Top 10 Posts of 2024

I'm only a little late figuring this out.  We're just barely past halfway through January.  Now, if it were all the way at the end of January, that would really have been dragging my feet.  The big news is that this is the first time I've posted my Top 10 since the 2020 listing.  I guess I really did have a few rough years in there.

So, without further ado, what were the ten most popular topics (by readership) on my blog this past year?

Starting the list at #10 was the Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge to use FamilySearch Full-Text Search.  My searches didn't go well, but my frustrations apparently engaged people.

#9 was another Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post, this time about the best newspaper article I had found for my family history.  One of the articles had a photo of me!

Coming in at #8 is one more Saturday Night Genealogy Fun story (are we picking up on a theme here?), with five "different" facts about family members.  This gave me an opportunity to mention that my maternal grandfather supposedly played baseball with Jackie Robinson.

Who could have guessed that a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post would be #7?  This one asked us to write about a day we had fun with genealogy, and it definitely was fun the day I found my great-great-grandparents' Russian marriage record.

The #6 post has nothing to do with Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.  It was when I celebrated my lucky 13th blogiversary (along with Lisa Hork Gorrell, of course).

#5 is my post lamenting some of the recent changes I have seen occur at the FamilySearch Center at which I volunteer, and pondering what might be coming in the future.

For the #4 post we return to Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, when I listed my genealogy goals for 2024.  I was trying to be cautious and optimistic at the same time.

And another Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge comes in at #3.  This time it was the best research achievement I had had during the previous month.

The #2 post was when I noticed a problem with the year in the index of Russian records posted on JewishGen.  I haven't seen any changes to the index since writing about that.

And the #1 post in popularity on my blog in 2024 was when I explained all of the things I am not doing with AI in genealogy for, you guessed it, Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.  (And I'm still not doing them.)

So last year seven of the top ten posts were for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.  That's still not surprising, not only because lots of people read Randy's blog but also because I was almost rebooting my blog after a few years of sparse posting.

I generally don't get a lot of comments on my posts, even those that are read a lot.  The #1 and #2 posts on the popularity list were tied for the most comments this year.

But That Doesn't Add Up Right

I posted last month about finding my great-great-grandparents' marriage record and several other family records in a recent data upload by the Ukraine Research Group on JewishGen.org.  But now I have to worry about how accurate the years are on those records as they are indexed.

I found a Russian birth record for one of my cousins, Dvorah Kardish, the daughter of Moishe Kardish and Rivka Polatnick.  The index entry shows Dvorya Kardish, daughter of Moshe, son of Chaim Duvid, and Rivka, daughter of Leyb.  This certainly sounds like my family member!  The entry indicates she was born January 21, 1899.  I clicked on the image link.

Record #9
Birth record for Dvorya Kardish
January 21 / 12 Shevat
Father Moshe Chaim-Duvid, mother Rivka daughter of Leyb
Kamenets Podolsky, Podolia, Russian Empire
(image has been edited to crop out some of the other records on the page)

But when I went to enter this information in my family tree, I noted a few inconsistencies.

There is a note on the page for the record above Dvorya's that refers to 1897.  How could there be a note about something that happened to a child in 1897 if the child wasn't born until 1899?

Second, I have found Dvorya enumerated with the Kardish family in an 1895 Russian revision list (kind of like a census).  If she wasn't born until 1899, that just couldn't happen (that's a really big twinkle in someone's eye).

Third, Dvorya's first child (at least the first I know about) was born in 1915 (I found her birth record in this upload), which would make Dvorya only 16 years old at the time.  Not a deal-breaker, but not likely.  (Yes, I realize the year could be wrong on her daughter's record.)

And not as definitive, but still important to take into account, an 1899 birth would change Dvorya's position in the accepted birth order of the children in that family.  I often tell people that before knowing your exact birth date was an important fact in everyday life, most people didn't know precisely when they were born, but they did usually know who was the oldest child, who was second, etc., down to the youngest.  And the birth order that I was told matches that in the revision list.

So now I had four data points pointing to the possible inaccuracy of the birth year quoted in the JewishGen index.

Obviously, this required further investigation.

The page with Dvorya's birth record does not have a year written on it anywhere I could see to indicate when these births had taken place or were recorded.  I looked several pages before and after but none of them has a year written on it to indicate when the births occurred.  The only one that has a year on it, a few pages before the page in question, has a big block of text in the middle of the page and the year 1898 at the end of the text.  It looks to be some kind of "this is wrapping up the end of the year" note.  I considered that maybe the indexers had used it as an indication that the pages following were for 1899.

Working on the hypothesis that the page with Dvorya's birth had somehow fallen out and been [re]placed out of order in the record book, I looked at the information on the sheet that I probably could rely on:  that she had been born on January 21 on the Christian calendar, which equaled 12 Shevat on the Jewish calendar.  The months were abbreviated at the top of the page, and while I don't know the names of the months in the Jewish calendar well enough to recall them, I could see that the month started with "sh", so I Googled "Jewish months", and only Shevat starts with that.

To try to resolve the problem, I went to SteveMorse.org, clicked on Steve's handy Jewish Calendar Conversions in One Step page, changed the readout to the 57th century in the Jewish era so I could see years for the 19th century, changed the Christian date to January 21, and started going year by year through the Jewish years until I got January 21 and 12 Shevat in the same year.  Yay, it's 1891 (5651 on the Jewish calendar)!

Except I then remembered that the Russians were still on the Julian calendar in the 19th century, but the Jewish calendar was going by the Gregorian dates and Steve's page shows Gregorian by default.  Oops.

So I went back, changed the readout to Julian, set my date as 12 Shevat, and scrolled through years on the Christian calendar line.

Aha!  The year in which 12 Shevat and January 21 were the same day in the Julian calendar then became 1890 (5650 on the Jewish calendar).  That resolved the three concrete inconsistencies and kept Dvorya's birth order in the family the same.

Hooray!

It appears that the pages in the birth registration book are out of order, but that's how they are now and how they were filmed.

I fixed my date question, but how do we correct that problem?  How many more pages in this book are out of order?  How many people will have enough information beforehand, as I did, to realize that there's a problem?  And how many more of the digitized record books might have the same problem?

And what does the note from 1905 on the left side of Dvorya's birth record say?

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: A Genealogy Fun Day

There's nothing like an open-ended invitation to write about almost anything, which is what we have tonight from Randy Seaver for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  When was the last time you had genealogy fun?  It could be research, conferences, a society meeting, or just talking with friends about your research, a favorite trip, etc.  Tell us about a recent genealogy fun day!

2.  Share your answers on your own blog or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

I have had lots of genealogy fun the past two days!

Recently the Ukraine Research Division of JewishGen (the self-proclaimed home of Jewish genealogy on the Web) announced that it had uploaded a bunch of records from several different locations, including (finally!) Kamenets-Podolsky (formerly in Russia; current name Kamianets-Podilskyi, Ukraine).  I was very excited, as that is where I have always been told my maternal grandmother's father's family was from, but I had no documents from there showing their names.  I actually had not been optimistic about ever finding any, due to a significant fire several years ago that affected the archive there.

So I searched using the form on the JewishGen home page, looking for Gorodetsky (my great-grandfather's original surname) in Ukraine.

And I found my great-great-grandparents' marriage record!!!

Record #109 (bottom)
Marriage record for Vigdor Gorodetsky and Esther Leya Shnayderman
August 17, 1888 (Julian calendar; August 29 on Gregorian calendar)
Kamenets-Podolsky, Podolia, Russian Empire
(image has been edited to crop out other records on the page)

Not only was this exciting because, hey, it's a new family record, but it actually corroborated several hypotheses I had made over the years.

• I had guessed my great-great-grandmother's maiden name to be Schneiderman, based on correlating a lot of information from multiple generations of relatives.  Correct!

• I had guessed that her father's name was Joine (pronounced yoy-ne) after looking at naming patterns in my family.  Correct!

• I had estimated the marriage to have taken place before 1891.  It was in 1888.  Correct!

• I had guessed that the marriage should have taken place in Kamenets-Podolsky.  Correct!

• I had estimated my great-great-grandfather's birth year to be between 1864 and 1868.  He was listed as 25 at the time of the marriage, putting his birth year about 1863–1864.  Damned close!

• And I had estimated my great-great-grandmother's birth year to be between 1868 and 1874.  She was listed as 21 at the time of the marriage, putting her birth year about 1867–1868.  Also damned close!

It is great to have my logic substantiated by the actual record.

And on top of that, I have also found two dozen additional records — births, marriages, divorces, deaths, revision lists (kind of like a census) — for my Schneiderman and related lines, including Kardish and Belder.  I have been staying up way too late for the past couple of days because I can't tear myself away from the computer.

Genealogy fun?  Absolutely!  I've been doing the genealogy happy dance for two days!

Thank you, Randy, for giving us a topic tonight that allowed me to write about my cool discovery!

IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy 2016 — Already Halfway Done!

I'm attending the IAJGS Jewish genealogy conference in beautiful Seattle, and it has certainly been an interesting three days.  The highlight of Sunday's presentations was, by far, the keynote address by Dr. Devin Naar, "Sephardic Family History as Jewish Family History."  He talked about how he became interested in family history when he was young and began serious research when someone sent him information about another family named Naar, wondering if they were related.  He traced the other family backward from New Jersey to the Caribbean, Netherlands, and eventually Portugal and Spain.  He has learned much more concrete information about the other Naar family than his own, unfortunately.  Though it is almost definite that his Greek Naar family came from Spain and is probably connected, he can't trace his family out of Greece, primarily due to a lack of records.  He integrated the stories of both families into the broader scope of world history, explaining events that affected them.  He even clearly explained the difference between Ladino and Spanish, which I have been wondering about for a while.  The fact that he is still stuck on his own family made his journey that much more realistic, because everything wasn't all wrapped up in a neat, pretty package at the end.  And he was an energetic, enthusiastic speaker.  I suspect his students at the University of Washington enjoy his classes a lot.

The most memorable line of his talk, however, wasn't actually about his research.  It was a translation of a Ladino saying:  the "relative of the heel." This is someone who is probably related to you, but you don't quite know what the relationship is, or he might be a distant relation, or perhaps an in-law of an in-law, or might really just be an old, old friend of the family with no blood connection at all.  It reminded me of Jeremy Frankel (the president of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society) and the "tenuously, absurdly distant" cousins he writes to, hoping that they have a photo or some snippet of information about the family.

On Monday I tended to a fair bit of business.  I went to a media lunch talk with the IAJGS president and other bloggers, a "birds of a feather" meeting for volunteers working with the JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, and the JGS Webmaster roundtable (standing in for the SFBAJGS Webmaster, who was not able to attend the conference).  But I was able to make time to see the documentary Havana Nagila:  The Jews of Cuba, which I really thought I should squeeze in, seeing as how my talk at this conference is about the research I did on my Cuban Jewish cousins.  It was an interesting movie, especially because it's more than 20 years old at this point.  I even recognized some of the people and locations from my visit to Havana last July.

Tuesday brought more variety to my schedule.  Two sessions I attended were all about research, in Australia and New Zealand (by Robyn Dryen, she of the oh-so-dry sense of humor) and in the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, or "the Joint") archives.  My cousin's mother was from Australia, and I still want to hunt down some information on that branch.  And the Joint assisted so many people, I'm convinced I have to be able to find something on someone in my family.

Tuesday was also when I had consultations with representatives from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, who brought laptops with specialized databases not available online.  Now that I know the names of more of my relatives who perished in the Holocaust, I was hoping to find documents about them.  There might be something in the ITS holdings for Maishe Eli Szocherman, who died in Auschwitz, but none of the other names appeared in any of the databases.  This means I have several names for which I need to submit Pages of Testimony.

Most of the intrepid SFBAJGS attendees

Of course, the conference is always a wonderful opportunity to network and see other genealogists in person.  In addition to the 40+ members of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society who traveled north for the conference, I've talked to Maris Bredt, Schelly Dardashti, Banai Feldstein, Emily Garber, Roger Lustig, Jeff Malka, Jeff Miller, Israel Pickholtz, Garri Regev, Mary Roddy, Janette Silverman, Joel Spector, Susan Weinberg, and Joel Weintraub, along with several others.  And there are still three days to go!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Who Is Your Most Recent Immigrant Ancestor?

This week for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun Randy Seaver posed a question about immigrant ancestors:

1) Who is your most recent immigrant ancestor?  I'm assuming that your ancestors moved from one country to another at some point in time.

2)  Tell us about that person:  name, birth and death, emigration and immigration country and port, date or year of immigration, etc.  Share it in a blog post of your own, in a comment on this blog post, or on Facebook or Google+.

Well, my family are relative latecomers compared to Randy's, by almost 70 years.  My most recent immigrant ancestors were my great-great-grandparents, Gershon Nowicki and Dvojre (Yelsky) Nowicki, shown as Gerszon and Dobra Nowitzky, who departed Liverpool on August 24, 1922 on the S.S. Laconia and arrived in New York City on September 3.  When they immigrated they were listed as being about 66 and 64 years old, respectively.  Gershon was a woodturner, and Dvojre was simply his wife.  They were of the Hebrew race (Jewish), and their last permanent residence was Porosowa, Poland (now Porozovo, Belarus).  Their nearest relative whence they came was their daughter, Mirke Krimelewicz, also in Porosowa.

The second page of the passenger list shows that Gershon and Dvojre paid for their own tickets, were each in possession of $25, and had never before been in the United States.  The relative they were joining was their son, Sam Nowitzky, who lived at 1160 52nd Street, Brooklyn.  They replied no to all of the big "boot you out right away" questions:  ever been in prison, are you a polygaist or an archist, do you advocate overthrow of the government, etc.  They both stated they were in good physical and mental health and were not deformed or crippled.  Gershon is listed as 4'5" and Dvojre as only 4', which seems incredibly tiny to me; no one has ever told me they were that short.  They both had fair complexions and dark hair and eyes, and were born in Porosowa.

So that covers all the typed information on the form, which was created when they embarked.  Now we get to the added comments, most of them handwritten, which came at Ellis Island.  The first clue that there's more to look for is the word "ADMITTED" stamped over the letters "S I" to the left of their names on the first page (I admit, the letters are hard to read under the ADMITTED).  When you see this, or a handwritten "X" to the left, you should look for your immigrant relative on a page near the end of the complete ship manifest for detained aliens or those held for special inquiry.  The names are often spelled differently on the two pages, so they might not come up in the same search.  That happened to me with Gershon.  On the special inquiry page, his name is Gerzon Nowitzcy.  Dvojre's first name is still Dobra, however.  On the second page of the passenger list, both Gershon and Dvojre have "Senility which may aff." handwritten over the typed responses and "Med. cert" and a number.

And now for the special inquiry page.  An explanation of the special inquiry process can be found on the JewishGen.org site, including a partial list of abbreviations found.  (Part of the explanation is the bad news that most of the special inquiry records no longer exist.)  Going by this information, both of my great-great-grandparents were considered likely public charges (LPC) due to being physically (PH) defective (DEF).  The processors at Ellis Island believed that they weren't capable of working to support themselves.  Their inspector was named Tufarolo.  They were finally admitted on September 9, and while they were held they ate eight breakfasts, ten dinners, and eight suppers.  The additional days of meals after they were admitted was probably due to it taking a day or two to contact Sam or another relative and let them know that Gershon and Dvojre were allowed to stay.

In earlier years, the page listing aliens held for special inquiry also included the name and address of the person who picked up the immigrants, which can often be very helpful.  By 1922, however, this was no longer the case, so I don't know if it was my cousin Sam or someone else who collected his parents from the detention center at Ellis Island.

I don't have documented birth information on either of these great-great-grandparents.  They were both born roughly about 1858.  Dvojre died February 9, 1936 in Brooklyn.  Gershon died December 12, 1948 in Brooklyn.  And as for him being physically defective or senile, after his arrival he worked as a Hebrew teacher for several years, and family members have told me he was a rambunctious dirty old man right up until the end.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Best Genealogy Day Ever

For this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver asked people to write about their best genealogy day ever:

1) What was you very "Best Genealogy Day Ever?"  It might be the day you solved a thorny research problem, or spent the day at a repository and came away with more records than you could imagine, or the day you met a cousin or visited an ancestral home.

2)  Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook or Google+ post.  Be sure to drop a comment to this post if you write your own blog post and link to it.

I agree with Randy, it's hard to pick only one day, especially since I've been researching for 40 years.  What was probably the very best day combined talking to a relative for the first time with solving a difficult research problem.  I learned that my great-great-grandmother's name was not Moore, as I had been led to believe when I started researching my family history, and that led to a lot more information.  But I actually wrote about that last year!

Rather than write about the same story, I thought about what might be my second-best genealogy day ever.  There were still a lot of contenders, but I decided on when I was contacted by a cousin I had never heard of, which led to meeting a whole new branch of my family.

My mother's family is Jewish, and to help try to make contact with possible cousins, I have posted all of the surnames in my family on JewishGen.org in the Family Finder database.  Every now and then I get a nibble, but rarely anything significant.

Then one day I received a message from a woman who thought she might be related to me on my Meckler line, because both of our families came from Kamenets Litovsk, Russia (now Kamyenyets, Belarus).  We went back and forth a few times with "Do you recognize this name?" before we discovered that we both had the same woman with an extremely unusual married name, then living in Israel, in our trees.  We figured the odds were in our favor at that point and that we had to be cousins.  And then she invited me to her 50th wedding anniversary in Winnipeg!

So off I went to Winnipeg that summer, and I think I met about a hundred cousins.  One of the cousins, who was actually born in Kamenets Litovsk, sat down with me and we figured out the most likely place where the connection between our two branches comes in the family tree.  I was particularly impressed when she was able to go back and forth between the Hebrew, Yiddish, and English sections of the yizkor book for Kamenets Litovsk and read all the information about family members that was there.

After I updated all of my information in Family Tree Maker, I shared the new version of the family tree with many of the cousins I had met.  I'm still in touch with most of them even now, eight years later.

Something that made this discovery very special is that the province Kamenets Litovsk was in, Grodno, has very few archival records remaining for the Jewish community (the Nazis were particularly thorough in that area in destroying historical records), so I had never expected to be able to find relatives on that side of my family.  To not only meet family members, but also to learn about earlier generations of my family, was a wonderful gift.  And all of it started with that first message.

DNA and Legal Records and Jewish Records, Oh My!

Days 2 and 3 of the Northwest Genealogy Conference continued to be interesting and educational.  On Friday the featured speaker was CeCe Moore, and the theme for the day was therefore DNA, of course.  The session I attended was "Autosomal DNA and Chromosome Mapping:  Discovering Your Ancestors in You" (as I already have a good handle on the basics and ethnicity estimates, and really didn't want to hear about Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and his program).  While I recently attended a one-day seminar by Dr. Tim Janzen on this topic, I have to say that Moore explained it a little more clearly, and now I almost feel prepared to try using these techniques on my own family research.  She was very open about warning everyone that this is time-consuming stuff, however, so I have to figure out a way to fit it into my schedule (ha!).

I also went to Elissa Scalise Powell's third offering at the conference, "Baker's Dozen Steps to Writing Research Reports."  She has created a great template that looks like it will make writing reports much easier.  I'm definitely going to implement ideas from this session in my regular work.

Saturday's featured guest was Judy Russell, the Legal Genealogist, and most of the day's sessions were related to legal records and courthouse research.  I managed to get up early enough to make it to the first presentation of the day, "That First Trip to the Courthouse", by Judy.  Yes, I have done a lot of courthouse research already, but she's just so entertaining that it was worthwhile to listen to.  Some of the points she made really resonated with my own experience, such as "Don't be afraid to ask."  Once I couldn't find a record in the computer index that I really, really thought should be there, so I asked if any other index was available.  The clerk took me across the hall to the original docket books, from which the computerized index had been created.  The case I wanted was listed in the book!  I don't know why it was missing from the computer database, but I found what I needed.

As a follow-up to "Don't be afraid to ask", Judy had in her handout, "Almost every courthouse has someone who really knows the old records.  It's worth trying to find that person and find a convenient time to chat."  When I was trying to determine in which courts and prisons or jails a particular man might have records, the clerk told me that this one guy upstairs in the D.A.'s office knew all about how the courts were set up "in the old days."  You know that I immediately went up there to see if that man was available.  Lucky me, he was!, and he had a few spare minutes.  He explained how the old municipal (city) court and jail used to function and what probably happened to their old records.  I still didn't find the records (the consensus was that they had probably been destroyed decades before), but I had a much better understanding of the process the man I was researching had gone through in the judicial system.

After Judy's morning session I taught my class, "Looking for Non-Jews in Jewish Records."  This talk originated as a keynote at a local family history day.  The main point is that those of us researching Jewish family history can be obsessive (very obsessive) about finding any and all records and resources that might be helpful and then often sharing the information online.  Though the sites on which the information is shared are usually focused on Jewish research, the resources themselves often aren't.  So if, for example, someone who isn't Jewish has ancestors who were in Belarus, the Belarus Special Interest Group's page on JewishGen has links to lots of great information that can help that person.  About twenty-five people came to my class, which went very well.  Several people stopped me later to say that they learned a lot, which is always great to hear.

The next session was Judy's second class of the day, "Where There Is — Or Isn't — a Will."  I learned a few new things here, such as the fact that a "holographic" will (one handwritten in its entirety by the person making it) is called "olographic" in areas that use civil law (as opposed to English common law), such as Louisiana, Puerto Rico, and Québec.  In Florida you might find a "curator" listed as one of the people involved.  He was a temporary caretaker of property after someone's death, before an administrator was appointed.  The example that Judy discussed was when a man who sold perishable foods died; the curator stepped in to make sure that the food was handled properly and saved during the time it took the court to find and appoint an administrator.  I found it interesting to learn that, while minors are not considered competent to bequeath real estate, they can leave personal property:  boys at 14 and girls at 17.

The afternoon began with Judy's last presentation of the conference, "Order in the Court:  Using Court Records in Genealogical Research."  This was a different kind of class.  She gave a brief overview of courts but then switched gears and suggested that researchers take the time to simply read through cases that occurred in the same time and place as where their ancestors lived, even if those ancestors themselves had not been involved in the cases.  The information in the write-ups of cases can give you a lot of details about what life was like at that time and place.  She read from several cases.  The most detailed example was an 1844 Virginia appellate case relating to a murder, in which we learned about the types of houses people lived in, family living arrangements in those houses, when people normally went to bed, the styles of shoes men wore, and what types of guns were commonly used, among many other things.  While it's always recommended to read about the history of an area, this was the first time I've heard a recommendation to read the court cases of an area to learn more background information.

The final session of the day really surprised me.  The title, "Field Dependency:  A Way to Evaluate Genealogical Sources", and the handout sounded very academic and stuffy, but Jean Wilcox Hibben turned it into a lively talk about looking at records and thinking about for what purpose a record was created, who gave the information, ways in which the information could have been misunderstood, reasons for which someone might have lied or made a mistake, and generally just looking at each record critically and analyzing it.  It was a great way to end a conference at which I learned a good amount of new things and made several new genealogy friends.  I had a wonderful time in Arlington and hope the conference continues to grow and improve in the years to come.

November ZichronNote Has Been Delivered! (Electronically)

Hooray!  The November issue of ZichronNote has been put to bed, and it's still November.  The electronic version has already been sent to SFBAJGS members, and the print copy will be mailed out soon.  I really enjoyed the articles in this one.  (Okay, I enjoy the articles in every issue!)  Larry Fagan, one of our members, broke through a longstanding brick wall by availing himself of help from JewishGen classes and our brick wall session in August.  Heidi Lyss, a board member, has written about the "Jews in Utah" session at this summer's IAJGS conference and the direct connection it had to her own family research.  Jeremy Frankel has given us the second part of the story of discovering a lost branch of his family, and we learned that we now have part three to look forward to, with more revelations!  And this time even I contributed:  some updates, but still looking for a wedding photo of Jeanette August Meier Heller; and information about the JewishGen Memorial Plaques Database and how to contribute to it.

Does all of this sound like something you just have to read?  Well, remember, the most recent issues of ZichronNote are available only to members of the society. If you join (at the still very affordable annual membership rate) you get a subscription to the journal, help fund research projects, and support a hobby you enjoy.  And if you're interested in contributing to ZichronNote, write to me for more information.

I Found Two Possible Siblings of My Great-Great-Grandfather!

Possibly Gersh Wolf Gorodetsky

One of the great advantages of searchable electronic databases is their ability to show you information you wouldn't have thought to look for.  Even if you had considered looking, the time required might not have been practical.

Many years ago, I rented several rolls of microfilm of Jewish metrical records from Kishinev, Russian Empire (now Chisinau, Moldova) from the Family History Library.  I was trying to find information about my great-grandfather's family, which I had been told moved to Kishinev from the Kamenets Podolsky area some time soon after his birth.

My search was very successful.  I found the birth registrations of five of the six younger children in the family, the death record for my great-great-grandmother, and the index entry for my great-great-grandfather's second marriage (the church did not have the full marriage record on film).  I learned that this branch of my family was probably reasonably well educated, because when those five siblings immigrated to the United States the birthdates they used were surprisingly close to the actual dates.  I also learned my great-great-grandmother died one month after the birth of her youngest child, and that my great-great-grandfather did not remarry until two and a half years later, even though he had a one-month-old child.

I still have those microfilms on extended loan at my local Family History Center in Oakland, because I know it can be helpful to go through these types of records and look for other people with the same name and from the same place, as they might be related.  As these records were in Russian handwriting from the 1890's to the early 1900's, however, I kept putting it off, because I didn't want to slog through the 100+-year-old Cyrillic.

But now we have the Internet and searchable databases.  Several volunteers have transcribed many of the FHL microfilms of Kishinev records, and the transcriptions are now online in one of those databases.  I was recently doing research for someone else and ended up searching in the database that includes the Kishinev metrical records.

I didn't find any relevant information for the family I was researching, but I really thought there should be something.  To test the database, I searched for my family name, Gorodetsky, to see what kinds of results I would get.

The first thing I did was look for the information I had already found on microfilm.  All of it was there — that was a good start.  In these records my great-great-grandfather was consistently listed as being from Orinin, and his father's name as Gersh Wolf.  Then I glanced over the other results from the search.

I noticed a minimal death listing with my great-great-grandfather's name as the father.  I found another listing with more information about the same death and discovered that my great-great-grandmother had had at least one more pregnancy beyond the eight children I knew of, but this one apparently had sadly ended in a miscarriage.  I didn't know that miscarriages could be included in the death registers, but at least this one was.

Then I saw a second Gorodetsky whose father was also Gersh Wolf and who was from Orinin.  This man was potentially a brother of my great-great-grandfather!  He had three children listed in the database results.  Based on the birthdates of his children, he was probably a little younger than my great-great-grandfather.

I also found the death of a woman with the same father and from the same town, but she's quite a bit older than my great-great-grandfather.  She might be a sister!  It appears that she was not married.

Looking at the range of ages for these possible siblings made me wonder about my third-great-grandfather.  If these three were siblings, I wonder how many wives/mothers there were.  It's plausible, though on the extreme end, that all three could be children of the same mother.  Unfortunately, these records give only the father's name; the mother's name is not included.

I also began to think about Gersh Wolf's possible age.  I realized that none of Gersh Wolf's eight grandchildren I know about and the three potential grandchildren from the database had that name.  It was a common practice among many Eastern European Jews at this time, including my family, to name children after deceased ancestors.  In fact, my great-grandfather and three of his siblings named their first daughters after their mother; three of the siblings named their first sons after their father.  Admittedly, I know the names of only eleven possible grandchildren, but those births extend to 1910.  I'm starting to consider whether my third-great-grandfather was still alive as of that year, and that's why no one had yet named a child after him.  If Gersh Wolf was the father of the woman whose death I found, however, he had to have been born by around 1818 at the latest, so that would make him at least 92!  Of course, it's also possible that his children didn't like him, and that's why they didn't name any sons after him . . . .

Obviously, I need to follow up on all of these potential new clues.  And all this because I decided to poke around in a database!

Randy Seaver's Genea-musings Saturday Genealogy Poll

Today Randy Seaver posted a genealogy poll on his Genea-Musings blog.  I don't often answer online polls like this, but I found his questions interesting.  The Mission Impossible music isn't playing in the background here, but these are my answers:

a)  Which genealogy software programs for your computer do you use (e.g., Family Tree Maker, Reunion, GRAMPS, etc.)?
The program I use regularly is Family Tree Maker, PC version 16.  I also have installed and use to varying degrees PAF 5.0, Legacy Family Tree, Reunion, and Mac Family Tree (yes, I'm "computer bilingual").  I even used to use the old Mac version of Family Tree Maker!

b)  Which online family trees have information submitted by you - in either a separate online tree (e.g., Ancestry Member Tree) or a universal (collaborative) online tree (e.g., WikiTree)?
I have no family trees posted online anywhere, and I advise others to do the same.  I don't want my family tree information appropriated, inappropriately linked, and/or mangled by people who don't do good research.  (A good genealogy friend of mine had her entire tree copied with no attribution by a Ph.D. student, of all people!)  I do, however, have a family research page on my own Web site with the names and locations I am researching, and family members have found me that way, which shows you don't need to put a tree online to collaborate with family.

c)  For which subscription genealogy record providers (e.g., Ancestry) do you have a subscription?
The only site for which I have a paid subscription is FindMyPast.com, because the paid version shows the newspaper images, which the FHL Portal version does not.

d)  Which FREE genealogy record providers (e.g., FamilySearch) do you use regularly?
At home I use FamilySearch extensively, along with FindAGrave, Google, JewishGen.org, Library and Archives Canada, RootsWeb, USGenWeb, many newspaper and genealogical society sites, and any site that includes information I am looking for.  I also regularly visit my local LDS FamilySearch Center (which in my case happens to be the Oakland FamilySearch Library) and use the databases available through the FHL Portal, which include 19th Century British Newspapers (a Gale database), Ancestry.com World Edition, Fold3, Godfrey Library, Newspaper Archive, and more, and which are free to use in the library.  The Oakland FSL also has individual subscriptions to GenealogyBank, VitalSearch, and Newspapers.com, each available on only one computer.  I also use Steve Morse's One-Step Webpages, but it isn't actually a records site, just a better way to search on other sites that do have records.

e)  How much time do you spend each week doing actual genealogy research online?  [Note:  not reading, or social networking, but actual searching in a record provider].  Estimate an average number of hours per week.
I probably do a minimum of about 20–30 hours of online research every week.

f)  How much time do you spend each week doing actual genealogy research in a repository (e.g., library, archive, courthouse, etc.)?  Estimate an average number of hours per month over, say, a one-year period. 
The amount of time I spend doing on-site research varies from week to week, but it probably averages out to about 5–10 hours per week.

g) How much time do you spend each week adding information to your genealogy software program (either on your computer or online)?  Estimate an average number of hours per week over, say, a one month period.
I have no online trees so spend no time adding information to them.  (That's one way to save time!)
 
h) How much time do you spend each month at a genealogical society meeting, program or event (not a seminar or conference)?  Estimate an average number of hours per month over, say, a one-year period.
I attend several meetings and programs from different organizations.  It's probably about 9 hours per month, assuming about six programs per month at one and a half hours each.

i) How much time do you spend each month on genealogy education (e.g., reading books and periodicals, attending seminars, conferences, workshops, webinars, etc.)?   Estimate an average number of hours per month over, say, a one-year period.
This is another hard one, because of the number of hours spent at conferences.  Maybe about 20 hours per month on average.

j)  How much time do you spend each week reading, writing and commenting on genealogy blogs, websites, and social media?   Estimate an average number of hours per week over, say, a one-month period.
This is probably about 13 hours per week.  A good chunk of that is writing for my own blog, of course!

I noticed that one question Randy didn't ask is how much time we spend just talking to other people about genealogy!

Article about Me in "The J"

My mother, me, and
my siblings

"The J", the weekly Jewish newspaper that covers the San Francisco Bay area, published a lovely article about me and my genealogy business!  It was posted online Thursday (and Thomas Macentee found it before I did!).  And there are some good plugs for the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society, Oakland FamilySearch Library, JewishGen, and Association of Professional Genealogists as resources for people to turn to for help with their research.  If anyone has a spare copy of the printed issue, I would really appreciate it!