There's a National Subway Day, You Say?

Novoslobodskaya Station, Russian Metro
by Alex 'Florstein' Fedorov, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46392339

I was talking with a friend a couple of months ago and we started comparing notes on which subway systems we had each traveled on.  Somehow my mind went from that to thinking that could be a fun subject to blog about, then to wondering whether there was any sort of official "national subway day."  I Googled it and found that yes, indeed, someone had declared a National Subway Day on November 3, 2015.  That also seems to have been the only day it was celebrated, but I took it as an excuse to blog on the topic anyway.

I'm not sure that subways are my favorite form of transportation, but I don't mind using them, and I've been on several.  In no particular order:

Moscow, Russia Metro, 1982:  At the time I was there, it was still the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, one constituent member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  And the Metro (pronounced mye-tro) was beautiful.  Each station was a work of art, and we were told that was the intention.  I don't recall that it ran late.  One incident that happened to me when using the system was when a friend and I were leaving the station and standing on the escalator as it gently took us back to fresh air.  For some reason I had my friend's passport in my hand and was looking at it in detail, when one of the people ahead of us, who appeared to have been drinking heavily, suddenly stumbled backward and fell onto me.  Not only did I catch him and not fall myself, I didn't even drop the passport.  But my friend and I took a few steps backward, just in case it should happen again (it didn't).

Paris, France Métro, 1983:  I don't remember as much detail about the Métro in Paris, probably because whlie I was there I was dead broke and walked almost everywhere rather than pay for transportation.  But I did ride it a couple of times.  I don't recall that it was awful or great, just kind of there.

London, England Underground, 1996:  The Tube, as it is commonly called, has a reputation all its own.  People ride it just to say they've done so.  I rode it to get from one point to another, but I did notice the signs saying, "Mind the Gap," which are well known.  When I was going from the Prime Meridian to the Tower of London, I should have taken the Tube, but I didn't realize how far I was going to have to walk.  By the time I got to the Tower, it was closing for the day, and all I did was walk around it.  So that was one time I really blew it by not taking the subway.

New York City Subway, 1997 and 2005:  Another transportation system famous in its own way, the New York City Subway has the most stations and is one of the busiest and longest in the world.  In 2005 I wanted to visit a cousin who lived in the heart of Manhattan, and she convinced me not to even think of driving but to take the subway instead.  So I did.  It was a nice trip there and back.  I also took it once with my sister when I was visiting her in New Jersey, because she found out I had never been on it.  So we rode into The City and walked around for a while.  We somehow fortuitously ended up on 57th Avenue and I was able to show her around The Compleat Strategist, an adventure games store that carried products from the company I was working for at the time (this was in 1997).  She is still the only family member who actually got excited to see my name in print, jumping up and down in the store.

Washington, D.C. Metro, 2000 and 2011:  The outstanding feature of the Metro in DC is how huge the tunnels are.  They are absolutely cavernous.  I was told that the reason for their ridiculous size is that they're supposed to be emergency shelters for people if something really horrible happens outside.  But that doesn't make sense, unless the people are supposed to stand on each others' shoulders, because most of the space is up.  So I suspect the real reason is something else entirely.  But it's a nice system, and I definitely enjoyed riding it.

Montreal, Quebec Metro, about 1999:  I traveled to Montreal once for work, and while there I learned about the underground transportation systems.  Not only is there a subway, but there are underground walkways between buildings so that people can move around in the dead of winter.  I thought that was pretty smart of them.  I don't remember anything in particular about the Metro, so it couldn't have been bad.

Boston, Massachusetts Subway, 1991, 1992, 1993:  The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) looks and feels ancient, or at least it did when I was using it.  I used to go to Boston at least once a year and took the subway a lot.  The cars always felt rickety, and when they careened around curves you worried whether you were going to go airborne.  The cars seem to just barely fit in the tunnels.  I heard rumors (never substantiated) that some people who were working had been crushed.  Not a friendly system.  I have one friend who knew the system inside out, backward and forward, to the extent that he could figure out in his head that if we went two stops past where we wanted and then came back one stop, we could walk far fewer stairs to get to the street.  He was amazing.

San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit:  The subway system with which I am most familiar is BART (I love acronyms!).  Not only did I live in the Bay Area for 28 years, but I worked as a train operator at BART.  I have to admit, I loved riding BART around, especially in San Francisco, because I hated driving in San Francisco.  BART is a great system.  I even wrote two blog posts about using BART to get to genealogically important research sites (in San Francisco and in the East Bay)!

So that comes to eight systems.  Hmm, I thought it was more than that.  I guess I need to get out there and ride a few more!

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Late Addition, December 31, 2024

San Francisco Muni Metro:  For some reason, it recently occurred to me that I had ridden not only BART in San Francisco, but also San Francisco's Muni Metro, the light rail vehicle system that is partly a subway and partly above ground.  So in the interest of completeness, I'm adding it now.  The main reason I used the system was when Sutro Library, the genealogy-focused branch of the California State Library system, was moved from a location to which you almost had to drive to two floors in the CSU San Francisco library, which was reachable by, you guessed it, Muni Metro.  And as I mentioned above when writing about BART, I hated driving in San Francisco, so given an option to avoid that, I very quickly did so.  I was never a fan of Muni buses, but I liked the rail system.  I probably took it about half a dozen times out to Sutro.  And it is a totally different system from BART, so that brings my total to nine.

IAJGS Conference - Days 2 and 3

I was caught in a bit of a quandary yesterday.  I wanted to post about both my Monday at the IAJGS conference and finish my review of the Christina Applegate episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, but I had two problems.  I really didn't think I was going to be able to stay awake long enough to do both, and I didn't have the most informative day at the conference, so I wasn't sure how much I could say that was positive.  I settled for only finishing the WDYTYA post and hoped that Tuesday would be a better day at the conference.  Today was a vast improvement, so I guess I made the right decision.

The best session I attended Monday was learning about the resources at the City of Boston Archives.  Marta Crilly, an archivist there, gave an outstanding, well organized presentation.  The archives has a fantastic collection of resources for Boston research -- records of taxes, voter registrations, the almshouse, a correctional institution, children's institutions, the lunatic hospital, business registration certificates (including ones for married women; they had to register their businesses separately to protect their husbands' assets if the business went bankrupt), school transcripts and publications, teacher lists, city employees, maps, and photos.  A lot of the photographs have been digitized and are online, but most records are available only at the archives.  Luckily, you don't have to go in person; they have a friendly and knowledgeable staff who can help people who are not local.  I didn't bring information about my half-sister's family (who lived in Boston for several years) with me to the conference, but when I return home I think I'll have to take a look and see what kinds of questions the archives can help me with.

Another useful session was on postwar resources at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Reference librarian Megan Lewis gave an overview of the resources available, which include photographs, oral histories, films, and transcripts.  The museum has merged what once were separate catalogs for each collection into a unified catalog that covers most of the museum's holdings.  There is also a search page for part of the ITS inventory.  The other good part of the day was a roundtable session that I coordinated for Jewish genealogical society newsletter/journal editors.  We had some productive discussions about what different societies are publishing in journals and newsletters, and how there is now much more of an intersection between those publications and digital communications.

The disappointing part of the day was that the three sessions I attended that were focused on my own personal family research, in Latvia and Belarus, were all duds.  The descriptions in the program didn't really match what the presenters talked about, and I took away very, very little useful information.  I felt that half my day was wasted.

Board of Special Inquiry transcript

On the positive side, Tuesday I learned quite a bit.  The best session was on Jewish family history research in Australia.  Since there are few Jewish-specific archival collections, the talk covered several general resources as well.  Robyn Dryen of the Australian Jewish Genealogical Society, the presenter, knew her material well.  The fact that much of the information is online was nice to learn.  And I can try to find records from when my family lived Australia in the early 1970's!  I heard Genie Milgrom talk about her research into her family's converso roots in Inquisition Spain.  She did deep research and made some incredible discoveries about her family and the town of Fermoselle, where they were from.  She has now traced her female ancestral line back 22 generations.  Gladys Friedman Paulin followed up her Sunday talk about U.S. ports of arrival with a presentation on the Immigration Service Board of Special Inquiry, which could decide whether a potential immigrant was allowed to remain in the U.S. or be deported.  Even though the process was highly political and there was almost no training for the men conducting the inquiries, about 98% of immigrants were eventually allowed into the country.  Unfortunately, the only ports for which board records still exist are New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, but that is better than nothing.  And Israel Pickholtz gave a very entertaining presentation about recent DNA testing he has encouraged several family members to do in conjunction with his Pikholz family research.  He explained several possible family connections he had hypothesized and was hoping to confirm with the testing.  As far as I could tell, so far none of the results they got turned out as expected, but he and his cousin Jacob Laor are still hopeful some useful information will come out of it.

The other really good part of the day was that my new presentation about online Jewish historical newspapers was very well received.  The room was packed to overflowing (okay, it was a really small room; apparently the programming committee didn't think the session would attract many people).  Later in the afternoon I had several people who were at the talk come up and tell me they thought it was a great talk and that they found the information very useful.  And someone from a Florida genealogical society said she wants to have her group bring me out there to give a presentation!

I was particularly proud, because this was the first time a family member was able to come to one of my talks.  My cousin Janis wasn't able to come after all, but her husband George took some time off from work to come and listen to me.  Plus my cousin Yoni volunteered to help look over the PowerPoint file ahead of time to make sure I didn't have any grammatical errors in the slides; he decided it looked good.  He did admit, however, that he had been hoping to find a mistake just so he could correct me.

And I just looked at the clock and noticed it's 1:30 a.m.!  I better get to bed; the first session starts at 8:15 ....

IAJGS Conference, Boston - Day 1

Today was the first day of the 2013 IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy.  I haven't been to Boston in about seven years, and it's a great city, so just being here is part of the fun.  I've even started to remember my way around.  I've already seen many people I know -- Schelly Dardashti, Banai Lynn Feldstein, Ava Cohn, Kahlile Mehr, Gary Mokotoff, Eileen Polakoff -- including several from the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogy Society at home -- Rosanne Leeson, Lynn Rhodes, Jeff Lewy, Sita Likuski, Judy Baston, Vivian Kahn (definitely more of us than I thought were coming!).  And that is part of what makes these conferences enjoyable -- networking and seeing people in person.

The main reason to come, though, really is the opportunity to attend lots of lectures and soak up information.  I got a good start on that today.  A couple of the sessions I attended were kind of duds, where the handout told you pretty much everything that the speaker had to say, but at most of them I came away with new knowledge.  Ava Cohn, AKA Sherlock Cohn, talked about analyzing photographs.  She emphasized thinking about the four people involved in a photo (the photographer, the subject, the person who kept the photo, and the genealogist who is mining it for clues) and looking at details in the photo that can help you pinpoint a time, place, or other tidbit that could open the door to new revelations.  Gladys Friedman Paulin discussed U.S. ports of entry other than Ellis Island.  Some of the important points were what made a good port of entry, which ports were officially recognized by the immigration service, the primary ethnic groups that came through several ports and what factors contributed to that, and which ports have surviving records other than federal ones.  And I finally got to hear Judy Baston's talk about using the American Jewish Yearbook for genealogical research.  Not only did the yearbooks include officers of local organizations such as landsmanshaftn, charitable organizations, and educational societies; obituaries and necrologies; lists of subscribers; Jewish members of the armed forces; international information; and more, all of the yearbooks have been digitzed and are online and freely available.

The highlight of the day was the keynote speech by Aaron Lansky, the founder of the Yiddish Book Center.  I'm sure many of the stories he told are in his book Outwitting History (which I forgot to bring my copy to have him sign!), but he is an entertaining speaker and great storyteller. Besides hearing about the amazing story of the Yiddish Book Center and all the books that have been saved, some of the most fascinating information was about what more is expected to come in the future.  Around 11,000 of the books have been digitized and are available online.  Yiddish voice recordings that were recovered from the Jewish Public Library in Montreal are also being digitized and placed online.  Thanks to a "computational linguist" from the Pyrenees (who is really a rocket scientist), it is likely that soon OCR scanning of Yiddish will be possible.  And Lansky said that within ten years there should be comparable "scanning" of audio files, which will create searchable transcripts.  And to think that not so long ago people were saying that Yiddish was a dead language ....

I'm looking forward to another interesting day tomorrow, unfortunately starting at 8:15 in the morning!  But sleep is overrated, right?