IAJGS Conference, Days 5 and 6 and Going Home

The IAJGS conference runs longer than most genealogy conferences, so as you get toward the end you might not have quite as much energy as at the beginning.  On Thursday morning, the fifth day, I wanted to go to the Leadership Series session on membership database solutions, as the topic has come up at our board meetings for the past couple of years.  I really did.  But it was at 7:00 a.m., and I was up until 6:00 a.m. working on that day's presentation.

See, on Wednesday night I was going over the PowerPoint file for my Thursday talk, and then the computer rebelled.  It said it couldn't save the file.  I tried save as.  I tried again to save it directly.  The computer was adamant — nope, not happening; sorry, unable to comply.  After trying everything in my rather limited arsenal, I finally had to concede defeat.  And then I had to reconstruct the presentation from scratch, without the benefit of the graphics that were on my home computer.  I tried to remember what the original slides had said and made do with what I could download from Ancestry and other sites.  Around 6:00 I was too bleary-eyed to focus, so I gave up and fell asleep.

I knew I wouldn't make it to the database session (I hope they make the information available to societies later), and being awake in time for the 8:15 talk about Jewish settlement in the Caribbean didn't sound realistic, but I thought I had a chance of going to the Professional Genealogists Birds of a Feather get-together at 9:45.  I slept through my alarm.  So much for that idea.

I finally did wake up, in time to go to Dana Cohen Sprott's session on the "Lost Jews of St. Maarten."  She first gave a broad overview of Jewish settlement on several Caribbean islands (after pointing out multiple times that the correct pronunciation has the emphasis on the third, not the second, syllable) and then focused a little more on St. Maarten (where she lives) and on the "dead man found behind the Radio Shack."  Apparently a body was discovered behind what was at the time a Radio Shack but what previously was a Jewish burial ground (see page 10 of the "WeekEnder" section of the October 30, 2010 issue of The Daily Herald for more details).  Dana has been researching the Jewish presence in the Caribbean for several years.  It was an entertaining and informative talk.

For lunch Mark Fearer and I had a very small ProGen get-together (if any other ProGen alumni were at the conference, they didn't own up to it).  We had a lively discussion covering many professional genealogy topics, which helped make up for the fact that I missed the BoF meeting.

The first session of the afternoon was the reconstructed presentation, which was about my research on two Colonial Jews, Daniel Joseph of Virginia and Israel Joseph of South Carolina (the first Colonial research I ever did!).  I told everyone up front what had happened to the file and apologized for the situation, then gamely went on to give the talk.  Lucky for me, everyone was very understanding.  My most recent research results (learned only a couple of weeks before the conference) actually ended up running contrary to my original hypothesis, so I opened it up to suggestions from the audience on possible future avenues to pursue.  I received some very helpful ideas I'll be looking at, including checking with the American Jewish Archives to see if there might be original research notes from when Rabbi Malcolm Stern wrote his book on First American Jewish Families.

Since Thursday was the last day the ProQuest databases would be available, I bypassed the rest of the afternoon sessions and spent the next two hours looking for articles about family members in newspapers.  I was particularly successful with Schumeister cousins appearing in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune collection.  I have about 40 articles with lots of information on those relatives.  And I have copies of my cousin's and my sister-in-law's doctoral dissertations thanks to ProQuest!

I rounded out the afternoon with a mentor session that someone had even signed up for ahead of time.  The same woman who solved a brick wall because of information in my Sunday talk came back for more.  She's trying to determine where an ancestor came from.  I gave her lots of homework and resources to check out.  After that I hung around to enjoy the prebanquet reception (all vegetarian, but probably not kosher) and socialized with several friends before heading back to my room to collapse.

Friday is always the "afterthought" day of the conference.  It's only half a day, and a lot of attendees leave late Thursday or early Friday.  Given that, I was pleasantly surprised to see a good turnout for my 8:15 talk (someone really had it in for me at this conference with early time slots), which was on immigration and naturalization records.  Even the illustrious Hal Bookbinder was there (I think he enjoyed it).  The bad news was that the air conditioning appeared to be off, either because the conference organizers had decided to economize or the hotel saw fit to cut it off early.  I was not amused.

The same a/c problem reared its ugly head when I tried to enjoy Mark Fearer's talk on Jewish immigration to Texas.  While I didn't have a choice about staying in the room for my own talk, I did for Mark's, and sadly I had to abandon it in favor of the resource room, where the air condioning was still going strong.  Since I was there, I took advantage of the databases still available and focused on JewishData.com.  I found photographs of several tombstones for my friend's family.  I also tried to search on the Israel Genealogy Research Association site, but the entire site was down, which was very disappointing.

And that was it!  Poof, the conference was over!  Then it was just a matter of checking out of the hotel, waiting for the airport shuttle, and flying home.  As usual, overall it was a good conference, and I learned lots of new things.  There are always some duds, but they were definitely outweighed by the many informative talks, and it was great to see so many of my genealogy friends and colleagues in person.  Plus I had the opportunity to participate in the first annual membership recruitment drive of the Antarctica Jewish Genealogical Society!  I'm glad I was able to attend this year.  I wish I could go to Warsaw in 2018, but I suspect that won't be practical for me, so I'll focus on Cleveland in 2019 instead.

Representatives of the Antarctica Jewish Genealogical Society,
just before the keynote presentation on Sunday, July 23, 2017

My commentary on days 1 and 2 of the conference is here, and that for days 3 and 4 is here.

IAJGS Conference, Days 3 and 4

It really is amazing how much you can cram into a conference schedule when you try.  Between speaker sessions, volunteer activities, and networking, I've been going steadily all day long every day.  But oh!, the things I'm learning!

Tuesday began with a Jewish bloggers brown bag breakfast.  It's a pleasure to meet people whose words you read in cyberspace and put faces to names.  I had a lovely time chatting with Lara Diamond (Lara's Jewnealogy), Emily Garber ([going] The Extra Yad), Israel Pickholtz (All My Foreparents), Ann Rabinowitz (JewishGen blog), Mary-Jane Roth (Memory Keeper's Notebook), Marian Wood (Climbing My Family Tree), and Barbara Zabitz (blog in progress).  Then it was off to learn more!

Well, it should have been.  In the first session I headed to, the speaker kept his head down and read directly from prepared notes, without looking up at the audience.  He also wasn't making any great revelations, so I quickly moved on and instead spent some research time in the resource room.  The second session was much better, though.  Alexander Beider spoke about the origins of Jews from North Africa.  His discussion covered the same types of linguistic and naming clues that he discussed in Monday evening's presentation, indicating origins from multiple locations in Europe and elsewhere.

From there I gave my third presentation of the conference, on where to find and how to access online Jewish historical newspapers.  I was really happy to let people know that there are now two free online OCR programs for Yiddish and that Google Translate handles Yiddish.  That makes a lot more historical Jewish newspapers much more accessible than they used to be.

On Tuesday IAJGS held a Tech Lunch, where people with technical and computer skills are asked to volunteer their skills in helping IAJGS.  It sounds as though there are plans for a Web site redesign and a desire to offer assistance to societies.  Something was said about encouraging everyone to be on Facebook also, but I still don't think that's a substitute for a good Web site.  Facebook is great for short term, but legacy material is lost.

The afternoon brought some interesting subjects.  Nicolas Coiffait has been researching the soldiers in Napoléon's armies and has identified more than 2,000 men he believes are Jewish.  He is continuing the research and trying to learn more about each man.  Eugenio Alonso spoke on how to research conversos and Anusim in the Caribbean by using documents from the National Historical Archive of Spain, many of which are available online for free.  He showed several examples that identified individuals as "judaizing", meaning that they were following Jewish practices.  He pointed out that he had even found two documents that specified the judaizers were black.  And that was the end of the day for me, because I had to head back to my room to reconstruct a presentation for later in the week (more on that in my next post).

On Wednesday I finally had the opportunity to "sleep in":  My first session didn't begin until 8:15!  (Hooray!)  And I had to be there, because I was the one speaking, on the subject of copyright and how it affects genealogy.  Unfortunately, far too many genealogists are still woefully undereducated on this subject, with significant numbers believing that if it's online it's ok to copy.  It was gratifying to have one person in the audience who understood already, but it was also good that people asked lots of questions, because that indicated they wanted to learn what they should be doing.  I'm very happy that the program committee accepted that talk for the conference.

We had a small but dedicated number who came to the JGS Newsletter Editors meeting.  Five people, including me, were there, representing four society publications.  Mostly it was another opportunity for networking, but we also did some brainstorming.  It's interesting that one group still has only a print publication, with no electronic version.

A session on the Yad Vashem Web site was supposed to show advanced ways to use other record sets besides the central database.  It didn't really deliver, but as a sample photograph the speaker used a wedding photo that accompanied a recent article in ZichronNote.  The photo is notable because even though it was for a wedding, the bride and groom, and in fact the entire wedding party, were wearing the cloth yellow Stars of David mandated by the German government.  Surprisingly, the speaker did not mention that.

Squeezed in between the end of the third morning session and the beginning of the group lunches, most of the SFBAJGS members here met for a quick photo to celebrate being at the conference.  While we had almost 50 members last year at the Seattle conference, this year we are a more modest thirteen, ten of whom came for the photo.  That isn't too bad!

San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society members in Florida

After lunch, my afternoon was spent at the IAJGS Annual Meeting.  I was the representative for my society this year, as the president was at home in California.  I've never been to the meeting before, so I wasn't sure what to expect.  I should have known — it was a standard bureaucratic meeting, including lots of reports, delays, and minor tiffs.  We did accomplish what we needed to, voting on bylaws and the next set of officers, and only ran about 15 minutes overtime.  It's unlikely that I'll be attending next year's conference in Warsaw, so someone else will have the pleasure of attending the meeting.

My day ended with one of the best parts of family history:  actually getting together with family.  I don't come out to the east coast often, so I always try to see family when I'm here.  I have cousins who live relatively nearby (75 miles away), in Daytona.  They drove out to the hotel, and we had a nice dinner together.  I even updated them on the latest research I'm doing on our grandfather.  They're as interested as I am in finding out who his biological father was.

My commentary on days 1 and 2 of the conference is here, and that for days 5 and 6 is here.

A Recap of Tony Burroughs for the AAGSNC Meeting

At today's meeting of the African American Genealogical Society of Northern California, those members who had presented talks the previous Saturday at the Sacramento African American Family History Seminar were invited to give short synopses of those talks.  My talk had been on how valuable of a resource the Freedmen's Bureau records are in black family history research, particularly in identifying the last slave owner before Emancipation.  But I also gave that talk to AAGSNC last November, so I didn't think everyone wanted to hear it again so soon.  Instead, I chose to give a recap of the keynote from the seminar, which was delivered by well known genealogist and author Tony Burroughs.  Mr. Burroughs' points were well taken, and I think they bear repeating.

The title of the keynote was "The Next Phase of African American Genealogy."  Burroughs began by explaining the six phases we have already been working through:

• oral history:  Collect stories from family members and record that information to preserve it and to share it with future generations.

• research family history to 1870:  To research family members who were enslaved, it is necessary to find them in 1870, almost always the first census in which former slaves were enumerated by name.  Their locations in 1870 become the springboard to search for them in pre-Emancipation records.

• identify the last slave owner:  Identifying the last slave owner is critical, because then you know where you should look for records that mention the family member by name.

• research the slave owner:  Researching the slave owner and his family helps place your ancestor in time.  You want to learn when your ancestor became associated with the owner, what happened to him, where he was before that, and whatever else you can find.  You may be able to identify family units.  Researching slavery can sometimes help you undertand why an owner might have moved with his slaves, might have hired his slaves out, why one owner treated his slaves differently than another owner did, and more.  Gaining a better understanding of the institution helps you understand how all the players acted in it.

• back to Africa:  Not everyone will be able to accomplish this, but with more original manifests of slave cargoes being discovered and publicized, some people have been able to identity their ancestors on specific manifests and definitively learn their original names and from where they came in Africa.

from the Library of Congress

• research the Caribbean:  More than 90% of Africans kidnapped for the slave trade went to the Caribbean and South America.  Many/most of the slaves who came into North America came here from the Caribbean, not directly from Africa.  Understanding how the slave trade and migration routes worked will help inform your research.

Before Burroughs moved on to the next phase, he talked a little about what he says is not research, and I have to say I agreed with every point.  He finds that too many people are not actually doing research nowadays:  They're just following twitching little leaves and hints on large Web sites and taking them at their word.  People are relying too heavily on online information only and don't look offline in archives and other repositories.  Others are taking DNA tests and letting the results define who they are related to, even if they can't tell you what the relationship is.  According to Burroughs, if you don't analyze the documents you find and take the time to understand what those documents are saying about your ancestors, you aren't doing research.  If you have a DNA "cousin" but don't know how you're related, that doesn't count as research either.  He even mentioned "Skip" Gates — apparently DNA tests show they're related, somehow, but they don't know what the connection is.  So is that research?  A resounding no!

I found his comments about the DNA companies to be spot on.  He pointed out that the information we receive from those companies when we have them test our DNA is not peer reviewed, so nobody but the people selling it to us vouches for it.  (How much do you trust salesmen?)  He explained that only population geneticists are doing research that is actually valid in describing how ethnic groups are related.  And he didn't make exceptions for any of the consumer DNA companies, not even African Ancestry, the one often touted as being the only "reliable" one for people with ancestry going back to Africa.  His commentary resonated with me and made me think yet again of Judy Russell's use of the phrase "cocktail party conversation" as the best description for the autosomal results these companies send us.

So what is the next phase?  The big one is to collaborate with historians.  People did not act in vacuums.  They were part of what was going on around them.  We need to gain a better understanding of the historical circumstances and situations that occurred during our ancestors' lives in order to understand how our ancestors fit into their times, and also to help us determine what the records from those times can tell us about our ancestors.  Studying history can also help us make better decisions on what we can take as "next steps" and where we might be able to find more information.

As a corollary to working with historians, his second comment was that we need to study slavery more, and in particular to study slavery before starting to research ancestors who were enslaved.  We really need to understand this institution, how it worked differently in different areas, how people worked with and against it.  Understanding why actions were taken again helps us make better decisions when directing our research efforts.

Burroughs then told us the records he has on his wish list to be digitized.  Though he had earlier commented that too many people rely on finding everything online, even he had to admit that having information more easily available to more people can improve research.  The list was:
• historical black newspapers (hooray for newspapers!)
• plantation records
• slave trader records
• Caribbean migration records
• Cuban archival records

All of these records tend to be difficult to find and use.  Having them digitized would logically help many, many people make serious advances with their research.  But on a practical level, I suspect it will be a long time before any of them are digitized on any significant level.

As he was wrapping up his talk, Burroughs made a couple of interesting observations.  The first was the benefit of doing real research versus relying on oral history, which many people do when building their family trees.  I have seen people discount historical records because they didn't agree with what Grandma had said.  He talked about research conducted on traditional African griots, the keepers of oral history for many tribes.  After some quantitative study, it was learned that the best trained griots, those who were the best at their work, could reliably remember information going back 125 years.  For Americans with slave ancestry, 125 years does not even take you back to Emancipation.  So relying strictly on the oral history in your family can't get you all the answers you want.

The other interesting tidbit was almost a throw-away right before the end of the talk.  Burroughs said that in all the research he has conducted, he has found that only about 15% of former slaves took their former owners' surnames.  Only 15%!  So if you are trying to find the former slave owner by looking for everyone in the county with the same last name as your ancestor, 85% of the time you will not be successful.  I don't like those odds myself.

Keep in mind, these are my take-aways from Burroughs' talk.  I admit that in my case he was preaching to the choir, because I agreed with almost all the points he made.  But I found the talk educational and inspiring, and I know I'll keep it in mind during my research in the future.