Wordless Wednesday

IAJGS Conference Wrap-up, and Visiting Family and the Cemetery

Friday, the final day of the conference, was not just throw-away sessions.  The ones I attended were interesting, even if I didn't agree with everything.

The early morning one (that I had to be at on time, because I was assisting the speaker) was given by Sandra Crystall, whose day job is using geographic information systems (GIS) in wetlands assessment for the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services.  She is also an enthusiastic genealogist.  She has taken population data collected by Dr. Laurence Leitenberg and is creating maps that show the changes in population over time for about 800 towns.  Crystall is using data for the years 1750, 1800, 1850, 1900, and 1930.  The research and project were supported by the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy and Paul Jacobi Center.  The maps show increases and decreases and indicate shifts in population from small towns to larger cities.  When the maps are completed they will be posted for online viewing.  Several people in the audience suggested that interactive maps that showed the continuum of changes would be better than the static maps that are being created, but those would take significantly more time and programming.

Certified Genealogist Rhoda Miller gave a presentation on evidence analysis.  This was essentially a talk about the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS); she discussed all the points of the GPS in relation to several examples.  Few people in the audience were professional researchers, and almost no one had heard of the GPS before.  In one example, I disagreed with her classification of a piece of evidence as being a primary source.  She had created a table showing the pieces of evidence she had found for the birth year of her grandfather.  For all but one, there was no way to determine who had given the information for his birth year (e.g., ship manifest, census return), and she listed them as secondary sources.  But for one record, an application for a grave purchase, her grandfather had given the birth year.  She classified this as primary, saying that he would know when he was born.  I asked why that was not a secondary source, as he was not cognizant at the time and could not attest to it from his own knowledge or memory.  She explained that his parents would have told him.  I did not press the point, but in my mind, that's the very definition of second-hand information:  when someone else tells you.  But I'm not a CG, so I may be missing something.

The final session was definitely one that I'll be able to use.  Vivian Kahn and Rony Golan taught a quick-and-dirty Hebrew class for genealogists.  The handout was a list of genealogical terms in English and Hebrew, complete with pronunciations, and lists of male and female names in English and Hebrew.  We got an overview of the alphabet in both block printing and cursive (which was great, because cursive is so much harder) and even some comparisons to Yiddish.  For example, I now know that cursive Yiddish uses vowels, but Hebrew doesn't.  Printed Hebrew often doesn't use vowels either, particularly on tombstones.  Those missing vowels can make translation difficult.  I'm starting slowly -- I can recognize three letters so far! -- but it's a start.  Learning Hebrew and Yiddish has long been on my to-do list, and at least this class was a first step.

There was no wrap-up or good-bye ceremony for the conference; it was just suddenly over.  I left the hotel and went straight to meet up with my cousin so we could drive to Connecticut for a visit with her mother.  It was a lovely visit, and she answered all sorts of questions about the family.  Luckily, her memory is still very good.  She also has a beautiful photograph of my great-grandmother and three of her siblings, along with all of their spouses.  She let me take a photo of the photo (even if I got it a little fuzzy) and identified everyone for me!  But she doesn't know why a cousin is in the photo and the fifth sibling isn't.

On Saturday, before I returned my rental car and boarded my flight back to California, I made one more genealogy visit, but this time the conversations were one-sided.  I drove to Brockton, not too far from my cousins' house in Sharon, and found Calvary Cemetery, where the great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and several cousins of my stepsons are buried.  I paid my respects at both of the family plots and stayed around to talk to them for a while (just like Kelly Clarkson did on Who Do You Think You Are?).  It's a well maintained cemetery, and the gravestones are in good condition, which was nice to see.  I'm glad I was able to go.

IAJGS Conference - Days 4 and 5

Wednesday afternoon at the conference I finally hit the wall.  I was headed to my fifth session of the day and suddenly my brain turned to mush.  (Well, it had been three and a half days of nonstop lectures.)  I had trouble figuring out which talk I wanted to go to, then couldn't find the room, and when I looked at the handout the words were like little black bugs walking around on the page.  I decided maybe it was time for a break, so I spent the rest of the day in the computer resource room, searching in databases I don't normally have access to.  But before I fried my brain I did attend a couple of good presentations.

Avrohom Krauss taught a class on how landsmanshaftn records can add great background information about your family members.  Landsmanshaftn were societies that Jewish immigrants started when they immigrated.  A society was usually built around everyone being from the same town or area (a landsman is a person from the same town as you).  The groups were organized to help newcomers integrate themselves into their new country while at the same time maintaining ties to the old country.  They often offered insurance to members and charitable support.  Krauss discussed the types of records created and the repositories with large collections.  If your ancestor was active in a group, you can perhaps find his (membership was mostly for men) name in the society's records, and maybe even a signature.  I have a photograph of my great-grandfather with a branch of the Workman's Circle, and now I feel inspired to look for him in their records.

Jeff Malka's session on Sephardic research was enjoyable and informative, and it didn't hurt that a lot of the resources he talked about are online, with the Dutch State Archive being particularly useful, so you can research from your chair.  One of the more interesting things he talked about was how a person might have several variations ("aliases") of his name, most of which were based on translating the name from one language to another.  So Aben Melec (Hebrew) is the same as Aben Rey (Spanish) and Aben Meleque (Arabic), and they are all based on the word maleque/meleq, which means "king" and comes from Aramaic.  Keeping track of someone's aliases and proving that they are all for the same person is an important aspect of Sephardic research.  Another tidbit was about the group of Jewish merchants who arrived at New Amsterdam from Recife.  Pieter Stuyvesant, the governor, didn't want to admit them, but he was an employee of the Dutch West India Company, and company officials said they wanted the businessmen to be allowed to settle.

1584 Map of the Azores

Thursday was a banner day -- I had "aha!" moments in three different sessions!  I guess everything started adding up from all that learnin' I've been pouring into my head all week (and taking that break Wednesday afternoon probably didn't hurt).  The first light bulb went off in another presentation on Sephardic research, this one by Schelly Dardashti.  She covered the general travel path used by many Sephardim after they left Spain and eventually worked their way to the New World, and the languages used by the Sephardic diaspora.  The Azores were one of the important stopping points for many people.  When discussing languages (which for Sephardim include Hebrew, Ladino, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Farsi, Judeo-Arabic, and a Roman dialect, among others), Schelly mentioned that names beginning or ending in "al" usually could be traced to Arabic, and these were often Sephardic converso names.  And that's when I thought of a woman I used to work with (at one point I was working on the genealogy of everyone in my office) who has a Portuguese line from the Azores by the name of Amaral.  While working on her family, I had learned that the Amarals were one of the original settling families when Portugal claimed the Azores, and that many Jews were among the settlers also.  So now I'm wondering if maybe the Amarals were originally Jewish.

The next session with a revelation was on Jewish American research before 1880, by David Kleiman.  This again was focused on Sephardic research, because probably about 90% of the Jews in the U.S. for the first 200 years were of Sephardic origin.  This time the aha was for research I had done for another woman I used to work with (yup, in the same office).  She had always been told that her ancestor was Jewish.  I had found him in a book of extracts for a county in Virginia, listed as "Daniel Joseph, Jew" (well, how much clearer can you get than that?), but hit a solid brick wall at that point.  I found someone who looked like it could (should!) be him in Rabbi Malcolm Stern's book First American Jewish Families, which had been digitized and placed online, but I couldn't prove the connection, and it's been bugging me for years.  Kleiman explained that an updated version of Rabbi Stern's family trees, with corrections, additions, and enhancements, is being built at the Americans of Jewish Descent Web site.  Between that and the other resources Kleiman discussed, I think I'm finally going to be able to connect Daniel to Israel Joseph of Charleston, South Carolina.  Then it's on to tracing their family in Europe!

The last aha was actually for my own family.  Maureen Taylor, the Photo Detective, gave a talk called "Immigrant Clues in Photographs."  She covered some of the same points that Ava Cohn had on Sunday, such as thinking about who is in a photo and who kept the photo, and some of the occasions for which people often had photos taken.  Two of the most common times were when people were getting ready to leave to immigrate, and soon after they had arrived in their new country.  And I realized that a photograph I have of my great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother with three other people (a woman and two teenage girls) had to have been taken just before my great-grandmother left Russia to come to the U.S.  Now that I have a context for the photo, I'm almost certain that the second woman in the photo is my great-great-grandmother's sister.  I still have to figure out who the other two girls are, but I'm making progress!  It is amazing how it feels when several things you've learned suddenly click together.

The rest of Taylor's presentation was very entertaining.  She showed several different photographs she has picked up over the years, with hairstyles, clothing, studio props, and other items that help determine when, where, and why a photo was taken.  One photo had two men and a woman standing kind of between and behind them, and a broom on the floor.  Taylor explained it was someone "jumping the broom", a tradition commonly associated with black Americans but which Taylor said was also a Swiss-German custom (though the Wikipedia page I've linked to mentions Gypsies but not Swiss-Germans).  And a man in the audience identified the soldier in one of the photographs she showed, which really surprised her.

The last day of the conference is tomorrow, and only a half day at that.  But I'm assisting at the 8:15 session, so I better get at least a little sleep.

Wordless Wednesday

IAJGS Conference - Days 2 and 3

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

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

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

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

Board of Special Inquiry transcript

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

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

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

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

"Who Do You Think You Are?" - Christina Applegate

This week's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? was probably my favorite type — solving a specific mystery in the celebrity's family.  And the research that was shown on screen actually looked pretty good and seemed to hold together, even though they didn't follow up on some points that seemed as though they might have helped answer some questions.

Christina Applegate was our celebrity, and the introduction talked about her career as an Emmy-Award-winning actress and producer born into a show business family.  Her main claim to fame is still having portrayed Kelly Bundy on Married . . . with Children (which I have to admit was not a show I liked; the characters were just too nasty to each other). Applegate was born in Hollywood (which is really part of Los Angeles) and grew up in Laurel Canyon (which is also part of Los Angeles).  Her parents separated when she was five months old and she grew up with her mother.  Her father moved to Big Sur and she didn't see much of him.

The mystery in the family was Christina's paternal grandmother.  Her paternal grandfather was Paul Applegate, but almost nothing was known about the grandmother except that she was supposed to have died young.  Christina's father, Bob Applegate, didn't really know how his mother died but had heard some rumors.

For the program, Bob drove down to Los Angeles to talk with Christina about what he knew and remembered.  Apparently there was some interest in the family about genealogy (or maybe it was at the behest of the producers?), because a sister got a copy of Bob's birth certificate from New Jersey. He was born Robert William Applegate on November 10, 1942 in Trenton, New Jersey (but he thought he was older!).  His birth certificate showed his parents as Paul Applegate and Lavina Shaw (age 21).  They were both born in New Jersey and were married.  Lavina's address was shown as 522 Market Street in Trenton.

Bob remembered his grandmother (his dad's mother) telling him at the breakfast table one morning that his mother had died.  He thought he was about 7 or 8 years old when it happened, which would have made his mother about 28 years old.  His grandmother told him his mother was found outside of a bar beaten to death.  (What a horrible thing to tell such a young child, whether it was true or not!  Either Grandma was blunt in general or really didn't like Bob's mother.)  Christina said, "Let's hope that that's not true," and since this program is heavy on foreshadowing, that pretty much let us know it wasn't going to be true.  She also said, "This is gonna be crazy," so we knew to expect some twists and turns.

Christina went to Trenton to start her research.  She hoped to find out why Bob had lived with his grandmother there.  She met genealogist Joseph Shumway (an employee of ProGenealogists, part of the Ancestry.com empire) at the Office of Vital Statistics.  She told him she was looking for her grandparents' marriage certificate.  (I really wish they would stop with these blatantly fake lead-ins.  Everyone should know by now the research is done ahead of time, so quit pretending already!!)  Soon after, an unnamed clerk (c'mon, guys, give the poor man an on-screen credit!) brought a copy of the marriage license to Shumway.  The license gave Bob's parents' names as Paul Schallar Applegate, born January 20, 1914, and Lavina Victorine Shaw, born October 9, 1921.  Lavina's parents were listed as Ovid Shaw and Lavina Weaver, and her address was 522 Market Street, the same address as on Bob's birth certificate.  Paul and Lavina were married in June 1941.  So this was a great start.  Shumway said he would "look" to see if there was a divorce for Paul and Lavina and sent Christina to the Trenton Public Library to find out about Lavina before she was married.

At the library Christina met with Kimberly Matthews, the library director.  (Just remember, when you do your research, the odds on you getting to meet with the director of the facility are slim and none, and Slim just left town.  Oh, unless you have Ancestry.com paying for everything.)   We were treated to more lame dialogue -- Matthews told Christina that it was a "total long shot" they might find something in the newspaper, but that they should look anyway.  So of course, what did they find but an engagement announcement.  (It was obvious they were looking at GenealogyBank.com, but of course they wouldn't show that, because they have to pretend that all the records you need are on Ancestry.  Plus they would probably owe GenealogyBank a product placement fee.  I'm sure they're still trying to find a relevant article on their own site, Newspapers.com.)  They then found a photo of Bob's mother Lavina with her sister Delilah (also on GenealogyBank), but I know from testing it myself that they didn't find it by searching on Lavina's name.  I had to search her sister's name for it to turn up.

The photo was in the Society section of the Trenton Evening Times of August 26, 1934.  The caption said that Lavina and Delilah were the daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Ovid Shaw and that they had just come back from an extended round of social visits, including an automobile tour around New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  The family was living at 111 Ward Avenue.  So at one point the Shaw family obviously had some money, even a few years into the Great Depression.

Then Matthews wanted to check Market Street to see what kind of neighborhood it was in.  Matthews told Christina to "take a look on Ancestry.com" (oh, good, we can go back to our safe haven) at the 1940 census.  The family was living at 522 Market Street, the same address as on the marriage license and birth certificate.  Matthews had Christina specifically look at the "Duration of Unemployment . . . in Weeks" column, which showed that Ovid had been unemployed 12 weeks of 1940 and Lavina 8 weeks.  The family was no longer well off, a common occurrence as the Depression wore on.

Christina left the library to head to her next stop, because Shumway had told her that he had found court documents.  Her musings to herself included a comment that Paul and Lavina had never actually lived together, which was totally unwarranted.  She knew that they had married in June 1941 and that her father was born in November 1942.  Not only is that a year and a half they easily could have lived together, she didn't even know for sure yet (oh, wait, she really did, didn't she?) that they hadn't stayed together.

Christina went to the New Jersey State Library, where she met with family law professor Meredith Schalick of Rutgers University.  Schalick walked Christina through the file of documents that had been found regarding Paul and Lavina's divorce.  Lavina filed the original complaint in October 1942, a year after Bob was born.  It was a contentious divorce, with accusations of cruelty, abandonment, abuse, alcoholism, and adultery.  From what was discussed, it seemed mostly to come down to "he said, she said", because there didn't appear to be testimony from anyone else, except for a statement from Paul's mother that Lavina idolized her baby.  Before Schalick showed the final resolution, she cautioned Christina that in the time period in question, it was extremely unusual for a mother to lose custody.  Lavina didn't lose; she was awarded custody of Bob because the defendant (Paul) had not shown her to be an unfit mother.  So it appeared that Bob actually stayed with his mother until about 1946 or so, when he was 5 years old.  Schalick also cautioned that pages might be missing from the file, but didn't explain why she thought that might be the case or what she thought those missing pages might add to the story.

Almost next door to the New Jersey State Library is the State Archives.  Christina went there with Schalick to look for Lavina's death certificate.  Schalick said she had called ahead and Joe Clutch was going to help them.  They told him they were looking for Lavina Shaw's death, probably around 1950.  He quickly found a death certificate for February 18, 1946, but it was for Lavina Weaver Shaw, Lavina Shaw Applegate's mother.  The address on the certificate was 522 Market Street (I wonder how many people drove past there the day after this episode aired?).

In the divorce proceedings, Lavina had said that her mother had helped watch Bob.  It was possible that the reason Lavina gave up custody of Bob was because her mother was no longer alive to help her take care of him.

From this Schalick made the huge leap to saying maybe they should look online for more information.  What was even more surprising about this is that they used the word "online" and didn't go to Ancestry!  Back they went to GenealogyBank.  This was another instance where they rigged the result, because if you search for Lavina Shaw, you don't find this article.  But somehow they found an obituary for Lavina V. Walton, Bob's mother, remarried to Charles S. Walton.  The obit listed her survivors as her husband; her son, Robert Applegate; and a half-brother, Victor Shaw.  Apparently Ovid Shaw had married a second time, whether because he and Lavina the elder divorced or because he remarried very soon after she died.  But that wasn't germane to the story, so they didn't even comment on it.

Now that they had a date for Lavina's death, they again asked Joe to look for the death certificate.  This time they were successful.  Lavina died March 30, 1955 from pulmonary tuberculosis, with contributory causes of cirrhosis of the liver, chronic alcoholism, and nutritional anemia.  Bob had been 12 years old when she died, not 7 or 8.  It wasn't the brutal death that his paternal grandmother had talked about, but it did lend credence to some of the accusations Paul Applegate had listed in the divorce case.  Christina commented that "we can't find out the why", but that Lavina had died of a disease and that it was a sad story, which I think everyone can agree with.

Something I wish they had followed up on in the episode was Lavina's marriage to Walton.  Depending on when it occurred, it might have been feasible for Lavina to try to regain custody of Bob.  On the other hand, her problems with alcohol might have precluded any such attempt by that time.

Christina asked her father to fly out to Trenton and they went over all of her discoveries.  I'm guessing it was pretty emotional, because instead of the back-and-forth between the celebrity and the parent that we usually have at this part of the program, it was mostly a voiceover.  At one point Bob asked, "Is there any good in here anywhere?"  The response surprised me a little:  Christina said that he had given her strength, intelligence, and talent, and that he had done that with no help.  Um, not to slam on the man, but didn't we hear at the beginning of the episode that Christina's parents divorced when she was only a few months old and he wasn't that involved with her life?  She also said her father "was given nothing to work with" as he was growing up.  This also surprised me, because we were never told that his paternal grandmother didn't love him or that she treated him poorly (well, other than her harsh comment about his mother's death).

Lavina's death certificate said that she was buried in Riverview Cemetery in Trenton. Bob and Christina went there and met Maude Snyder, the president of the cemetery, in the office.  She looked up Lavina in the index cards and told them where the plot was, but warned them there was no monument to look for.  She also told them that there was a plot reserved for Bob.  Bob and Christina wandered around a little while trying to find the plot by the row markers (I've done that!) and finally figured out which space it was.  Bob, obviously very choked up, said, "I'm gonna get you a monument, Mom."  In the most touching moment of the episode, the next shot, with a graphic on the bottom saying it was three months later, showed a brand-new monument with Lavina's name and dates on it, and "Mom, I found you."

IAJGS Conference, Boston - Day 1

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

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

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

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

A Celebrity in the Family

I'm currently in Massachusetts to attend the annual IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, being held this year in Boston, where I'll be giving a talk on online historical Jewish newspapers.  Since I don't make it out to Massachusetts very often, I decided to visit some cousins who live in Sharon, just outside of Boston.  My cousin Janis is also interested in genealogy and helps me with my work on this branch of my family.  (And I'm very excited that she'll be coming to hear my talk -- it will be the first time a family member has been able to do so!)  I call her son Yoni my "birthday cousin" because we share the same birthday, albeit 34 years apart.

Yoni has always been interested in sports, and when I met him several years ago he was already writing articles and practicing doing detailed sportscasts.  One of the first things Janis told me when I arrived was about an award Yoni had recently won.  The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association and the Young Broadcasters of America partnered this year to create two new awards -- the Bob Ryan Sportswriter and Bob Costas Sportscaster awards -- to honor two high school students.  My cousin Yoni was the winner of the inaugural Bob Ryan Sportswriter Award!

Apparently Yoni has been very busy since I saw him last!  He has published three books about his high school's sports teams (football, baseball, and basketball) and produced documentaries with highlights of the football and baseball teams' recent seasons.  Three years ago he was chosen as one of thirteen U.S. students who wrote monthly blogs for the Sports Illustrated Kids Web site.  On the local community television station he has cohosted more than 60 discussion programs about professional sports, and he has worked for three years as a play-by-play announcer for several sports events in Sharon.  And now he will be majoring in journalism and business at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

I'm a big sports fan myself, so I think this is especially wonderful.  Now I'm looking forward to seeing Yoni become a big-time sportswriter in national newspapers, so I can say, "Hey, that's my cousin!"

Audio Heirlooms

Do you have family heirlooms of the audible variety?  That would be some kind of audio recording, such as of a family event, an oral history interview of a grandparent, or maybe a singing performance by your brother.  As with photographs, these are unique items that should be identified and saved to share with future generations.

It used to be that cassette tapes were often the way these were shared.  I have two cassettes of my aunt's uncles and aunt discussing family history and other relatives.  I even have a cassette with recordings of several of my voice recitals.  Nowadays, however, the most common way to share audio is by electronic files.  If you have old recordings, you should probably consider transferring them to a digital format and then sharing them on CD's or DVD's with family members.  Recently the New York Times published a three-part series on archiving family history; the first part discussed preserving audio, including important things to think about when converting analog to digital.

Some audio recordings are national heirlooms.  The May–June 2013 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine included an article titled "Saving Our Sounds."  The National Recording Registry includes musical, spoken word, and natural sound recordings that span 150 years of our history.  The complete list of titles in the National Recording Registry is available online and includes such things as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, Fanny Brice singing "Second Hand Rose", Scott Joplin playing ragtime, and Ishi, the last speaker of the Yahi language, singing and telling traditional stories.  Some of the recordings themselves are online also.

If you don't yet have audio heirlooms to share with family members, there are some resources to help you start.  The StoryCorps oral history project allows you to record yourself and/or a relative, gives you a copy of the recording on a DVD, and archives your recording in the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.  And this coming Wednesday, August 7, Marian Pierre-Louis will give a presentation on conducting oral history interviews and sharing them, through Legacy Family Tree Webinars.

I wish I had a recording of my father's swing band performing on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour.  But if they didn't record Gladys Knight (the winner) that night, they sure as heck didn't record my father.