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 2016 — Conference Wrap-up and Looking Ahead

How time flies!  It's hard to believe, but the IAJGS 2016 International Conference on Jewish Genealogy is already over.  The second half of the conference had several useful sessions, plus we had not one, but two days of ProQuest databases (but more on that later).

Wednesday was a good day for some socializing.  One of the sessions I attended was the Professional Jewish Genealogists Birds of a Feather meeting.  The professional genealogists at the conference try to get together to talk about what’s going on in our field, how we can help each other, and things along those lines. About a dozen people came, and we had some productive discussions.  Then for lunch, three of us at the conference who have participated in the ProGen Study Group (Susan Kaplan, Janice Lovelace, and me) actually went out of the hotel (!) and had lunch together, in a real restaurant, no less.   It was an enjoyable break.

From the regular sessions I went to, I was surprised that the one I found most informative was on Newspapers.com.  I’ve been to one of the talks before (a thinly veiled sales pitch), but I always want to keep up-to-date on what’s happening with digitized newspapers.  I learned that for its new digitization efforts Ancestry has partnered with ProQuest, and this time it’s better for the newspaper publishers than in previous times.  Publishers actually get a copy of the digitized papers, which apparently didn’t always happen before.  I remember the sad experience I had trying to find the Poughkeepsie Journal online after it was dropped from Fold3.  It was digitized by ProQuest, and when the online agreement expired, the Journal didn’t even have a copy of the images of its own paper.  With the new agreements that apparently shouldn’t happen to other publishers.

Wednesday was also ProQuest database day in the resource room, which I always look forward to.  For several years the conference has been able to arrange access to many ProQuest databases for attendees.  Along with about 40 historical newspaper databases, some of which I had not seen at previous conferences — Austin American Statesman, Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, South China Morning Post — there was a database I hadn't heard of before, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.  I had a field day!  I found files and reports about Jewish, Japanese, Chinese, and Sikh immigration into Ellis Island, oral interviews from 185 people who had immigrated through Ellis Island or worked there, even a series on INS investigations into prostitution and white slavery.

Thursday morning started far too early for my taste.  Because my talk was at 7:30, which I wasn’t happy about to begin with, Emily Garber organized a bloggers breakfast for 6:30(!).  I actually managed to get there early, which meant I had time for a nice cup of Earl Grey before everyone else arrived, and I was almost awake.  It’s nice to see people in person with whom you normally interact only in cyberspace, so it was worthwhile to be there.

I had been joking all conference that I was expecting about five people to show up for my 7:30 talk about the research I have done on my Cuban cousins.  I admit, it's a pretty narrow topic.  I was so happy to see thirteen people there!  My talk went well, although I finished sooner than I had expected, for which I apologized.  There were several questions afterward, though, and everyone seemed to enjoy it, so I think it was successful.

After my talk I was finally awake enough to notice that there were signs around saying that we had an additional day of ProQuest database access.  Yippee!  I was able to download the remaining oral interviews I hadn't had time for on Wednesday, plus find some additional newspaper articles.  ProQuest has never given us an extra day before, so this was a great treat.

Judy Russell’s presentation about being an ethical genealogist was straightforward:  Her three rules are tell the truth, play nice with others, and don’t tell tales out of school.   If you keep those in mind when you’re doing your research, sharing information with others, and posting family info online, everything should pretty much be fine.  That seems like a good approach for genealogy to me!

One big negative on Thursday was the session that was really nothing more than a sales pitch for research services.  The substantive information was easily shared in less than two minutes; everything else after that was the pitch (in a 75-minute session).  Someone not at the conference suggested to me that maybe what we need are to have some presentations clearly labeled as “vendor sessions.”

Friday morning, the last day of the conference, is always a mixed bag.  Many attendees leave the conference early, and sessions tend to be small.  I’m sure it’s difficult to decide what to schedule for those conditions.  A talk about proving the Jewish ancestry of a Catholic family was short on documentation (as in, none was shown) and lasted only 25 minutes.  Judy Russell spoke about some situations in which DNA has been used successfully when documentation did not exist.  And in the last time slot of the day, Michael Strauss gave an interesting presentation on the life and family of Levi Strauss (who is no relation, as he pointed out).  And then everyone began saying their good-byes and drifting away as they headed home.

I caught the end of one additional session on Friday, where two of the organizers of the IAJGS 2017 conference were seeking input on what attendees liked and didn't like this year and what they would like to see next year.  I heard some people say they have already decided they don’t plan to attend next year’s conference, which will take place July 23–28 in Orlando, Florida, the first time the conference will be held in the South.  While I agree that Florida in July is not exactly my idea of perfect weather conditions, I do hope to be at the conference.  Some research areas the organizers plan to emphasize are Jewish life in the South and in Colonial America.  Now I have an incentive to push myself to prove that the Daniel Joseph I have been researching in 1760’s Virginia is indeed the brother of Israel Joseph, a big macher in the Jewish community of Charleston, South Carolina.  I better get back to work on that research!

FGS Conference: Society Day and Librarians' Day

Here I am in lovely Salt Lake City.  It's February, but those of us here for the joint Federation of Genealogical Societies and RootsTech conferences have been enjoying relatively mild temperatures of 50's and even low 60's, rather than the snow we had been anticipating.  No complaints!

The FGS conference began on Wednesday, one day earlier than RootsTech, with Society Day.  It became clear very quickly that FGS is the red-headed stepchild in this joint-conference relationship.  Its sessions are tucked away in a far corner of the Salt Palace, much closer to JB's Restaurant than to where the RootsTech sessions will be.  If attendees actually have the audacity to want to attend sessions from both FGS and RootsTech on the same day, they're going to have quite a walk to travel between the two.  The exhibitor hall doesn't even open until Thursday — when RootsTech starts.

Getting back to Society Day, however, I figured I should attend as many sessions as possible, since I'm a board member of three genealogical groups.  I had hoped I would find helpful nuggets in at least one of the sessions, and indeed I did.  Two talks were particularly useful.

One of my boards, the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society, is working on a new policies and procedures manual, and Ann Staley of the Jacksonville Genealogical Society taught an informative class on that subject to start the day. She clearly defined the purpose of a P&P manual and outlined a good process for putting together or updating one.  Though she unfortunately didn't include the URL's in her handout, she showed three good examples of other societies' manuals which are available online.  I'll be tracking those down and downloading them to use as inspiration for the SFBAJGS project.

Later in the day, genealogy tech guru Thomas MacEntee's topic was "Technology Initiatives for Genealogical Societies."  Thomas always has great information, but I had seen that his handout dealt with several topics that had come up in discussion in recent board meetings, so I was really looking forward to hearing the specifics.  One of the best pieces of advice he mentioned was that if you create a free Web site using Weebly.com and already have your own domain name (such as http://www.sfbajgs.org/), you can transfer your newly created site to your domain, again for free.  That could be helpful not only for the society, but maybe even my own Web site!  He also mentioned that a society that sponsors a FamilySearch Wiki page no longer is required to maintain that page (though assistance is always appreciated), so it is an excellent publicity opportunity to do so, and kind of missing the boat not to.  He even described ways to use Pinterest (which I truly have never understood the point of) that may have convinced me to start using it as part of the SFBAJGS publicity efforts.  I definitely got a lot of bang for my buck from his session.  Overall, I was pretty happy with Society Day.

I actually arrived in Salt Lake on Sunday night and spent all day Monday doing research at the Family History Library.  I came fairly well prepared and retrieved/scanned about forty documents for my own family, plus about another fifty for other people.  It was a great beginning for my trip!

Even before Wednesday, though, I had begun my conference educational opportunities.  On Tuesday, I attended the Librarians' Day sponsored by ProQuest.  We enjoyed five speakers (and a great buffet lunch).  Curt Witcher from the Allen County Public Library spoke about how librarians need to change their established methods to work better with the new types of patrons who come in.  He particularly picked on what he considers to be the obsolete, old-fashioned reference desk — or, as he termed it, the "fort" — and how it divides the librarians from the patrons.  An archivist from The National Archives (of the United Kingdom, and yes, that's with a capital "T") discussed how TNA's online holdings help bring people into the archives in person to do more research.  Librarians from the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio and the Tulsa (Oklahoma) City-County Library talked about genealogy tourism and how repositories can help bring tourist traffic to their areas.  Though these talks aren't directly applicable to my volunteer work in the Oakland FamilySearch Library, there were some points I'll be bringing up when I get home (such as the reference desk as a fort to hide behind).

The big news that came out of Tuesday was during the talk by Bill Forsyth from ProQuest.  He revealed that HeritageQuest Online (HQO), long a staple offering from libraries and often accessible at home by library card holders, is undergoing a major overhaul.  HQO has partnered with Ancestry.com and is scheduled to roll out a new interface and new collections next month, in March.  The search pages on HQO will now be in the Ancestry style and will have more flexibility, such as Soundex and sounds like, instead of only exact spelling.  Several U.S. census databases will be added, such as the nonpopulation schedules.  I freely admit I have never liked the HeritageQuest interface, and I was very happy to hear that HQO hadn't gone the FindMyPast route and hired programmers to create a new, subpar interface when a good one was already available.  HQO will continue to be available through libraries, so if you have been able to use it through your local library Web site with your library card, that shouldn't change.  My only concern is that we have yet another company in bed with Ancestry.com.  "Incestuous" is becoming an understatement when describing the interrelationships in the genealogy marketplace.

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Additional comments about the conference are here for Thursday and Friday and here for Saturday and my overall impressions.

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

Big News in Online Newspapers

I received a message this morning saying that NewspaperArchive.com, one of the two best online newspaper sites and the first site I start my searches with, has been purchased by ProQuest, one of the multinational conglomerates that control much of the online information in the world today.  I wasn't able to confirm that by searching online, but I did find several references to ProQuest now handling NewspaperArchive's marketing.

One effect of the situation is that NewspaperArchive.com is currently not available through the Family History Library portal at FamilySearch Centers and Libraries, while ProQuest and the LDS Church/FamilySearch negotiate a new licensing agreement.  (I'm sure Godfrey Library has also had to renegotiate, as NewspaperArchive has been available through its portal.)  It is believed that ProQuest and the church will work something out, so NewspaperArchive should return in the near(ish) future to the portal.

I hope, however, that ProQuest does not change the current individual subscription model for NewspaperArchive.  Most ProQuest newspaper databases are available only through institutions such as universities and research libraries, and I would hate to see NewspaperArchive go that route.

Free Access to "ProQuest Dissertations and Theses" for February 2013

Samuel Brainin (z''l), USC, 1966

Every month those who have signed up for the ProQuest Discover More Corps social network have free access to one database.  This month's database is "Dissertations and Theses."  Unfortunately, the dissertations themselves are not part of the database; it is actually only an index.  Some entries have abstracts.  For most you are given the option of purchasing a copy of the dissertation.

It was still fun to poke around in the index.  I have a photo (left) of my cousin when he graduated from the University of Southern California with his Ph.D.  Now I know that it was in 1966, his dissertation topic was "The Estimation of Randomly Varying Parameters in Linear Systems", and it was in Electrical Engineering.  I also found my sister-in-law's Mathematics dissertation from Howard University.  And that's about it for my family that I know of (although my sister is threatening to go for a Ph.D.).

In the San Francisco Bay area, we have three Steve's with Ph.D.'s who are involved with genealogy (Danko, Harris, and Morse).  All of them are in the database.

Finding a relative's dissertation topic usually isn't going to take your research back further generations, but it adds richness to the information you have.  So who are the academics in your family?

Recent Updates to Online Newspaper Archives Page

I posted recently about the Wikipedia page for online newspaper archives, a portal with links to other sites with digitized newspapers, abstracts, and indices.  I just completed another round of updates and additions to the page:

• Israel: updated the list of digitized newspapers on the National Library of Israel site
• Missouri: updated the list of available newspapers on the State Historical Society of Missouri Digital Newspaper Project page
• Washington State: added newspapers on the University of Washington Library site, including four student newspapers and the Pacific Fisherman Journal (nope, not kidding, it's real!)
• General USA: added many links to ProQuest newspapers that allow purchase of individual articles.  Most ProQuest databases are for large institutions, but these newly added links allow consumers to access content from home.  Almost all of them are for more recent content, but that can also be helpful in family history research.  In addition, five new states were added to the U.S. list, plus Guam now has an entry.

And remember, since this is Wikipedia, if you find an online newspaper archive that is not listed, you also can contribute to this growing resource.  If you don't want to get involved with Wikipedia, send links to me and I will be happy to add them to the page.

Free Informational Webinars from ProQuest

ProQuest, the company that presents HeritageQuest and many historical newspaper databases online, also offers informational Webinars on how to utilize HeritageQuest (HQ) and Ancestry Library Edition.  The Webinars are free (yay!) and are stored online for later viewing, also for free.

The current list of upcoming Webinars is available here.  The list includes HQ Freedman's Bank and Serial Set records (coming this Monday, January 7, so register soon!), HQ Books and Revolutionary War records, Ancestry U.S. records, and Ancestry Canadian records.  Some of the previously broadcast Webinars available are Ancestry U.K. and Ireland records; HQ Census, PERSI, and Serial Set records; and Ancestry 1940 census.  You even have the option to download the recorded Webinars to your computer and view them at your leisure.  They require a specific viewer, but even that is available for free.

Sounds like an all-around good deal to me!  I'll be watching the Freedman's Bank/Serial Set Webinar on Monday for sure, and I've signed up for a couple more after that.

Free Library Access to Historical Jewish Newspapers in June

For the month of June only, Proquest is providing free access to libraries to its Historical Jewish Newspaper project.  Go to http://www.proquest.com/en-US/promos/feature27_pq.shtml for more information.  The instructions are to join the ProQuest Discover More Corps social network, then click on the tab there for Database of the Month.  Librarians may also request a longer free trial and other products from ProQuest.