Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Which Ancestral Home Would You Like to Visit?

Randy Seaver asks for a difficult decision in this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Tell us which ancestral home (an actual building, a village, a town, even a country) you would most like to visit.   Which ancestors lived there and for how long?  

(2) Share your ancestral home information in your own blog post or on Facebook, and leave a link to it in the comments.
 
Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic.

Randy appears to be fortunate in that he has several lines in his family that were in the same location, making it easy to choose that place.  Mine are kind of scattered all over the place, which makes the choice difficult.  On the other hand, Randy did give country as an option, so I think I'll choose "Russian Empire."  As in the one that doesn't exist anymore.  But it was the country from which all of the ancestors on my mother's side of the family emigrated.

All the American documentation I have says that the Brainins came from Kreuzburg, which is now Krustpils, Latvia.  I would love to go there and try to find some European documents that actually confirm that's where they were from.  Supposedly my 3x-great-grandfather was a doctor; maybe that increases the possibility of finding a record about him?

The Mecklers came from Kamenets Litovsk, Grodno gubernia, which is now Kamyanyets, Belarus.  I have that family tracked back to my 3x-great-grandfather Zvi Mekler.  I wouldn't expect to find much about my family in modern Kamyanyets, but I want the opportunity to look.

The Nowicki family came from Porozovo, Grodno gubernia, now Porazava, Belarus.  This is another location where not much has survived regarding the former Jewish population, but you never know unless you try.

The Gorodetskys were at least registered in Orinin, Kamenets Podolskiy gubernia, which is now Orynyn, Ukraine.  I don't know how far back that registration goes or how long it might have been since someone lived there.  The family was apparently at one time in the city of Kamenets Podolskiy (now Kamyanets Podilskyy), which is where my great-grandfather and his older sister are said to have been born, so that's probably the more important location to visit first.

The Schneidermans were also said to have been from Kamenets Podolskiy, although I don't think it was stated whether that was the city or merely the gubernia.

I don't know where the Jaffes, Bindermans, Blooms, or Yelskys are supposed to have been from.  I guess I would start searching for the Jaffes and Bindermans in Krustpils and the Blooms and Yelskys in Porazava.  I might also have Cohen/Kagan and Kardish/Kortisch ancestors.  I would start my search for them in Kamyanets Podilskyy.

So that gives me a lot of territory to cover.  What was once one (very large) country would now necessitate going through at least three modern countries.  And not going at all to modern Russia, because my ancestors all seem to have stayed in the Pale, apparently not having any of the high-end occupations that permitted one to reside in Russia proper.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Ellen's Questions, Part 3

In this week's challenge for Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, we continue to follow up on a previous one.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Ellen Thompson-Jennings posted 20 questions on her Hound on the Hunt blog two weeks ago — see Even More Questions about Your Ancestors and Maybe a Few about You (posted 27 June). 

(2) We will do these five at a time, with Questions 11 to 15 tonight (we did 1 through 5 two weeks ago and questions 6 through 10 last week).

(3) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.

Okay, these are my answers.

11.  If money weren’t an issue, where would you go to do genealogy research?

All over the world!  I would go to Ukrainian archives and hire interpreters to find information about my Gorodetsky and Schneiderman (and maybe Kagan) family lines.  I would try doing research in Moldova with more interpreters, looking for my Gorodetskys.  I would visit the Latvian archives with yet more interpreters, desperately trying to find even one measly document about my Brainins and Jaffes.  I would go to archives in Belarus (yes, more interpreters) to see if any of the record sets listed on the Routes to Roots site include any of my Mekler, Nowicki, Yelsky, or related relatives.  If I found addresses in any of those records, I would look to see if those buildings had survived.  In Belarus I would also search for records and information about the families of my many Mekler cousins with whom I am now in contact.

It would be ineresting to go back to Cuba, now that I have a little more information about my Cuban cousins, to try researching in person, instead of having to rely on e-mail communications with my researcher there.  At least I can read Spanish fluently and understand spoken Spanish fairly well.

And that's just my mother's side of the family!

For my father's side, I'd like to go to Manchester, England (where my brother has been able to go, once) and research the Dunstans and Winns (and I wouldn't need an interpreter there).  If I could trace the Dunstans back to Cornwall, that would be my next stop.  I should also go to New Jersey to do archives research on all of his other lines, because they were all in New Jersey for such a long time.

And after all that I would probably take a break to determine my next destination.

12.  Do you ever feel as though you’re the only person researching your family?

At this point, yes.  A cousin in Ottawa, Canada was doing research for a while, even going to the point of creating a legal-sized two-page questionnaire that she sent around to all the relatives there (I am very fortunate that she made photocopies of all of the pages for me).  I don't think she is pursuing that anymore.  Other than the occasional random forays my brother makes online (which almost always produce something substantive and useful), I'm it.

13.  Why do you think you’re interested in your family history and other family members might not be?

I used to actually listen to the stories that my mother and grandmother told about family when I was a little girl.  For whatever reason, my brother and sister were apparently not as interested.  So I was already primed when, at the age of 13, I had a junior high school assignment to trace my family back four generations.  I still have that purple mimeographed piece of paper and the notes I took at the time while interviewing family members.  That assignment is what got me hooked.  I think being open to the stories and then starting so young, when I had so many older relatives who were still alive and could tell me information themselves, was a rare combination.

14.  Do you intend to write about your genealogy/family history findings?

You mean like a book?  Oh, heavens, no!  I hate writing.  But I do manage to post to my blog on a (semi)regular basis and share a lot of the family stories and discoveries that way.  And I have shared family trees with so many cousins I lost count.  If I could find someone who wanted to do the writing after I did all the research, that would work much better for me.  And then I could edit the manuscript, because I love editing.

15.  Did you ever make a genealogy mistake that caused you to have to prune your family tree?

One mistake, and one discovery via DNA.  The mistake was relying on the information in the IGI to identify my great-great-grandmother Lippincott's parents.  I happily researched the parents that were listed and went back quite a ways.  But as more records became readily available and I did more research, I discovered that there were two girls of almost the same age with almost the same name, my great-great-grandmother and another one.  That, of course, meant that I had to fully research both women.  I was finally able to determine through church records that the parents listed in that IGI record were those of the other Lippincott, not mine, even though the marriage date and husband were correct for mine.  Someone accidentally combined info from two records!  So out went the one line of Lippincotts and I began work on the correct one, which I have not been able to document as extensively, but at least I'm pretty sure they're actually mine.  The two lines will probably end up connecting some generations back, because you can't go anywhere in New Jersey without tripping over a Lippincott because they've been there so long and are interrelated, but I'm not worried about that yet.

The other "pruning" came when I demonsrated through DNA testing that my grandfather's biological father was not the man his mother married.  I actually haven't taken those people out of my family tree, because Elmer Sellers was the only father my grandfather knew, and I put years and years of work into that research.  But I have discontinued further research in that direction and now focus on determining just who my grandfather's biological father was.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Interview a Relative Who Was at a Family Event

Sometimes when I read Randy Seaver's challenge for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun I know right away what I want to write about, and tonight is one of those nights.

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible music, please!):

(1) If you could go back in a time machine and reattend one family event that you were present at as a child, and would love to return to interview your relative, what event would that be?

(2)  Tell us about it in a comment on this blog post, in a blog post of your own, or in a Facebook post.

The family event I would like to attend again is one for which I have no memory of my own, but which both of my parents told me happened.  My mother told me that shortly after I was born, she took a trip back to Florida so that her maternal grandmother could see me.  There is no photograph to document this trip, so some years ago I asked my father about it, and he does recall my mother taking a trip to Florida with me when I was a little baby.  This would have been in 1962, probably summer or fall.

Obviously, I don't remember the visit, but it would be logical to presume that my maternal grandmother would have been there also.  Perhaps my grandfather was not there, because otherwise there really should have been a photograph.  He took photos of all sorts of family events.  Why, oh why, is there no photo of the four generations of women?

The relative I would like to interview is my great-grandmother Sarah Libby Gordon (born Sore Leibe Brainin).  She died the next year, and there are lots of questions I would like to ask her.  I would love to have more information about her parents (who did immigrate to the United States but died even before my mother was born), her sister (since I know almost nothing about the Jaffe side of my family), her grandparents (whom she probably knew), when she came to this country (after thirty years of searching I still haven't found her on a passenger list, even though she would have been traveling with three small children), where she was actually living in Europe (all the documents about that side of the family here in the U.S. say they were from Kreuzburg, Russia, now Krustpils, Latvia, but I haven't found a single document from Europe to verify that), what it was like living in Europe, how the family decided to emigrate, and many more I'm sure I would come up with.

I would love to ask her about the photograph my grandmother had (which I now have) showing her as an apparent teenager with her mother.  Also in the photograph are another woman and two other girls.  My grandmother recognized her mother and grandmother but had no idea who the other three people were.  I think the second woman might be my great-grandmother's sister, but I have no clue about the two girls.  I suspect the photo was taken soon before my branch of the family came to the United States.  I want to know the significance of the photo book shown on a small table on one side of the photograph, and of the rolled-up piece of paper in my great-great-grandmother's hand.

I'd ask her about my great-grandfather, her husband, who died in 1955:  what he was like, what she knew about his side of the family, if they ever communicated with any family members still in Europe.  Maybe she would know if the Gorodetskys really were related to the Kardishes.

I would ask what she remembered about my great-great-grandfather, her husband's father, who immigrated to the United States in 1914 and died in 1925.  She and my great-grandfather had been married about ten years when he passed away, so I'm sure she would have known him at least a little.

I would ask her what it was like to have one of her sons take the advice to "Go west, young man!" literally.  While the rest of the family stayed in the New York–New Jersey–Massachusetts area, Dave was in San Francisco in 1910, Montana in 1917, and Washington State in 1918, before appearing in the 1920 census in New York.

I'd see if she knew anything about the man her older sister took up with, the mysterious "Mr. Katz", who was the father of my grandmother's favorite cousin.  Perhaps she could also shed some light on what happened to that older sister that caused her to live the last years of her life in an institution.

I'd like to find out what she thought of her new life in the United States.  Did it live up to what she had expected?  If not, was it still better than what life had been like in Russia?

My mother used to tell me that her grandmother never learned to speak English.  My mother would talk in English, and her grandmother would respond in German, and somehow they managed to communicate that way.  I'd like to find out if that was accurate.

I'd like to tell her that I now have her silverplate flatware and that I traditionally use it for seder dinner during Passover.  I think she'd like that.

Easy Custom Genealogy Maps beyond North America

A few weeks ago, for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver asked readers of his blog to create custom maps of U.S. states and Canadian provinces they had visited, and then to create maps of where their ancestors had lived in some given year.  This was a fun exercise, and it was interesting to see the results.  I was disappointed, however, that I was unable to map several of my ancestors, because they were not living in North America.

Surprisingly, Facebook came to my rescue.  One of my friends posted a link to MapLoco, a site that creates custom world maps of places you've visited.  They're not as detailed as the maps from the first site — you can only indicate visited or not, as opposed to the four levels of visits available on the other site.  The world map site also doesn't have an option to export a graphic file of your map.  Instead, you can generate a URL to a page that shows the countries you marked.  But the site does give me a quick, easy way to map the rest of my ancestors' locations!

For the SNGF exercise I used the locations of my ancestors in 1865, which I had generated the week before, and mapped those in the U.S.  For this new map I took those same locations, added the European ones (the only other continent where I had ancestors in 1865), and clicked those places on the world map site.  The site then automatically generated a URL for my custom map.  Instead of using the URL itself, you can do a screen capture of the map and use the image.  The map the site shows when you use the URL looks like this:

You can see that the title is "Countries I've Visited", and underneath that it lists the countries "I've been to."  There's no way to change the title, which for this map should be "Countries Where My Ancestors Lived in 1865."  The legend on the left indicates Not Visited and Visited.  If you're doing a screen capture, you could easily cut out the "Countries I've Visited" banner, but the text below that is helpful because it lists the countries, which might be difficult to recognize from the map alone.

You actually have two options for images, though.  While you're making the map, it looks like this:

The advantage here is that the Not Visited/Visited legend and "I" text aren't part of the map.  On the other hand, you don't get the list of countries spelled out.

Something I noticed when mapping my ancestors was that due to border changes, I had to fudge a little.  Many of my ancestors lived in the Russian Empire, but that no longer exists.  So I marked the modern countries (Belarus, Latvia, and Ukraine) that control the specific areas where they were.

You might think of that as being a problem relevant mostly to 19th- and early 20th-century research, but I even had the same situation when I created a map of the countries I have visited myself:

Quite a few border changes have occurred during the latter part of the 20th century.  Two of the countries I have visited are the USSR and the Panama Canal Zone.  Neither one exists today.  For the USSR I marked the countries corresponding to the Soviet republics I visited.  But the Canal Zone is just gone, incorporated into the country of Panama, which I visited separately from the Canal Zone.

Hey, wouldn't it be cool if there were a site that could generate maps for any given year, with the appropriate corresponding country borders?

Wordless Wednesday

More IAJGS Conference: Days 3 and 4

I'm still here at the IAJGS conference, and I am happy to report that I had much better luck starting on Tuesday with the sessions I attended.  There were still a couple of duds, but nothing like the disasters of the beginning of the conference.

Some of the presentations have been particularly good.  The standout for me on Tuesday was Jane Neff Rollins, who spoke about finding and using labor union documents for genealogy research.  My great-grandfather was in unions and supported them, plus my aunt's uncle (I do research for family members also) was prominent in his union.  Rollins gave an excellent overview of several types of records that possibly could be found, but it will depend on the specific union and what records it saved.  I would be thrilled to find my great-grandfather in union membership lists, meeting minutes, photographs, or a conference agenda, which are just some of the items that were suggested.  Of course, one of the difficult things is finding where these records might be held, but the University of Connecticut has a page with links to several labor archives around the country.  Those are not the only places union documents might be, but they're good places to start.

Another interesting talk on Tuesday was the story of a Jewish man in Russian Latvia who helped fight for Latvian independence but ended up dying in a Latvian prison during World War II.  Not only did the speaker, Eric Benjaminson, explain several of the more unusual documents that he obtained regarding his cousin's history, he also tried to present a plausible perspective of the Latvians who helped this process along its way.  While that part of his talk was obviously conjecture, I have not seen that included in a presentation before.  He was trying to give a broader view of the history.  His ability to look at the other side's perspective might be related to his thirty years of experience as a diplomat.

I also heard a great talk from Vivian Kahn about 2,000 years of Jewish history in Hungary.  The only disappointment on Tuesday was a lecture by someone whose point seemed to be less to transmit information than to share his anger.  I decided I didn't want to be angry all day also and left early.

Wednesday was not quite at the same level as Tuesday but still informative.  The most useful presentation was about researching Canadian family from outside Canada.  Marion Werle talked a little about the history of Jewish immigration into Canada and then covered a broad range of records that exist, including all the normal ones plus some others, such as colonization records and 1940 national registrations.  Not all of them are actually available to people outside Canada (unless they are Canadian citizens), but she even suggested some ways to deal with that restriction.  She also listed sites on which many records can be found.

It wasn't a presentation, but I led a very productive meeting of Jewish genealogical society newsletter editors.  One of my volunteer positions is IAJGS communications chairman, and the main responsibility is working with the newsletter editors.  This past year I unfortunately was not able to keep up with that as well as I would have liked, but I was really inspired by some of the ideas suggested at the meeting.  One idea I hope to implement is making sure that all newsletters and journals have an index of articles published over the publication's history, possibly hosted on the IAJGS Web site.  Too many genealogy articles don't get enough publicity and disappear too soon, and an article index would help prevent that wealth of information from being forgotten.

I spent a few hours in the resource room on Wednesday searching in ProQuest historical and newspaper databases.  On one day of the conference ProQuest allows access to the databases, most of which are not available as personal subscriptions.  The resource room is usually packed on ProQuest day, with a line waiting at the door.  I don't know what happened, but I never saw a line and the room was never full.  On the other hand, I found very few articles, so maybe I'm not the only who has mined those databases pretty thoroughly already.  But it's still great that we have access for a day.

The other presentation I heard on Wednesday was by Rose Feldman of the Israel Genealogy Research Association.  She spoke about the Jewish Legion and other Jews in Eretz Israel (Palestine) during World War I and a little later.  IGRA researchers have been trying to locate as many documents as possible that document the participation of Jews in Palestine during the war.  They are still discovering documents in unexpected archives but hope to find even more,

Looking forward to two more days of conference, and then some research at the Family History Library before I head back to California!

Earlier commentary on the conference:
Days 1 and 2