, had only recently stopped responding to e-mails due to his deteriorated health. Had I reached him eight years ago, what might I have found out? It's impossible to know now. This is why it's important to keep tabs on all the e-mails and other correspondance one has out there at any given time.

Conclusion

So what do we have?

We have my Traurig family from Kańczuga that changed their name to Trauring around the 1870s.

We have the Israel Wolf/Ferdinand Traurig family that came from Pilzno, that changed their name also to Trauring around the same time.

We have the Traurig family from Prešov that changed their name to Vesely and Smutny in Australia, after surviving the Holocaust.

We have the Traurig family that arrived in Pre-State Israel in 1946, and changed their name to the Hebrew Al Yagon.

So four different Traurig families, who ended up with four different surnames. These, of course, being the ones I know about.

What name-change stories have you run into when researching your family history? Does anyone have other example of a name that was changed in so many ways?

Starting to use Google+

2013-04-09T20:50:00.001+03:00

I've been on Google+ as long as anyone, but I admit that at the beginning it didn't seem very useful. Over time I started to notice, however, lots of discussions going on – particularly about genealogy. Then Google introduced Communities and real discussions started happening. I started to comment on other people's questions, usually through the iPhone app which makes it easy, and realized that it holds some advantages over Facebook in fostering discussions.

I've had a Facebook Page for a long time, with over 2600 followers, and I answer questions there all the time, but it seemed time to get more involved in Google+.

As such, I've connected this blog directly to Google+, which should allow me to easily share posts there, and I have set up a Google+ Page for this blog that people can follow.

So if you use Google+, follow this blog's page to keep updated, and to take part in discussions connected to the posts, and to ask your own questions. If you have suggestions on how to best use Google+, let me know in the comments below (or post on Google+).

From Despair to Celebration

2013-04-07T15:52:00.000+03:00

The origin of a major celebration was from the darkest time and the utmost of despair.

Hakafot Shniyot celebration in Tel Aviv (YouTube)

In Israel the Jewish holidays are celebrated slightly different than in other countries. The three pilgrimage holidays in which Jews would historically travel to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices at the temple – Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (Pentecost) and Sukkot (Tabernacles) – are celebrated for two days outside of Israel (for Pesach and Sukkot, two days at the beginning and two days at the end), and only one day within Israel. The reason for this is a historical inability to be sure that the lunar months on which the Jewish calendar are based was accurate outside of Israel. While in today's modern world this is not a problem, the keeping of two days for each holiday outside of Israel (in the diaspora) has remained. In fact, many Jewish tourists who visit Israel during the holidays still keep the second day while in Israel. There are various reasons for this, but it's worth pointing out the disparity of some Jews keeping a holiday where they cannot drive a car or take a bus, where they are generally dressed in their fanciest clothes, and the rest of the country going about its business as normal.

The end of the week of the Sukkot holiday is actually a pair of different holidays called Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. In the diaspora these holidays take place on two sequential days at the end of the Sukkot holiday. On the eve of Simchat Torah, there is a celebration that includes dancing in a large circle holding Torahs and singing. This is called Hakafot.

In Israel, however, the two holidays of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah are merged into a single day. This means that while Jews in other countries celebrate Hakafot on the second night, in Israel the holiday is already over.

This has led to one of the most interesting celebrations in Israel, that of Hakafot Shniyot (Second Hakafot). There is amazingly little written online about this celebration, so let me explain. The holiday is over so there are no restrictions on things like playing musical instruments or using a loudspeaker. In cities across Israel celebrations are held that have the traditional Hakafot dancing with Torahs, and take advantage of the fact that music and lights not available on the holiday can be used. These celebrations are attended by politicians and other dignitaries, but are open to everyone. The largest celebrations are in the major cities like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but celebrations occur in many cities and small towns. These are very popular celebrations which bring in many groups of people, from religious to secular, Ashkenazi to Sephardi, etc.

In looking up what was written online, I found various explanations for the holiday. One person wrote it originated with the Arizal, a 16th-century rabbi who lived in Safed as a way of showing solidarity with the Jewish communities in the diaspora. Others wrote it is an attempt to offer Hakafot to non-religious Jews, who would be more willing to come celebrate with real music in a public square than in the traditional Hakafot carried out in synagogues and without music. There may be some truth to these statements. The Arizal may have celebrated a second night of Hakafot (although I have no evidence of this), and the current celebrations may be a way to bring religious and non-religious Jews together, but neither of these explain where the modern celebration in Israel originated, nor why.

Which brings me to the main point of this article. I recently finished reading an amazing memoir by the former (1993-2003) Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Israel Meir Lau. The book is called Out of the Depths: The Story of a Child of Buchenwald Who Returned Home at Last and it is one of the most moving books I have ever read. I do not think it possible to read this book and not cry repeatedly. Rabbi Lau was only 2 years old when the second world war broke out. His parents were deported to death camps and murdered, and he was deported to two different concentration camps as a young child. Protected by his older brother who was enjoined by their father to protect the younger Lau and preserve the family's 37-generation rabbinic dynasty, the young Lau ended up surviving Buchenwald, where he was liberated by American forces just short of his eighth birthday. Making their way to France with other young Buchenwald survivors (including a young Elie Wiesel who would remain in France), the two brothers insisted on going to the one place Jews could call their own, Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel). They received visas to then British-Mandate Palestine, and were among the first Holocaust survivors to arrive in what would become the State of Israel a few short years later (they were among the first because the British severely restricted Jewish immigration at that time – perhaps 150 Jewish children who survived Buchenwald were too hard even for the British to turn down).

'Lulek' Lau, the future Chief Rabbi, upon his arrival in Israel with a rifle provided by a US soldier (that was later confiscated by the British). (Yad Vashem)

One of the very interesting stories told by Lau, is that of his father-in-law Rabbi Yedidya Frenkel. During the war, Lau's future-father-in-law was the rabbi of the Florentin neighborhood in Tel Aviv. After services ended concluding the Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah holiday in October 1942, Rabbi Frenkel asked his congregants to remain in the synagogue for a few minutes. I'll quote from the book for the rest of the story:

The congregants wondered at his strange request, but they respected the rabbi's wishes. He removed a Torah scroll from the ark, and in a voice quivering with emotion, announced to the congregation, "In Poland and elsewhere throughout war-torn Europe, the telephones aren't working, the telegraph stations are closed, the mail no longer runs. Entire communities are cut off, and we do not know what has happened to their Jews. At this exact hour, in Warsaw, Kraków, and every other city in Poland, they should be beginning their Simchat Torah celebrations. But we do not know whether they are performing the traditional processions [Hakafot] holding the Torah scrolls. We are completely cut off from them, and despite our attempts to make contact, the communities do not answer. But all Jews are responsible for one another. Let us act in their stead and perform processions on their behalf, at least symbolically."

Thus started the tradition of Hakafot Shniyot celebrations in Israel, from a place of darkness and despair. Rabbi Lau relates that in the years following the foundation of the State of Israel, as long as his father-in-law was alive, the Hafakot Shniyot celebration in the Florentin neighborhood were visited by the current Prime Minister and IDF Chief of Staff (as well as many other dignitaries). The celebrations spread, first to cities like Jerusalem and to the main square in Tel Aviv, to towns like Kfar Chabad, to army bases, and eventually across the entire country.

As we begin the commemoration of Yom HaShoa tonight here in Israel, it is worth remembering that one of Israel's most popular and happiest celebrations, came from a time when Jews across the globe did not know the fate of their family members in Europe. When his future-father-in-law was starting this tradition, the young Lau was likely hiding in an attic with his soon-to-be murdered mother, being fed cookies to keep him quiet in case Gestapo soldiers might hear him when searching the building. It's hard to conceive such events, not having experienced them, but we must remember, and I hope everyone will remember tonight that even out of despair can come celebration, and with the State of Israel hopefully no such event will ever be able to happen again.

Some celebrations of Hakafot Shniyot from this past year:

Tel Aviv:

Kfar Chabad:

Ponevitch Yeshiva:

Bring It Home

2013-04-07T11:22:00.000+03:00

Today was Yom HaShoa (Holocaust Remembrance Day) in Israel. While there are many ways to commemorate the Holocaust, and those family members we lost, I wanted to bring to people's attention a very interesting attempt at remembering those who were lost.

Menorah rescued from Budapest flea market, now being used in Israel.

We know the Nazis stole an incredible amount of artwork from Jewish families during the Holocaust, from valuable paintings, to even Judaica. While the Nazis were known to steal expensive Judaica such as gold menorahs or silver candlesticks, what happened to the everyday ritual items that most Jewish families used? Certainly the Nazis didn't bother to collect cheap Judaica and send it by train somewhere – so where did it go?

Kiddush cup rescued from flea market.

Some of the Judaica might have been taken with Jews when being sent by trains to death camps, some may have been sold cheaply in an attempt to raise some money before fleeing, but most of it was likely left behind in their homes. What happened to the Judaica left behind? Either it was looted following the mass deportations, or the people who moved into the homes left behind by the Jews just took it when they moved in. Maybe they sold it, maybe they stuck it in a box and stuck it in the attic, maybe they just threw it in the garbage. No one knows exactly what happened to all of that Judaica, but we do know that there are likely millions of such ritual objects from candlesticks to menorahs to spice boxes to seder plates that once existed and many of them may still exist.

Which brings me to Bill Frankel. On a trip to to Budapest, he stopped by the very large Esceri flea market in that city. While wandering around looking at the various wares for sale, he started noticing things like kiddush cups, menorahs, Torah yads, spice boxes, etc. Hundreds of them. When he would show interest in a Jewish piece, the dealers would inevitably pull ut a box from under their table with more Jewish objects. The supply was endless.

A strange mixture of items for sale in the Esceri flea market.

On the trip Bill Frankel bought several objects, but determined that more of these Jewish ritual objects needed to 'come home'. Moreover, he didn't want these objects to end up in museums or on display somewhere in some exhibit – he wanted them to be used again by Jewish families. With this idea he founded Bring It Home, a charity with exactly that goal.

Bring It Home was founded to facilitate finding these items, purchasing or otherwise acquiring Jewish ritual objects in Europe, distributing them to new Jewish homes, and creating an educational experience for those who get involved in the process.

Bring It Home is brand new, and are still putting together their marketing materials, organizing their first buying trip, etc., and need funds to get off the ground. To that end, the charity has started a fundraising campaign through crowdfunding site indiegogo. They're looking to raise $10,000, and they have two weeks left in the campaign. To see the current status, go to the campaign website, or check the widget below (and then go to the web site).

There are many ways to memorialize those killed in the Holocaust, but I think this is one of the more interesting and personal ways that one can commemorate those killed – by facilitating the return of these lost ritual objects, and putting them back into use by Jewish families worldwide.

Pursuing Genealogical Red Herrings

2013-03-21T16:29:00.000+02:00

Plane crashes, bigamy, and global law firms – enjoy.

A red herring is a literary device where the author of work inserts a clue that misleads the reader into thinking one thing, when the truth lies elsewhere. Frequently deployed in mysteries, where the author makes you think one person is guilty of a murder, when really it's someone else. Alfred Hitchcock was famous for using the technique in his movies. Red herrings are also yummy little fish frequently found at the kiddush table after attending synagogue on the sabbath, but I digress.

In genealogy, sometimes you spend a lot of time researching a lead that is not actually a lead at all. I sometimes think that when you have a very unique surname that you're researching, you're more prone to being fooled by a red herring, because you think there's less chance of the name being from a different family. My own surname, Trauring, is fairly rare. In general, I've always been able to connect Traurings to my own family, although there are some exceptions. What I've found is that many times when I find the name Trauring, it's not actually Trauring – that's where the red herring come in.

The Guatemala Plane Crash

Take, for example, a plane crash that occurred in Guatemala in 1974. A few years ago I ran into an article from the Baltimore Sun that covers a plane crash where 21 American tourists were killed in Guatemala. The crash occurred in 1974, and among the listed victims was a family: Jonathon, Edith, David and Robert Trauring. Here's the article:

Certainly a plane crash in an exotic location where a family that shares your rare surname is something that draws your attention. I spent some time trying to figure out who these people were, and how they were connected to my family. Something seemed wrong, however, right from the beginning. How was it that I had never heard of a family that lived not that far from mine (I grew up in Massachusetts, this family lived in New Jersey), with the same last name, who died in a plane crash during my lifetime? That issue nagged at me, but I continued to look. I figured they must have been from a distant branch of my family that I was in touch with, that lived mostly in the mid-west. I contacted one of those distant cousins, a fourth cousin once removed I believe, and yet they had never heard of this family either. Another clue that something was wrong was that I didn't find any evidence of this family existing at all. I eventually gave up, filed the article into my Mysteries folder, and figured I'd work it out later.

Recently I decided to take a look again. I found two other articles that covered the same crash, one on Google's News search, and another on Ancestry's Newspapers.com. Here's the article from Newspapers.com that was published in the El Dorado News-Times (El Dorado, Arkansas) on 30 December 1974:

El Dorado News-Tribune (El Dorado, Arkansas) 30 Dec 1974 Page 2 (Newspapers.comme)

Notice the difference? In this article, published on the same day but in a different paper, the surname of this family is Traurig, not Trauring.

So the surname is Traurig, right? Well, truthfully the information from this article is no more reliable than the other one so how do I know? Obviously finding evidence of the existence of this family as Traurig would be helpful in closing the book on this red herring.

Let's take a step back for a moment. Look at both articles. What are the names listed? The first article says:

Jonathon Trauring, 74 Skyes Avenue, Livingston, NJ; Edith Trauring, same address; David Trauring, a child of the same address; Robert Trauring, a child of the same address.

Clearly according to this article the family is Jonathan and Edith the parents, with David and Robert their children.

The second article says:

Jonathan, Edith, David and Robert Traurig

It doesn't explicitly state who the children are, but the normal assumption would be that the first two listed are the parents and the last two are children.

So Jonathon is the father, right? Wrong. Robert, the last listed and the one explicitly listed as a child in the first article, is the father. Edith is the mother. David and Jonathon are the children. How do I know this? Well, the obvious person to search for first is the father, and so following the article I searched for Jonathon Trauring, then later Traurig, and found nothing. I finally decided to search for Edith Traurig, where I found her SSDI entry and on Ancestry.com, finally, some solid evidence. Ancestry.com has a collection of documents from the US State Department called Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835-1974. I actually found my great-grandfather's records in this collection in the past. In this case, considering the deaths occurred on December 28, 1974, I was lucky as the collection only goes through the end of 1974 – only a few days later. Here's a excerpt of Robert's file:

Report of the Death of American Citizen Abroad - Robert Bernard Traurig

This file represents a certification of the details of a citizen's death, including documents signed by the US Consul in Guatemala and records from the medical examiner in NY that verified the identity of the body. As far as I'm concerned, we can safely say this family's surname was Traurig, not Trauring. Case closed.

Just so you know, with the information in these reports (which includes the names of the parents of Robert and Edith and their addresses at the time), it's possible to trace the family back quite a bit. Robert and his parents show up in the 1930 and 1940 censuses. Robert's father came from Austria, likely Galicia (likely because in one census Austria is crossed out and Poland is written in – and the region of Austria that became part of Poland after WWI was the Galicia region). With a little more digging, such as getting a copy of his naturalization papers, we could probably track this family back to the town they came from in Austria/Poland.

One other thing worth noting. Both articles use the unusual spelling Jonathon. The report of death for him spells the name Jonathan. Which is correct? I don't know, but you'd think the State Department document would have double-checked the name, so possibly both newspaper articles misspelled this given name, but only one misspelled the surname? Pushing that point further, the name given for the father in the original article – Jonathon Trauring – was completely wrong (not the father, spelling of the given name wrong, spelling of the surname wrong). Wonder why I couldn't find this family originally?

Did my gg-grandfather have two wives?

Ever run into a piece of information on your family that you wish you had not? This is the story of finding one such piece of information, but luckily finding out it was a red herring.

Searching on FamilySearch.org one day, I came across a record of an Isac Trauring in the 1915 Rhode Island state census:

Isac Trauring in 1915 Rhode Island Census (FamilySearch.org)

At the time I originally viewed the record, there was no image available to double check (see the image above for what I saw then, click on the link in the caption to see what it looks like now). The record did show the name of his wife, however, which was Marie. Now, my gg-grandmother's name was Esther, not Marie, so obviously this was a different person, right? Except my Isaac Trauring was born in 1862 in Austria - and sure enough so was this Isac Trauring. Seemed a bit too much coincidence.

A rare name like Trauring. First name Isaac. Born in Austria. In 1862. I mean, come on, obviously the same person right?

My gg-grandfather had lived in the US from the late 19th century up until about 1913 when he returned to Europe just in time for WWI (lucky him). That was another red flag. I had documentation of him in Vienna in 1914, and plenty of documentation of him living in Antwerp in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but the problem was I couldn't prove he had not returned to the US in 1915. Indeed, I didn't have much evidence at all from that document from 1914 until after my gg-grandmother died in 1925. So was my gg-grandfather married to two women?

Luckily, even without the original census record, I was able to prove otherwise. At the time it wasn't easy, but what I came up with was the following:

Maria Traurig in 1930 US Census in Rhode Island

So in 1930, a woman with the same name as Isac Trauring's spouse in the 1915 Rhode Island State census, the right age and in the right location, had the last name Traurig, instead of Trauring. Now, that's not conclusive proof, but it's a step in the right direction. At the time it was enough to let me stop looking until more evidence became available. More recently, that evidence has been added to FamilySearch. Most importantly, the images of the 1915 Rhode Island Census are online now, and here are the original handwritten entries:

Original 1915 Rhode Island Census entries for Isac and Maria Traurig

The index was transcribed incorrectly. The name is clearly Traurig, not Trauring. Case closed.

Still, it's worth considering for a moment that this typo (from less common name to more rare name) was made for a person what matched every other metric exactly – same first name, same birth country, same birth year. Too many coincidences? Apparently not.

Greenberg Trauring?

Greenberg Traurig is a fairly well-known global law firm headquartered in Miami, with offices around the US and around the world (even here in Israel). Among other areas of law, they file patents. I've had to do patent searches in the past and I have one patent, so occasionally I would search for 'Trauring' in the patent database online and see what came up. Besides my patent, and one by a cousin of mine, I saw a few that didn't seem to fit. Here's one such patent filed on behalf of Disney:

Disney Patent on Interactive Character System, filed by Greenberg Traurig

The reason the patent showed up when I searched for 'Trauring' was because the name of the law firm was misspelled in the patent! Considering the law firm itself filed the patent, that's particularly odd. Where this mistake originated, I certainly don't know. Maybe the USPTO made a mistake somewhere, or maybe someone who worked at Greenberg Traurig just made a typo, but why Trauring of all things? Is that a natural mistake when typing Traurig?

Apparently, Trauring is a natural mistake to make, because it's not the only place it shows up. Look at this screen shot from Greenberg Traurig's web site:

Web page on gtlaw.com, the web site of Greenberg Traurig

Note the title of the web page – Greenberg Trauring! Maybe the same employee who typed up that patent also worked on that web page?

Luckily, I'm familiar with the law firm and knew the name was Traurig. If the typo had been on the inventors name, and I had spent hours trying to track down a person that didn't exist, that would not have been fun. The point here is that even documents prepared by global law firms can have typos that can lead you astray.

Indeed all of these mistakes could originate simply as typos. The misspelled name in he news story could have been a typo, or perhaps a misheard spelling on an international phone call between Guatemala and a news bureau in the United States. The census record could have been a transcription mistake, or a typo. The Greenberg Traurig mistakes are almost certainly typos.

So next time you come across a name of a possible relative, and your gut tells you there is something wrong, trust your gut and make sure you're not following a red herring.

Lessons Learned

So what can you learn from the above cases? Here's what I learned:

When your gut tells you there is something wrong with the lead you're following, listen to your gut.
Always search for all members of a family, not just the adults (or who you think are the adults).
Just because an index says a name is correct, don't assume it is correct. Always check the original document.
Never settle for one record to provide you with information you're seeking – always look for corroboration from multiple additional sources (and different types of sources).
Red herring should be eaten, not followed.

Wacky Wednesday: Fire Extinguisher Hand Grenades

2013-03-13T15:00:00.000+02:00

Many bloggers use the Geneabloggers Daily Blogging Prompts to help them with ideas for what to post on a given day. There's Black Sheep Sunday, Maritime Monday, Tombstone Tuesday, etc.

This, however, isn't an official blogging prompt – I'm making it up right now. I'm calling this Wacky Wednesday because I'm posting something that is wacky, and not actually genealogy related, but something I discovered while researching in the NY City Archives last year. If you find something wacky while researching your family, feel free to post it as Wacky Wednesday as well.

I was researching my gg-grandfather who lived in New York City at the turn of the last century. In the city archives they have city directories which are unfortunately falling apart. I hope other copies of these directories exist somewhere, because the copies in the NY City Archives are not particularly good copies. In any case, while looking up my gg-grandfather, I came across the following advertisement in the 1890 NY City Directory for The Hayward Hand Grenade Fire Extinguisher:

In case you think this was some kind of random ad, apparently fire extinguisher hand grenades were fairly common back then and many companies manufactured them. The grenades were actually glass bottles filled with salt water (and later toxic chemicals) that you would throw towards the base of a fire, breaking the glass, and allowing the liquid to hopefully put out the fire.

A quick look on eBay shows several vintage glass fire extinguisher grenades for sale, for a few hundred dollars each. One collector is selling a Hayward Hand Grenade made from cobalt blue glass:

Cobalt Blue Hayward Hand Grenade Fire Extinguisher (eBay)

The same collector has many other glass grenades in his collection:

More glass fire extinguisher hand grenades (eBay)

A glass collector named Ferdinand Meyer has written up a good summary of the background of these interesting artifacts from a glass collector's point of view – with a collection of photos of many of the grenades from different companies (including Hayward). One photo he displays is from another site that sells antique bottles, and shows a yellow glass bottle that largely matches the image in the advertisement:

Yellow Hayward Hand Grenade Fire Extinguisher (GreatAntiqueBottles.com)

That particular bottle is for sale for $390.

So that's the wacky thing I found while researching my family in the NY City Archives. What wacky things have you found when you were looking for information on your family?

iPad Users – free app today that can fill out B&F genealogy forms

2013-03-12T19:50:00.000+02:00

If you use an iPad, I'd like to recommend you download an app that is free today, PDF Forms. It's normally $9.99. It's free today, and I think will go back to cost $9.99 tomorrow.

The app lets you load and fill out PDF forms. You can then share the forms filled out via e-mail, and you can decide whether to send it as an editable form, or as a 'flattened' PDF which is no longer editable. Why would you want a program to fill out PDF forms on your iPad? Obviously, so you can fill out this site's series of genealogy forms – The B&F Forms System.

B&F Ancestor Form

I've tested some of my forms in the program, and it seems to work pretty well. You just put the PDFs you want to edit on either Dropbox or Google Drive, and then connect with the program and it loads them directly. You can edit all the fields on the form, and then save the filled-out form as a separate file, e-mail it (either as an editable form, or flattened), print it, or load it into another program on your iPad that supports PDFs.

For those who do not have a genealogy program on their iPad, this is a good way to collect information while visiting relatives, as well as sharing information with people. Even those who do have genealogy programs on their iPad, can still benefit by using the forms as a way to collect information and to share information. For example, you can fill out a form with the information you know about a particular family, then send it in editable form to someone else and ask them to fill in the blanks.

I'm hoping to come out with some updated version of the forms soon, to take advantage of some new form capabilities, to add support for the 1940 census to the census form, and to make it possible to translate the forms into other languages (such as Hebrew). If you have any suggestions for improving the forms, please let me know in the comments below. Hopefully by the summer I'll have time to update the forms. In the meantime, go download PDF Forms on your iPad and use the current forms and let me know what you think.

UPDATE: The app is no longer free, but it seems they're lowered the price to $8.99.

Fascinating Headdress – where is this family from?

2013-02-26T16:31:00.000+02:00

My post Who's in that photo? from September received a comment today from Jane, who had a photo she couldn't figure out as well. She knew the names of the people in the photo (they were her great-grandfather's sisters), but didn't understand the significance of the massive bows on their heads. She asked if it was a fashion thing, or perhaps a religious requirement? Someone suggested to her that it might be a Jewish headdress, and thus she was asking here for advice on the photo.

Here's the photo, one of the more interesting family photos I've seen:

Now first let me say, nothing about the bows looked familiar to me. I'm not an expert on Jewish headdress or historical fashion, but I was pretty sure this was not a specifically Jewish headdress.

So what is its significance? Considering all three sisters are wearing the same headdress, my initial guess was that it would not be simply a fleeting fashion choice, but had to have some cultural or religious significance. How many sisters do you know who otherwise would wear the same outfits?

I can't say for sure that I know the origin of these bows, but I suspect from the research I did that these are in fact Alsatian headdresses called schlupfkàpp (a 'bow cap'). In the 19th century the region of Alsace-Lorraine developed a unique form of headdress that lasted into the 1940s before mostly disappearing. Early in the 19th century the bows were relatively small, but apparently the bows grew in size until they peaked in size around the turn of the century, exactly when Jane's photo was taken.

Here are a few examples of the style:

1919 illustration of traditional Alsatian costumes (Wikimedia Commons)

Husband with wife in traditional Alsatian costume, about 1875 (Christ Family)

Three sisters in Alsatian folk dress (Flickr)

Most sources point out that single women wore these bows in specific colors indicating their religion – Protestants wore Black bows, and Catholics wore brightly colored ones, usually Red. Apparently after marriage both Protestants and Catholics would wear black bows. One source I found mentioned that Jews wore Lavender bows, although I haven't found any other reference for that fact.

I certainly can't determine the color of the bows in Jane's photograph since it's black and white, so even though they seem black to me that might not be the case. I also can't read the location of the studio where the photograph was taken, although it could have been taken anywhere (although if it is in Alsace-Lorraine that would certainly seem to confirm my guess).

What I would suggest for Jane is to try to contact someone who knows about traditional Alsatian costumes. One other reason to do this, especially if Jane does not know what town her family came from, would be to determine the specific type of headdress her family members were wearing. Apparently the style of the bows varied from village to village, and it might be possible for someone to figure out the region or even the specific town by seeing the style of the bow.

One place to look is the Alsace Tourism web site, which has a section on Alsatian Costume. The web site even has a map showing the origin of specific headdresses in Alsace. The site also links to two different cultural groups and the Alsatian Museum in Strasbourg, all of which might be able to help figure out the specific origin of the bows in Jane's photo. Another option if Jane doesn't know where her great-grandfather came from is to track down his origin and seeing if he tracks back to a town in Alsace-Lorraine. If he moved to the US, she can using the techniques I wrote up previously in my article Finding Information on US Immigrants.

Certainly, this is an interesting example of using family photographs to locate the origin of a family. Even if the photo was taken in London or Chicago, it would still point to the family coming from Alsace-Lorraine and may even (with some expert help) point to the specific region or town. Of course, I don't have a lot of information about the family and could be totally off-base. I'm sure everyone reading this would appreciate if Jane would post in the comments if my guess is right and she confirms the origin of the headdress (and her family) as coming from Alsace-Lorraine.

Trick to use Hebrew and Yiddish in Adobe InDesign

2013-02-25T16:00:00.000+02:00

This is the second article in a series on publishing text in Hebrew and Yiddish for genealogy books. The first article looked at Finding Hebrew Fonts. This article looks at using those fonts to publish Hebrew, Yiddish or any Right-to-Left (RTL) language using Adboe InDesign, without having to buy the more expensive Adobe InDesign ME (which has extensive support for RTL languages).

The standard software for professional publishing these days is Adobe InDesign. When publishing genealogy books there are genealogy programs that can output formatted reports and books (such as the book output options of Heredis and GEDitCOM II mentioned on Tuesday), but if you want a fully customized book that can be published professionally (or through an online publisher/printer like lulu.com) either you or someone else who is helping you will likely need to use InDesign. InDesign itself is not cheap (about $650), but if you want to use RTL languages like Hebrew, Yiddish, or Arabic, it costs hundreds of dollars more for the ME (Middle East) version.

Why would you want to use RTL languages in a genealogy book? Some examples include transcribing Jewish gravestones which in many cases are at least partially (and frequently wholly) in Hebrew, and transcribing handwritten Yiddish letters. You could just put in a translation of the texts, but adding the original text, especially when the orginal may be hard to read, is a nice touch.

Since most people are not going to buy InDesign just to put together one book, they probably will be using a copy at work, or have a friend who has a copy help them out. If that's the case, however, chances are the copy of InDesign they are using will not be the ME version with support for RTL.

There are actually two InDesign add-ons you can buy that will enable RTL features in standard InDesign, ScribeDOOR from WinSoft International and World Tools from In-Tools. The cheapest solution is still $99. Again, perhaps too expensive, especially if it's not for a copy of InDesign you own. So what if you could use RTL langauges in InDesign without an expensive plug-in? Well it turns out you can, with a little trick I'm going to show you.

Keep in mind this trick won't add all the RTL features that the ME version of InDesign offers, but it will let you insert RTL text that will lay out properly. For short texts like gravestone transcriptions, or simple texts like letters, this is more than enough. If you want to format complicated things like forms and complex layouts, chances are you'll need to spend the extra money and get one of the other solutions.

Technically this has been possible since InDesign CS4, but I believe it may have required some scripting to make it work. I'm using CS6 and there is nothing you need to get it working other than following the steps below.

Open InDesign, and go to the Paragraph settings. You want to select the Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer:

Step 1: Select the Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer

This is what defines the type of text-box you create when using the Type Tool in InDesign.

Next, select the Type Tool:

Step 2: Select the Type Tool, and create a text box

and with the Type Tool selected, create a text box on the page.

Now, make sure the cursor is flashing in the text box and then, while holding down the Command key on a Mac, or the Control key on Windows, right-click into the text box (right-click on a Mac is either holding down the Control key while clicking, or on a newer trackpad using two fingers to click). That will bring up a menu:

Step 3: Command/Control Click and select 'Fill with Placeholder Text' from menu

When you see the menu, select 'Fill with Placeholder Text'. If you were not holding down the extra key (Command on the Mac, or Control on Windows) then it will just insert placeholder text in English characters. If you were holding down the extra key, you will instead see a window pop up:

Step 4: Select Hebrew from the pop-up menu

In this small window, you need to select Hebrew (or Arabic) in order to get RTL text inserted. When you click OK, you'll see the placeholder text inserted:

Hebrew Placeholder Text in the text box

Besides having random Hebrew text, you'll also notice the text box is now in RTL mode and you can edit Hebrew text properly.

Now you just delete the Hebrew text and your cursor will be on the right side of the text box, ready to enter any RTL text, whether Hebrew, Yiddish or Arabic.

Empty Text Box in RTL mode ready for text entry

You can change your font, size, whatever – and it will now all work in this text box. Use any number of Hebrew fonts, like those I mentioned in my recent article Finding Hebrew Fonts.

If you use this tip, let me know. If you're interested in hearing more about publishing genealogy books, let me know in the comments.

A Major Breakthough for Jewish Polish Records

2013-02-20T19:29:00.000+02:00

JRI-Poland and the Polish State Archives have announced a new agreement to expand the availability of Jewish records from Poland. An earlier agreement which was in effect between 1997 and 2006 resulted in the indexing of more than 4 million records which make up the bulk of the JRI-Poland database. The cancellation of that agreement in 2006 was a major blow to Jewish genealogy. There have been ongoing discussions since 2007, but the resumption of cooperation did not materialize until now. This announcement, made on Friday, is much more than most expected, and well worth the wait.

The first major component of the announcement is that JRI-Poland will be able to add an additional million records to its database within the next year. That is in addition to the 4 million existing records already in their database that originate from the Polish State Archives.

JRI-Poland Executive Director Stanley Diamond signing the agreement in the
presence of Polish Consul General Andrzej Szydło in Montreal, Quebec.

The second major component is that JRI-Poland will launch a new Order Processing System, which will allow people searching for records on the site to click on a record they want and order it directly on the JRI-Poland site using a credit card. JRI-Poland will handle the credit card processing and the archives in Poland will copy the records. For anyone who has dealt with ordering records from Polish archives directly, this is a major breakthrough.

While my Finding and getting copies of Jewish records in Poland article is still one of the most popular on this site, and was published in print as well, it is my hope that this announcement means that in the future that article will not be needed.

Polish State Archives General Director Władysław Stępniak signing the agreement,
with JRI-Poland representative Krzysztof Malczewski (on left) looking on.

The third major component of the announcement is that the Polish State Archives is starting a major effort to digitize all of their records in all 30 Regional Archives, and make them available for free online. As these digital scans come online, JRI-Poland will link directly to the images from their database search results. As the images come online, the new Order Processing System will be phased out.

The announcement is available on the JRI-Poland site (in English) as well as the Polish State Archives site (in Polish).

I'd like to congratulate Stanley Diamond, the Co-Founder and Executive Director of JRI-Poland, as well as the other JRI-Poland board members, staff and volunteers who made this agreement possible.

I look forward to seeing the different elements of this agreement come to fruition, and will let readers of this blog know about things as they happen.

Genealogy Apps in the Mac App Store (Update)

2013-02-19T13:54:00.001+02:00

Over two years ago I wrote about the launch of the Mac App Store, Apple's resident app store available on all modern Macs, and the three genealogy-related applications that launched with it. At the time the three applications available were MacFamilyTree, Family Tree Maker, and Date Calculator.

Two years later, what is the state of Mac genealogy in the App Store? There are now six applications that show up if you search 'genealogy':

Six Genealogy Apps in the Mac App Store

MacFamilyTree and Date Calculator are still there, while Family Tree Maker has been dropped from App Store. Newly added applications include Heredis, My Family Tree, GedScape Gold, and MemoryMiner.

Why did Ancestry.com drop Family Tree Maker from the App Store? I have no idea, but there are a few possibilities. The coding standards for applications in the Mac App Store are very strict, and they've gotten stricter over time. It's possible one of the those restrictions made it difficult for Ancestry.com to comply with the rules of the store. It's also possible that the lack of a clear upgrade path in the App Store was a bigger issue. Ancestry.com sells annual upgrades to their genealogy applications, and the App Store doesn't make this very easy. If anyone purchased Family Tree Maker on the App Store, I'm curious if you received any notification that the app was pulled, and for what reason.

Heredis had a major update recently, and that included launching it into the Mac App Store, as well as a free version for iPhone and iPad. Heredis calls this version the 'Blue Suite' and includes interperable version on PC, Mac, and iOS. I haven't used this new version of Heredis, but it looks quite impressive. There's actually a 20% off sale going on now for Heredis, through February 24, through the app store or through their web site. They have a free trial version also, so it's worth checking out first. Two of the more interesting features to me include the ability to create illustrated charts (i.e. a tree superimposed on an actual tree graphic) and the ability to generate a book. I've published a genealogy book before, but it required a lot of work in Adobe InDesign, and took months to finish. Imagine being able to generate a book with a single click? I haven't used this feature, but it's something I think all genealogy application should offer in some form.

My Family Tree and GedScape Gold are two apps I've never heard of before. My Family Tree seems to be a chart-based genealogy app that keeps an updated chart that you can add people to, but they show no other features in their description, and no trial version on their web site. According to reviews in the App Store, there are some bugs and support is not easy to get. It looks like an early version of an app that could offer a simple genealogy option to some, but it isn't quite ready yet (or supported well enough). GedScape Gold is a program to browse GEDCOM file and output a web version of your family tree. The application seems to have mixed reviews, although unlike My Family Tree, there is a support site and a free trial version available to test before buying. I suppose there is a purpose for GEDCOM viewers, but I certainly lean towards more full-featured applications.

MemoryMiner is an application I really like, and am happy to see it's in the App Store. This application fits in my visual sensibilities, where you can take a large number of photographs and link each person in the photo and can switch between looking at photos fro ma specific place, or of a specific person, etc. It's very powerful, and also includes the ability to import a GEDCOM file to populate the person database. My only big problem with the app is that while you can import a GEDCOM, it's very difficult to subsequently update information on the people you import. If you're working on a project over a long period of time, chances are your family database will be updated, and it would be great if you could import those changes easily. Another problem is the web site of the company hasn't been updated since 2011. Hopefully this is still an actively developed application, as it is unique in the way it allows you to tell a visual story of your family.

One last note. In my post last year, I mentioned that Date Calculator was created by the same company that puts out GEDitCOM II, a very interesting genealogy program for the Mac. GEDitCOM II has some very advanced features I've never seen in any genealogy program on any platform, including scripting using Applescript, Python and Ruby (including an online library of downloadable scripts), allows you to completely customize the user interface (including downloadable UIs), outputting a book using LaTeX (see this PDF of a book output of the Windsor family), etc. It's really quite an impressive program, but even though its been updated to work with application signing for OS X (a feature needed to show that a program is from a reliable source), it is not yet available through the App Store. I'm sure there are some good technical reasons for it not being available through the App Store, but it's really a shame as I think GEDitCOM II is underrated and could use the extra publicity of being available through the App Store to gain marketshare.

Finding Hebrew Fonts

2013-02-14T00:19:00.000+02:00

Even though I live in Israel, my computer operating system runs using English, and almost all the work I do is in English. That said, I occasionally have the need to do some work in Hebrew, which presents some problems. One problem is that I don't have a lot of Hebrew fonts on my computer, and usually whatever project I'm working on requires something slightly different (requiring me to find an appropriate font).

For genealogists, one use for Hebrew, even for those who do not speak Hebrew, is to transcribe the exact text on Jewish gravestones, which are frequently partially (and sometimes completely) in Hebrew. When publishing books on your family history, having the right fonts to publish those transcriptions can be very important. Another use is transcribing family letters written in Yiddish (Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet). By the way, if you do want to transcribe Yiddish, an interest tool online is called the Yiddish Typewriter and it lets you enter Yiddish in various forms, and it then outputs it into many more forms (including YIVO transcription, IPA transcription, PDF, Image (GIF, etc.) – it looks quite useful.

In this post I'm going to share some places you can find Hebrew fonts. Most of the sites I'm going to point out have free fonts, although I'll also include a few commercial sites. Keep in mind I'm not going to explain how to use these fonts on your computer, that will have to be in a different post.

So first, I should point out that there are different ways to divide Hebrew fonts, and I'll take a look at a few.

First, Hebrew fonts can be divided into three categories:

1) Fonts that support Nikudot (vowels) and Taamim (cantillation marks - also called Trop in Yiddish)

2) Fonts that support Nikudot (vowels) but do not support Taamim

3) Fonts that support neither Nikudot nor Taamim

A few things about these categories:

Category 1 is essentially only needed when one is reproducing a biblical passage, and not always. Taamim (cantillation marks) are used to show the reader of a passage how to pronounce that passage when reading it aloud in synagogue. There are other interpretations of the Taamim, but they are beyond the scope of this post.

Category 2 includes Hebrew vowels, which unlike in English, are not letters, but diacritical marks. In modern Israeli Hebrew, these vowels are usually not used. You won't, for example, see them in most books or newspapers. Newspapers published for people new to Hebrew (such as immigrants to Israel) use vowels, as it makes it easier to read the Hebrew (one doesn't need to figure out the word based on context). This is a niche market. Vowels are also frequently used in the publication of Hebrew prayer books. That said, if you plan on printing something in Hebrew that is going to be read by someone not fully fluent in Hebrew, including vowels is a good idea.

Category 3 is the largest category of fonts. Most modern Hebrew fonts will fall into this category, not only because Israelis don't use vowels, but because implementing vowels as diacritical marks is a pain in the neck for font designers.

Here's an example of Hebrew text with both Nikudot and Taamim:

Nikudot (Vowels) in Blue, Taamim (Cantillation Marks) in Red

This is a passage from Exodus Chapter 7 - roughly translated as "and the river will swarm with frogs, which will go up and come into your houses". The font is called Taamey Frank CLM, part of the free Culmus font collection I mention below. The text with Nikudot and Taamim came from the Mechon Mamre web site.

As you can imagine, designing fonts that take into consideration the proper placement of all of those marks is complicated. Considering that Hebrew has the history it does, there are still many uses for fonts with Nikudot (vowels) and Taamim (cantillation marks). Recently, a new English edition of the Talmud has been started called the Koren Talmud Bavli, which is the first Talmud that I'm aware of that includes the full text of the Talmud with Nikudot in the standard Vilna page layout.

Like in English, there are also serif and san-serif fonts – and like English, sans-serif fonts are generally perceived as more modern. There are also monospaced fonts.

There are also handwriting fonts, and fonts in alternate Hebrew alphabet forms like Rashi Script (which was not used by Rashi, nor is it really script).

You might find handwriting fonts that include Nikudot, but I doubt you'd ever see one with Taamim since it's a printing mark, and not generally handwritten.

Warning on using old Hebrew fonts

One more point worth making is that fonts in Hebrew were previously available in many formats that didn't work well together. Windows had one kind, Macintosh had another, and each went through different versions that didn't work even on the same platform. There are different ways of displaying Hebrew on the Internet as well, called visual and logical Hebrew. Visual Hebrew is the older format, still used on many Israeli sites. Logical Hebrew is the now standard format, which should be used by everyone. Old fonts were also encoded in different character encodings (like ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-8-i, or Windows-1255) instead of the more modern Unicode encoding formats (like UTF-8). I bring all of this up to point out that if you are scouring the net looking for Hebrew fonts, be careful not to install old fonts which might not use the latest standards. Look for fonts that mention Unicode, UTF-8 or UTF-16. If you have old Hebrew fonts on your computer – consider replacing them if they use one of these older formats – because even if they work on your computer you probably won't be able to share whatever you create with anyone else.

Okay, that all said, where do you get Hebrew fonts?

If you have no Hebrew fonts and want to get a variety of fonts quickly, there are two sites which have collected free Hebrew fonts and bundled them together for download.

The first is the Open Siddur Project, which has a Font Pack which includes 8 fonts with Nikudot and Taamim, 14 fonts with Nikudot, and 46 other Hebrew fonts (without Nikudot or Taamim). Note that all of these fonts are free and in Unicode format so you know they will work on modern computers and are interchangeable with other people. There is a PDF available that shows samples of all the fonts in the font pack. A few examples from the PDF:

A selection of fonts from the Open Siddur Project's Font Pack

The second is from The Bold Edge | Jewish Design Central, which has a Free Hebrew Font Collection. I'm not sure how many fonts are in this collect or what kinds there are, but it includes 50 different font files (although some may be in the same font family). I've requested they put together a PDF showing which fonts are included, so hopefully they will add that eventually.

Next, there is the Culmus Project whose goal it is to provide free Hebrew fonts for use with Linux and Unix systems. Even so, these fonts should work on Windows and Mac as well. There are 14 font families includes currently (full list - lists Latin counterpart fonts when they exist). In addition to some standard fonts that are serif, sans-serif and monospaced, they also have display fonts (Fancy) and fonts that include all the Nikudot and Taamim (Taamey). The Taamey fonts are downloadable individually, but for the rest, you need to download a file from their download page (at the top you should see a link right next to the text "Looking for the latest version?" and that's the file you need.

One interesting font is called Alef. It's a new font designed from the ground up to be used for both Hebrew and English, and on the web. I don't see any reason it can't be used in print as well. It's a free font licensed under the SIL Open Font License (see below). It was designed by a group of Israeli designers including Mushon Zer-Aviv, Michal Sahar and HaTayas (Danny Meirav) who together make up the HaGilda font foundry, and Nir Yenni. One of it's intentions is to replace Arial as the default choice for Hebrew web sites.

Scholarly Fonts

Another source of fonts worth nothing are those developed by different organizations for use by biblical scholars.

The first is Ezra SIL which was developed by SIL International, a non-profit organization that carries out linguistics training and research globally, and is based on the font used in the BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) The font is Unicode and contains Nikudot and Taamim. There are actually two versions of the font, Ezra SIL and Ezra SIL SR, the difference being in the style of Taamim. The regular Ezra SIL follows the format of the BHS, while Ezra SIL SR follows a more traditional (in Jewish usage) rounded style of Taamim.

Ezra SIL fonts also support OpenType, and take advantage of some OpenType features like ligatures (aleph-lamed ligature) and positioning to position the Nikudot and Taamim better. To use OpenType features, you need a program that supports them (such as Word 2010 and later on Windows, Mellel on Mac, or Adobe InDesign). There is something else special about the Ezra SIL fonts – they are open source. They use a license called the SIL Open Font License. You can freely modify them and re-distribute your changes (however, you can't use the world Ezra or SIL in the new font). This has led to other Hebrew fonts based on Ezra SIL.

An example of new fonts that derive from Ezra SIL are the Shlomo Fonts. These fonts are modified from Ezra SIL SR, and change some of the letters to make them easier to read. Some letters in Hebrew are very similar (ד/ר and נ/ג for example). Shlomo Fonts try to modify these similar letters so they are more easily distinguishable at first glance. An example of the difference:

Note the difference between the second letter from right (ג) in each font

Another font designed for academics is Cardo, designed by David J. Perry. It also uses the SIL Open Font License, although it is not, as far as I can tell, derived from Ezra SIL (although possibly the Hebrew part is). The font also includes Greek and Latin characters. This font is still being refined, and new versions do occasionally come out (the last released version was in 2011). Cardo is also an OpenType font. Cardo actually comes with a 57-page PDF user manual, which is useful to read if you want to get the most out of the font. The manual is included in the font file download.

Another academic Hebrew font is SBL Hebrew. SBL Hebrew is also Unicode and supports OpenType features. It also has a PDF user manual, which is 23 pages long. It seems that to some extant SBL Hebrew is positioned as a newer more advanced version of Ezra SIL. Indeed, it seems Ezra SIL and SBL Hebrew share at least one creator in common, John Hudson. Unlike Ezra SIL and Cardo, SBL Hebrew is not licensed under an Open Font License, but is freely usable for non-commercial purposes. For commercial use, it can be licensed from Tiro Typeworks.

Commercial Fonts

Some commercial font foundries that sell Hebrew fonts include Ascender and Adobe (Adobe's Myriad Hebrew is particularly interesting because it is a large set of Hebrew fonts that match up with the much-used Myriad Pro font in English). There are several Israeli foundries like Masterfont (see them also on MyFonts.com or fonts.com in English interfaces), and FontBit (I can't find them on an English site). There is also a site called Webmaster.org.il (in Hebrew) that collects fonts from many smaller type designers around Israel and links to them.

There are several Jewish software companies (I mean Jewish in that their software is Jewish-oriented) that offer Hebrew fonts. Davka offers a set of 116 Unicode Hebrew fonts called Hebrew Font Portfolio. Unfortunately, none of them support Nikudot. Davka also offers a set of 30 fonts that do include Nikudot and Taamim called Hebrew Font Gallery Deluxe. I'm not clear if these are Unicode or not. Kabbalah Software offers K-Fonts Collections with various types of Hebrew fonts like Body Text, Calligraphy, Design, Headline, Invitation, etc. They are all Unicode, however for some reason they are listed as working on Windows only. Definitely do not buy their 'Classic Mac' fonts which are not unicode and will not work properly on modern systems. The site looks a little out-of-date, so I'm not sure if this is an active company.

Hebrew-ish

One last thing, there is a class of fonts which are not Hebrew at all, but for lack of a better term I'll call Hebrew-ish. They are English fonts that use Hebrew letters that are repositioned, flipped, warped, whatever to make them into English letters. In other words, you can type in English and get English words that look vaguely Hebrew. This is a gimmick popular for graphics for Jewish events, etc. I'm not recommending this, I just thought it was interesting that there is a whole class of fonts like this. There are many fonts like this (probably more than a dozen easy to find). Below you can see four of them – Jerusalem, Peace, Shalom, and Ben Zion:

"Hebrew-ish" Fonts

I hope this post was useful. If you have other good Hebrew font resources, please share them in the comments. I hope to follow this up soon with an explanation of how to get Hebrew working on your computer, including a neat trick for using Hebrew with Adobe InDesign without having to shell out the extra money for the Middle East edition.

International Jewish Genealogy Conference in Boston

2013-02-06T16:00:00.000+02:00

Once a year the the IAJGS partners with a local Jewish genealogy society to have the International Jewish Genealogy Conference. Last year it was in Paris. The year before it was in Washington, DC (where I spoke about Utilizing Belgian Archives for Jewish Research). This year, in partnership with the JGS of Greater Boston, it will be in my hometown, Boston.

The conference is taking place at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, and will be from August 4-9. This is same place that the conference was held the last time the conference was held in Boston back in 1996. The hotel is in an amazing location for those who have never been to Boston. There are tons of things to do and see within walking distance of the hotel, from the historic district in Boston (Freedom Trail), to the first public park in America (Boston Common), to the shopping district (Newbury Street).

There is a special conference rate at the hotel, available for up to two weeks before the conference in case you want to show up early and tour. To get the conference rate, you can book through the conference web site, until July 11.

For those who have never been to the annual conference before, IAJGS has put together a video on what you can expect:

If you've never been to one of the annual conferences, I highly recommend it. You're sure to learn a lot, meet lots of people, and make connections with people and groups that are researching the same places and families you are researching.

Registration is now open, with an early registration discount available through April 30, 2013. One other date worth mentioning is that all additions to the conference Family Finder must be submitted by July 1, 2013. The Family Finder is a directory of family names and ancestral towns that are being researched by attendees at the conference. The top five names and towns can be displayed on your conference badge, and up to eight names will be put into the Family Finder book that is distributed at the conference.

Useful Document for Researching Belgian Immigrants to US

2013-02-06T15:28:00.000+02:00

Antwerp Baggage Disinfection Room
"Everything for passengers is done free of charge in this building."

I recently discovered a document on the web site of the Felix Archives (the Antwerp city archives) called Emigration to America (this is a PDF). It seems to date back to 1999, but is still useful, especially considering no documents newer than 75 years ago are available anyways, and this document lists what documents exist in archives related to people living in Antwerp that may have emigrated to the US. The document was put together by the Archivist of the City of Antwerp. The availability dates mentioned are certainly out of date - for example it refers to certain collections available up to 1915, but those collections are now available to at least 1930 if not later. This is because as time goes on, more records are made publicly available.

Some of the interesting records mentioned in the document include registers from hotels and boarding houses, and emigration lists of third-class passengers from 1892 forward (second-class and first-class passengers were not recorded in these registers because American immigration restriction did not apply to them).

Some of the archives mentioned in the document include:

Antwerp City Archives (Stadsarchief Antwerpen)
Provincial Archives Antwerp (Provinciaal Archief Antwerpen)
National Archives Antwerp (Rijksarchief Antwerpen)
National Archives Beveren (Rijksarchief Beveren)
National Archives of Belgium, Brussels (Algemeen Rijksarchief Brussel)
Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brussels (Archief van het Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, Brussel)
National Archives, The Hague (Algemeen Rijksarchief Den Haag)
Rotterdam Municipal Archives (Gemeentearchief Rotterdam)

as well as these in the US:

National Archives and Records Administration
Ellis Island
National Archives Regional Center in New York
New York Municipal Archives

and these genealogy societies:

Flemish Association for Family Research
(Vlaamse Vereniging voor Familiekunde)
Netherlands Genealogical Association

Keep in mind that some of the documents mentioned as being in specific archives (in 1999) are now in different archives. In particular the central immigrant police files are now in the National Archives in Brussels.

Database of Polish Victims of the Nazis

2013-01-17T17:22:00.001+02:00

There's an interesting database listing Polish victims of the Nazis, organized by a group of Polish government and non-government organizations, and sponsored mainly by Polish media organizations.

The site is connected to three Polish organizations: the Institute of National Remembrance, the Foundation for Polish-German Reconciliation, and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. It is also sponsored by a number of Polish media organizations, including the Polish Press Agency and several Polish TV stations.

The site, Straty.pl, is unfortunately only available in Polish. Luckily, it's not too hard to use without knowledge of Polish, especially if you use Google Chrome and the built-in Translate feature. Even without Translate, you can get around the site. This is what the search page looks like:

Straty.pl Search Page

A quick translation of the fields:

Nazwisko (Surname)

Imię (Given name)

Imię ojca (Father's name)

Imię matki (Mother's name)

Miejsce urodzenia (Place of birth)

Data urodzenia (Day of birth)

Data śmierci (Day of death)

dzień (day)

miesiąc (month)

rok (year)

SZUKAJ is Search, and CZYSC is Clear.

You can search for a surname alone, but apparently not a town alone. If a surname has too many hits, it will force you to fill in additional search fields to help pare down the umber of results.

Victims listed in the database include Polish soldiers who were killed, prisoners of war, resistance fighters, concentration camp prisoners, those persecuted for reasons of race (aka Jews and Gypsies), those executed by the Nazis, those sentenced to death by German courts, slave laborers, displaced persons, children, civilian casualties (such as from bombing raids), etc.

This list is not exclusively, nor even predominately, Jewish. The site was not set up as a memorial to Jewish victims of the Nazis, but rather as a database of Polish victims of the Nazis, some of which happened to be Jewish. In fact, one looking at the site might wonder if Jewish names in the database are more of an afterthought than a primary section of the database.

There are many sources of data in the database, and each listing will tell you which source they came from, which can help you track down further information. Data sources I've noticed include:

International Tracing Service (Bad Arolsen) (http://www.its-arolsen.org/)

Jewish Historical Institute (http://www.jhi.pl/)

Polish Red Cross (http://www.pck.pl/)

State Archive in Krakow (http://www.ank.gov.pl/)

Obviously this database is not complete, and it's not going to be 100% accurate (and certainly not complete when it comes to Jewish names). It is still useful to supplement the other existing databases out there, and to give you some direction on possible research routes. For example, if you see records from the International Tracing Service, you can contact them to get more information on the person you find.

You can also contribute data to the database, although I have not tried to do this. They have a questionnaire that you can fill out on individuals, listing their name, parents' names, birth date and location, nationality, religion, place of residence before the war, education, occupation, political organization membership, social activities, etc. This is, unfortunately like the rest of the site, only available in Polish. I'm not sure what would happen if you filled out the form in English.

Of course, when searching for information on Jewish victims of the Nazis, the most important database is the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names. One important distinction between these databases, beside Straty.pl's focus on Poles and Yad Vashem's focus on Jews (with obvious overlap), is that Straty.pl's database contains victims who are not necessarily people who were killed. Prisoners of camps, etc. even if they were not murdered, are contained in their database.

For example, the database includes two people with the surname Trauring, the couple Ferdynand and Stefania Trauring, who I know to appear on Shindler's lists. They show up in the Straty.pl database as prisoners of the Gross-Rosen sub-camp in Brunnlitz, which happens to be where prisoners working in Oskar Schindler's factory were interned. Whether this couple survived the war or not, they are listed in the Straty.pl database as having been prisoners. That's an important distinction.

The launch of the all new All Israel Database

2012-12-23T13:49:00.000+02:00

It's hard to believe it's been less than a year since the launch of the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA). Launched in January of this year, IGRA has achieved much, including having their website genealogy.org.il being ranked one of the top 40 International Genealogy web sites only 4 months after launching. Last week they reached a new milestone with the launch of their all new search engine for the All Israel Database, IGRA's collection of 85 (and growing) Israel-related databases. I mentioned these databases about a month ago (when there were under 60 databases), and also mentioned a new search engine was in the works. Today that new search engine has launched:

IGRA's All Israel Database search engine

The search engine was designed in conjunction with Brooke Schreier Ganz, based on her LeafSeek genealogy search engine. Brooke's LeefSeek won 2nd place at the 2012 RootsTech Developer Challenge earlier this year, and IGRA worked with Brooke to enhance the engine to include such important features as the ability to search concurrently in both English and Hebrew. The search engine also supports phonetic searching, based on Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching (BMPM), allowing matches to be made to similar-sounding names, regardless of exact spelling.

The new search engine was developed through the hard work of IGRA volunteers, such as IGRA President Garri Regev, Database Coordinator Rose Feldman, Secretary Carol Hoffman, and website team-members Daniel Horowitz and myself, as well as many database volunteers who helped find, scan and transcribe the information in the 85 databases.

You may have seen an earlier version of Brooke's search engine in use on the Gesher Galicia All Galicia Database, but this new search engine that we've designed is capable of searching in both English and Hebrew simultaneously, which is a major breakthrough and of course necessary for our Israel-focused databases.

I hope everyone reading this will stop and take a minute to check out the new All Israel Database and try it out. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask via the contact form on the web site, or in the comments below.

Two years of Blood and Frogs

2012-11-25T20:09:00.002+02:00

Thank you to Geneabloggers for pointing out it's my second blogiversary today. Thank you also to Jim Sanders from Hidden Genealogy Nuggets for pointing out to me that they did so.

Blood and Frogs: Jewish Genealogy and More was started on November 25, 2010. It's been a fun time, and I hope people have enjoyed what I've written and done here. If you've liked a specific article or site feature, please let me know in the comments.

In the past year I've also been working on two other sites, which unfortunately has lowered my output on this blog. I hope the usefulness of these two sites makes up for my lowered output on this blog.

The first, now almost a year old, is genealogy.org.il, the web site of the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA). It has already been ranked one of the top 40 international (non-US) web sites by Family Tree Magazine. Watch genealogy.org.il in the coming weeks for the introduction of one of the most advanced record search engines of any genealogy site – to support the over 50 databases added to the site in the past year.

The second is not yet done, but will be launching soon. I will writing about it here when the new site is ready. It is a site built to focus research into the Jewish community of a single town, Kańczuga, Poland (from the former Austro-Hungarian district of Galicia). There have not been any Jews in Kańczuga since 1942 when the Nazis murdered the entire Jewish population there, but there are many descendants of Jewish people who lived there prior to the Holocaust, and this site will lead research into the community that existed there, and try to make connections between long-lost relatives whose families came from the town.

Thank you to all my readers, to my 2601 followers on Facebook, and to my 386 followers on Twitter.

FamilyTreeDNA Sale - through end of year

2012-11-13T01:13:00.001+02:00

FamilyTreeDNA is having another sale, this time through the end of December. Always a good time to get started with genetic genealogy, or to upgrade existing kits.

For more information on genetic genealogy, see my earlier posts Thinking about trying genetic genealogy? (ignore the old sale info) for a good overview, and Using DNA for Genealogy: Y-DNA and mtDNA for more specific information about Y-DNA and mtDNA testing.

You don't need any special codes for the sale, just go to FamilyTreeDNA and the prices should on the site.

New Kits	Current Group Price	SALE PRICE
Y-DNA 37	$149	$119
Y-DNA 67	$239	$199
mtFullSequence (FMS)	$299	$199
SuperDNA (Y-DNA 67 and mtFullSequence)	$518	$398
Family Finder	$289	$199
Family Finder + mtDNAPlus	$438	$318
Family Finder + mtFullSequence	$559	$398
Family Finder + Y-DNA 37	$438	$318
Comprehensive (FF + FMS + Y-67)	$797	$597
Upgrades	Current Group Price	SALE PRICE
Y-Refine 12-25 Marker	$49	$35
Y-Refine 12-37 Marker	$99	$69
Y-Refine 12-67 Marker	$189	$148
Y-Refine 25-37 Marker	$49	$35
Y-Refine 25-67 Marker	$148	$114
Y-Refine 37-67 Marker	$99	$79
Y-Refine 37-111 Marker	$228	$188
Y-Refine 67-111 Marker	$129	$109
mtDNAPlus	$149	$129
mtHVR1toMega	$269	$179
mtHVR2toMega	$239	$179
mtFullSequence Add-on	$289	$199

Database of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland

2012-11-12T16:00:00.000+02:00

An interesting project people with Jewish relatives that lived in Poland should be aware of is the Database of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland. Started as a database of the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, it has expanded to include cemeteries in the following cities and towns:

Brok
Błonie
Garwolin
Góra Kalwaria
Grodzisk Mazowiecki
Gąbin
Karczew
Korczyna
Mińsk Mazowiecki
Mszczonów
Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki
Okuniew
Otwock
Palmiry
Piaseczno
Prudnik
Pruszków
Przytyk
Płock
Radom
Siedlce
Sierpc
Sochaczew
Sopot
Strzegowo
Szydłowiec
Warszawa
Wieliczka
Wiskitki
Wysokie Mazowieckie
Wyszków
Węgrów
Łaskarzew
Łosice
Żelechów
Żyrardów

New cemeteries are added on a semi-regular basis. Most recently in September the databases for Sopot, Palmiry and Korczyna were added.

The database includes photographs of graves, although the photos are small and generally hard to read. In Warsaw alone, there are over 80,000 records.

If you have family that lived in any of the above cities and towns, I recommend doing a search and seeing what you find.

Of course, when looking for Jewish cemetery records for your research, always check out the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR) as well. JOWBR has records from many countries, including 69 cemeteries in Poland. In Warsaw, JOWBR lists 5 cemeteries with only 591 burials, however, so clearly if you want to do research for all Polish cemeteries you'll need to search both databases. JOWBR has 97,953 burials in Piotrkow that this site doesn't have. Hopefully they will share data in the future.

For more information on JOWBR and how to use it, see my blog post from the JewishGen Blog: JewishGen Basics: JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR).

A look at new Israeli databases

2012-11-12T15:30:00.000+02:00

As mentioned previously I have been involved in the past year in building a new genealogy website in Israel, genealogy.org.il, for the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA). The site has already been recognized as one of the top 40 international genealogy sites by Family Tree Magazine. One of the big issues I've had to deal with recently was upgrading the site to deal with high number of users. The original server the site was on was not able to handle the numbers of users we were getting, and we've now moved the site onto a much better server that can handle the site, and allows us to easily add capacity as needed (something impossible on our last server).

While I've been working on the nuts and bolts of the site, certainly the reason the site has been so successful is not my work, but more the work of the many IGRA volunteers, led by Rose Feldman, who have been adding dozens of new databases to the site. Their productivity is frankly mind-blowing. Since we launched in January of this year, Rose and her volunteer army have added nearly 50 new databases to the site, and more are coming on-line all the time. Think about that – they are adding more than a database each week. This is only the beginning.

Databases are categorized into three time periods:

Ottoman Administration (pre-1917)
British Administration (1917-1948)
Israeli Administration (1948-)

For those researching Jewish relatives, these databases can help pinpoint where a relative may have been living at specific points in time, and can lead you in new directions in your research. Some records include the person's exact address.

Databases include things like voter lists, lists of registered lawyers, accountants, doctors and nurses, candidates for various elections, phone books, burial lists, etc. There are over 60,000 records in the database now, and each record contains multiple pieces of information.

The current databases include:

Ottoman Administration (-1917)

List of Students & Staff of Gymnasia Haivrit, Yaffo 1908-9
Kollel List 1912 Safed (population register of families receiving funds “haluka“)
Safed Burials 1433-2000 from the new cemetery and part of the old cemetery

British Administration (1917-1948)

Births in African and Asian Protectorates for the Years 1916-1940
Drishat Shalom (Regards) 1919
UK Passport requests made in Safed 1921- 1951
Donors from UK for Safed Old Age Home run by Simcha Shulman 1924-1929
First National Conference of Edot Hamizrah in Eretz Israel – Protocol 1925
Nurse Certification 1923-1948
Earthquake Donations 1927
Voters’ List for Haifa 1928
Queries about Land Registries 1928-1929
Queries about compensation for loss of property during the disturbances of 1929
Voters’ List for Municipal Council Petah Tikva 1930
Members of Agricultural Organizations in Petah Tikvah 1931-1936
Voters’ List for Municipal Council Petah Tikva 1932
Voters’ List for Municipal Council Safed 1932
Galician Kollel Safed 1932
Voters’ List from Petah Tikva for the 18th Zionist Congress 1933
List of Sephardic Males in Safed 1934
Award of Silver Jubilee Medals 1935
Rehavia Address Book June 1935
Deaths in African and Asian Protectorates for the Years 1936-1940
Members of the National Youth Aliyah Committee of Hadassah 1937
Members of the Histadrut Hamorim (Teachers’ Council) 1939
List of Teachers of the Dept. of Education of Havaad HaLeumi 1940-41
Candidates for the 1941 Hahistadrut Haklalit
Candidates for the 1941 Va’adat Hapoalot (The Women’s Workers’ Council)
Hebrew Soldiers of the Yishuv who fell and perished in World War II 1940-1945
Refugees in Mauritius 1944-45
Swiss Aliyah Requests 1945
List of Donors for Repairs of Mikva in Safed 1947
Yahrzeit List from the Safed Old Age Home
List of people who have files in Beit HaMeiri in Safed

Israeli Administration (1948-)

List of registered doctors 1948-1957
List of Candidates for the First Knesset (C0nstituent Assembly) 1949
Candidates for the 1949 Hahistadrut Haklalit (General Council Elections)
Candidates for the 1949 Moatzet Hapoalot (The Women’s Workers’ Council)
Candidates for the 1949 Histadrut Hahaklaim (Farmers’ Council)
Candidates for the 1949 Histadrut Hapekidim (Clerks’ Council)
Candidates for the second Knesset elections 1951
Practical Nurses 1951-52
List of Candidates for the Third Knesset 1955
Authorized People to act as Accountants 5716 (1955-56)
List of Persons Authorized to Act as Lawyers in Civil Courts in 1956
Authorized People to act as Accountants 5717 (1956-57)
Candidates for the 1959 Histadrut Hapekidim (Clerks’ Council)
Candidates for the 1959 Histadrut Hahaklaim (Farmers’ Council)

Some databases that are coming online soon, include:

Rehavia Address Book June 1937
Candidates for the 1959 HaHistadrut Haklalit (General Council Elections)
Candidates for the 1959 Va’adat Hapoalot (The Women’s Workers’ Council)

The best news is that the launch of a new advanced search engine for these records is coming online very soon (as in days). Few genealogy societies, if any, will have the kind of advanced search capabilities we will have on the site. It's an exciting time for researching genealogy in Israel.

To stay up-to-date on the launch of the new search engine and on the ongoing launch of new databases, follow IGRA on their Facebook Page (facebook.com/israelgenealogy) or via Twitter (twitter.com/israelgenealogy). Of course, if you want to comment on the web site and where it can be improved, you can always comment here and I'll see what I can do.

Friends from Antwerp - and is that a famous Yiddish poet?

2012-09-16T15:50:00.001+03:00

My grandfather was born in Vienna, Austria during World War I. His family had fled their homes in Galicia, then a region of Austria, and fled to the capital city to avoid the invading Russian army. His brothers, one born before him in 1911, and one after him in 1921, were both born in the Galician town of Rzeszow, known in Yiddish as Reisha.

In 1927 the family moved to Antwerp, Belgium, seeking a better life and perhaps more stable situation. As I've written about before, Antwerp and Belgium in general received many many Jewish immigrants during the interwar years, among them my family (my grandfather's future wife also made her way around the same time to Antwerp from Rzeszow).

In 1927 my grandfather was of course 12 years old, and he lived in Antwerp until 1940, when he was 25. Those were, no doubt, formative years for him. I know many stories about his time there, and have found documents hinting at others in the Police des Étrangers files I've found. I know just a couple of years after he arrived, after his father died, he ran a watch shop near the docks of the Antwerp port, helping support his family even though he was only 14 at the time. I know he used his US citizenship to travel to Nazi Germany in the 1930s and helped younger cousins get out of the country, as the Germans still respected a US passport (they probably hoped the US would side with them in the upcoming war). One thing I don't really know about, however, is what kind of social life he had. Some years ago he told me he bumped into an elementary school classmate of his from Belgium in New York, and he had recognized my grandfather even all those years later. He later sent my grandfather a class photo showing both of them. When researching family we sometimes forget that our relatives spent much of their time, especially when they were teenagers and young adults, with their friends instead of their family. It's part of what defined them and made them who they were.

In this light, some recent photographs I discovered at my grandfather's apartment are particularly interesting. I have no idea who anyone in the photos are other than my grandfather. If you had relatives born during WWI and who lived in Antwerp in the 1930s, perhaps they're among the people in these photos.

My grandfather is sitting on the bottom right

My grandfather in the middle with the white shirt

My grandfather isn't in this photo, but it was together with the others

My grandfather is on the right. The man on the left was his best friend.

Is this Baden in Germany? or is that booth to buy a ticket? My grandfather in on the left.

My grandfather sitting in the front

Know anyone in these photos?

Concerning the last photo, it raises an interesting question. Do you you think the man on the top right looks like Itzik Manger, the famous Yiddish poet? Here's a side by side, showing a close-up of the above person, and a photo of Itzik Manger from the YIVO Encyclopedia:

Right, Itzik Manger. Left, Maybe Manger?

I'm not an expert on Yiddish poets, and would never have thought of it, except in researching a distant cousin Golda I discovered she had once been married to (and divorced from) this famous poet from Romania. I never knew if this cousin even knew my grandfather, but if this Itzik Manger, perhaps this is evidence. Therefore is it possible that the woman he's got his arm on is Golda, my grandfather's cousin? or one of the other women in the photo? Here's a picture of Golda:

Golda, my grandfather's second cousin once-removed

So what do you think? Is that Itzik Manger? Is that my grandfather's cousin with him on the beach, possibly in Knokke, a favorite vacation spot? The picture of Golda is obviously of an older woman than in the photo on the beach, but that makes sense sine the photo of Golda was taken in 1939, when she was 35 (she was born in 1904). In the beach photo my grandfather looks like a teenager, so it could have been 1930 or shortly thereafter.

Itzik Manger survived the war and eventually moved to Israel. My grandfather's cousin, however, likely died during the war, although I've found no direct evidence of that. All I know is she shows up in the first register of Jews in Belgium in 1940 after the Germans invaded, but not in the later registration done in 1942. She doesn't show up in deportation lists, which recorded all those deported from Belgium to Auschwitz, so she either escaped Belgium or was killed. If she escaped, perhaps she changed her name and the trail was lost, or perhaps she escaped from Belgium only to be killed later in the war – certainly a possibility.

L'Shana Tova (from 1948)

2012-09-16T15:30:00.000+03:00

As Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish new year) begins tonight, I wanted to take this opportunity to wish all my readers a happy and healthy new year, or more traditionally L'Shana Tova (for a good year).

I also wanted to share a great new years card I found when scanning a cousin's photographs. The card was sent from a cousin who lived in Israel to a cousin who lived in Europe. The card was sent in 1948. Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, and Rosh Hashanah that year started the evening of October 3. This card, which depicts the moment of the Declaration of Independence with David Ben Gurion in the middle (under the portrait of Theodor Herzl), was probably a popular card that year.

Rosh Hashanah card from Israel in 1948

So to everyone who reads this blog, happy new year from Israel 64 years later.