All posts by Banai Lynn Feldstein

IAJGS 2019, Part 2

Day Three

It was time to give my new presentation. I had a bad feeling about the room they put me in and I was right. When I got there, the room was already full, and I wasn’t late. My session was a fire hazard. I had people sitting up the aisles and standing in the back. I heard from several people that they wanted to attend but couldn’t get in.

So Lesser Known Online Resources was a big hit. I have already submit it to other conferences and maybe I’ll finally be accepted to speak at some of those. People have approached me since that time, for two days so far, telling me they either loved it or couldn’t get in.

I next went to the Litvak SIG luncheon. I have never been to a SIG luncheon before, but since I was forced to buy some hotel food, I chose that one for the speaker and topic, which was supposed to be about archives and digitizing. The overpriced buffet meal was a tiny salad bar. And the speaker had been switched for a different topic. I am not happy about that.

I skipped the next two sessions I’d planned to go to for schmoozing or visiting the Resource Room. I got the gravestone images I wanted but couldn’t find anything I wanted from ProQuest.

I finished the conference day listening to Judi Missel and her brother talk about seven cousins who survived the Holocaust.

Day Four

I began the day at Jennifer Mendelsohn’s presentation. Hers was a beginner level session but had lots of Jewish Next Gen support in the room. It was interesting to hear what she taught from a journalist’s point of view.

I had very few things planned for the day but ended at the Webmaster’s Roundtable BOF. We had a small group, some interesting discussion, and finished early.

Quick Summary

Overall, sessions are going well. Speakers are interesting. Everything related to food is a disaster. Well, the conference food is. Going out to eat with cousins and friends is wonderful.

IAJGS 2019, Part 1

It’s summer again. That means it gets up to about 100 degrees for a while, the weeds stop growing making the yard work a little easier, the swamp cooler leaks and I can’t get anyone to come out to my house to fix it, and it’s time for the IAJGS annual conference on Jewish genealogy.

This year, IAJGS is in Cleveland, Ohio. I have some relatives here somewhere, but I don’t know who they are. I was in contact with one person from this branch of the family, but I didn’t get a response before the conference started to help me contact the ones who still live here. I didn’t leave myself extra time to visit people or tour the city or the cemetery anyway. I usually give myself a few days at these things.

Saturday was for acclimating, walking around the hotel to see what was here, trying to figure out where we could go for food all week. And the conference began on Sunday, as it always does.

As the years have gone by, I’ve tended to go to fewer lectures, but as we head in to the third day, I’ve gone to a few good ones, even some repeats from previous years.

Day One

Ron Arons has updated his lecture with some newer content and a new title. I first heard Avrohom Krauss talk about landsmanshaftn research years ago and I think this was the first time I went to his presentation in person.

The keynote was fun, as it usually is. One thing IAJGS seems to do well is find good opening keynote speakers. This year, Daniel Goldmark spoke about Jews in popular music. There were a lot of them.

The presidents’ reception was on the top floor of the hotel. It had a nice view.

The opening reception was different this year. It wasn’t right after the keynote or free, but at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I wasn’t impressed, with what I saw at the museum or the terrible way they served the food. Apparently there are six floors of the museum. Me and friends walked around one floor and then left for dinner.

Day Two

I began my second day in the Belarus SIG meeting where Miriam Weiner spoke about her research there. I worked for her in my first year of being a professional genealogist and was happy when see she remembered me at the reception the day before.

Walking around at random after, I found myself standing in front of my cousin. We just discovered each other a couple years ago through DNA. She’s my father’s second cousin on his biological side. We sat and talked for a bit before splitting up for some sessions. I’ll be seeing her more.

Cousins Elise Friedman and Hariette Gershon spoke about their Palevsky research and a global surname study. I was hoping for some tips on the ones I’m planning on. I have or have plans for three at this point: Mularzewicz, Nosatsky, and Feldstein. One of those names is going to be a lot more work than the other two, so it might get put off for longer. In the Palevsky case, they had more than one person working on it.

I skipped a couple meetings to see an Ava Cohn presentation on identifying photos. I keep missing her and she doesn’t get recorded, so I made sure to get to one this year.

I had dinner with a friend in the hotel and then back for the JewishGen session. They’re getting a new web site, finally, was the main take-away. That didn’t sound as exciting to me as people made it out to be. They announce the really exciting stuff when I’m not there. Or maybe it’s sitting through the whole meeting that makes it not as exciting and just hearing the highlights after is quicker. The reception after was on par with the opening reception, in how disappointing and disorganized it was.

Quick Summary

So far, so good. I’ve enjoyed all the presentations I’ve been to. The food has been a mess — I’ve heard other stories too. And it’s good to see some of my friends that I only see at genealogy conferences.

Getting To The Point With The Pikes

Years ago, someone on Twitter quoted Thomas Jones as he was giving a lecture at some genealogy event: “Genealogical proof is not a vote. The most censuses in agreement do not win.” I liked the quote and saved it. But I don’t completely agree.

I was working with someone who is almost my cousin to straighten out a family of her cousins. We had worked on this before, but her list of kids was a little different than mine, especially the order the kids were born. I had a bunch of vital records for them along with many censuses.

It was time, once and for all, to straighten it out. So I opened up a blank spreadsheet and charted them. I started with the censuses, just looking at the kids who were living with the parents.

Pretty quickly, I could see where I had gone wrong. My database was following the 1900 census, where the birth dates were listed in more detail, rather than just the age. But that was the outlier of all of them. The other censuses all agreed on the ages, showing each kid aging between four and six years between censuses, each census five years apart, whereas 1900 was all over the place in comparison. Nathan and Gussie were the biggest problems, as Nathan was far out of order and Gussie didn’t exist in any other record.

I then went on to look at other records I had. There were some kids who never showed up in the census because they died young in between the years. I had several birth and death certificates and one or two other records with exact dates for ten of them. Nathan’s death certificate matched with his age in 1905. And everything matched with the later censuses. The 1900 census was the outlier.

It turned out that my cousin had the kids’ birth order more correct than I did because I had used the earliest census more, and that one turned out to be quite wrong. When I work on families with no vital records, or people that didn’t know their actual birth dates, I tend to use the earliest information I can find, figuring it’s maybe the most accurate. In this case, that was a bad idea.

So the four censuses, along with more than ten other records, outvoted the one. The most censuses in agreement won.

Maybe Thomas went on to say that you need additional supporting documentation along with the censuses, which is what I did. Maybe I need a better source for his quote.

An Unusual Certificate

I found a most unusual certificate yesterday.

A good amount of my genealogy research in the US is attempting to find the origin location of immigrants. One of the best documents for doing this is naturalization records. It’s best if they naturalized after 1906 when the federal government standardized the forms, providing much more information.

Many of the documents I see contain a certificate of arrival along with the declaration and petition. Someone had to look through the ship lists and find the immigrant’s arrival. They marked the original ship list page and filled in a certificate saying they found it, the name the person arrived under, the ship, date, and port.

But yesterday, I found something new. It was a certificate of arrival that said a record of his arrival couldn’t be found. This was a first for me.

Ship list not found
Certificate of Arrival – Ship list not found – “No record of his arrival could be found for the reason that the Immigration authorities are unable to locate it from the information furnished.”

Also of interest, the Declaration listed the same ship as his wife’s naturalization years later. (She had no certificate of arrival and I haven’t found her on the ship either.) The Petition listed “SS Unknown”.

An additional detail: he was about 21 years old for his arrival. So it’s not like he arrived as an infant and had no memory of the event. And his naturalization was in 1924.

The next question is, can I find the ship list that the immigration authorities couldn’t find when the guy was alive? Well… I may have already found it. It needs more research to verify if it’s really him.

Warsaw, Poland – Summer 2018 Trip, Part 6

I didn’t mean to take this long to finish blogging about my summer trip, but at least it’s still during the same year. My trip ended back in Warsaw. I stayed in a hotel near the Old Town.

I went out to the Jewish Cemetery on Okopowa street, passing Umschlagplatz on the way. This cemetery was in better condition than Łodz, and was also actively being cleaned up and worked on.

In 2012, the POLIN Museum was still under construction and surrounded by fences, so I couldn’t see all the memorials that were immediately around it. This time, I got to see those and the museum. I spent four hours in the museum, but I rushed some of it because I was hungry for hours. Clearly I needed to prepare more time as there was so much to see and learn. I found two things in that museum that directly affected my own genealogy research.

There were crowds at the Jewish Ghetto Memorial outside of the POLIN Museum. On the way in, there was a row of people holding Israeli flags and a shofar blowing. On the way out, a group sang Hatikvah.

I wanted to go to the Jewish Historical Institute for some Belarus research, but the RtR site implied they had records that the JHI site did not have. instead, since I’d already seen the building, I headed to the Old Town and, on the last day of my visit, I joined the walking tour. I had seen almost everything on the tour already, but I got to hear some great stories about the Ikea castle and the bell, among others. The Warsaw Museum was free that day, so I spent some time in there too.

I ate in the Old Market Square, the tourist trap restaurants, but they were good. And then finally, I had to leave.

As a bonus on the flight back to the US, we flew over Greenland.

Lodz, Poland – Summer 2018 Trip, Part 5

My next visit was completely unplanned. To get to Kalisz, I had to change trains in Łódź, so I thought I might just make it a longer stop on the way back. Otherwise, I would have just gone back to Warsaw.

In JRI-Poland, I found a marriage record that was possibly my great aunt Reizel Halpert, and the couple were buried in the Łódź cemetery. I was able to get the image from JRI without going to the archive, saving me the archive visit.

My hotel was just off of Piotrkowska street, which is a bit of a tourist attraction. I walked up and down it a few times. The street is sprinkled with statues and a Walk of Fame for Polish cinema, along with a few impressive murals (and some I saw on other streets). I went out to Manufaktura; currently a mall, a cinema, a museum; but once the site of Izrael Poznański’s textile manufacturing complex.

And then I caught an Uber out to the Jewish cemetery. I was looking for four people but didn’t find any of them. My biggest problem was that JRI would not work on my phone, so while I was at the section, I couldn’t look up the stones I was looking at to figure out the location of my people in relation. Most of my people were on the right side out in the forest area. One was probably covered in ivy. Another just looked like an overgrown forest with no signs of stones, and two were in sections I never actually found. Still, I wandered around the cemetery for a few hours. Then I headed a little north to the ghetto area and Radegast railway station. The museum was closed for renovations and fenced off.

Checking online just before I left for anything else to do, I noticed that I had already taken a picture of the archive without even knowing it. One Uber driver knew English and suggested that Łódź was boring and I should visit Wrocław. I guess I’ll have to try that my next visit to Poland since I only had a few days left before my flight home.

Kalisz, Poland – Summer 2018 Trip, Part 4

After a few days of walking around Warsaw, I bought a train ticket and headed off to Kalisz. My previous trip to Poland included a visit to the Konin archive for records and I didn’t make it to Kalisz, so it was a priority. My grandmother was born in Kalisz and most of my research on her side of the family has been in Kalisz  records, with some in nearby Konin.

I found a picture online of a sign at the Jewish cemetery stating that it was open on Tuesdays. I walked over and found it wasn’t open. A call to the caretaker, Hila, and I had a plan to revisit on Wednesday, August 15th, which was two major holidays in Poland on the same day while everything else was closed. She pulled up on a bike and I headed in with my camera in hand. There was also a museum in the building, which finished off my visit. After my first glance through the gates from the day before, I was surprised to find so many more gravestones on the property than I expected, although many were piled and stacked up so the writing wasn’t visible, while others were hidden behind tall weeds. Hila barely knew any English but I think she was trying to tell me that many of the stones were recovered from the nearby streets and apartment buildings.

I didn’t go out to where the old cemetery had been because I read that it was just apartment buildings, there were no markers about its existence, and that the boundaries were not even known anymore. It was a little out of the way of everywhere else I went in the city, and the day I sort of headed to it, it started to rain and I didn’t have my umbrella.

I wanted to visit the archive, just for the sake of visiting, but didn’t have much to do there, with only one year of records not yet digitized, and it was quite a distance from the city center. Instead, I went to the Urząd Stanu Cywilnego, the civil registration office. The building had quite a crowd. Ignoring the signs telling me to take a number, I went upstairs to where the office was, pleasantly finding no crowd at all. A couple of people started asking me questions, but the Poles talk very quickly and are difficult for me to understand. Soon someone came along who knew English, so the conversation progressed much easier for me. My problem was that my grandmother was probably born in 1914, but the archive skipped over that year and I hoped the USC still had it. Additionally, I’d found the death of her sister in 1915, one year old. Was she a twin? I really needed 1914.

They didn’t have it. But the woman took a look in what she had and found the 1916 index, where Alta Galpert was listed, and it also noted that she was born in 1915.

This was good news! The archive had the 1916 books, but they hadn’t been digitized yet. It meant that I didn’t miss her birth in the missing 1914 book, just her sister’s. I decided to wait until they are digitized rather than heading out there for the one record. Maybe I can encourage them by email to scan the books sooner than they had planned.

I walked around the Old Town area a few times while I was in town, which was just over the bridge from my hotel. The town hall building had an observation deck, but it was under renovation at the time.

Warsaw, Poland – Summer 2018 Trip, Part 3

When the IAJGS conference concluded, my roommate’s daughter showed up, so I headed out to another hotel for a few nights, where the price was lower.

This is where my plans ended. I had a couple of rough ideas of what I’d do and gave myself almost two weeks in Europe before my return flight, but I was even less prepared this trip than the previous one. I was actually hoping that some people would want some research done, so I somehwat expected to not have time to do my own. But alas, for all the interest after my previous trip to Europe, I was here just for myself.

And then, the walking started. I thought I’d go on the Old Town walking tour, but I went out for a walk on my own first. Once I took a good look at the map, I could finally orient myself from my previous visit six years earlier. That time, I came in to Warsaw through the train station, which was just a few blocks from my hotel. And ulica Sienna was in between the two, the last remnant of the ghetto wall. There were lots of memorials to the ghetto wall in Warsaw with engravings on the ground showing where the wall was, including one right next to my hotel, but I believe that one is the last original piece.

Six years earlier, I had marked a bunch of things to see on a map and I didn’t spend much time in Warsaw to do them. This time, I opened up that map and went looking for it all. The old map was not of great quality in my phone, but I managed to find everything on it and more. Philip had shared a Google map to the conference, and he put a couple new things on it. As I did six years ago in Krakow, I accidentally walked farther than I meant to and made it all the way to Old Town in Warsaw. So I skipped the tour that I was thinking of doing the next day.

I headed to the Warsaw Uprising Museum on Sunday, when it was free. After standing in line for longer than I should have, I gave up and went walking again, all the way back to Old Town and then across to The Palm from my 2012 map.

IAJGS Conference – Summer 2018 Trip, Part 2

After my family reunion in Maine, I headed out to Warsaw, Poland for the IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy. The two events fell on the same weekend. I missed two days of the conference. Because of that, I felt like the conference was just starting as it was actually ending.

It’s good to be the webmaster because I have access to the On Demand videos, so I will be able to watch the opening session and any others that I missed that were recorded. I’d consider buying them if I didn’t already get them. The opening sessions are usually really interesting.

I met a cousin at IAJGS this year. It’s not easy for Ashkenazi Jews to research enough to find fifth cousins, but I did that during this past year. Sady, I did not get to meet him. He was visiting with his mother and went home before I arrived in Poland. But I did get to meet my fourth cousin, once removed, Myra! We just connected some months ago. She is the first person I have found who attends IAJGS conferences who turns out to be my cousin. I have lots of DNA cousins, but we’ve never found the genealogy connection. She’s also my first confirmed Australian cousin (along with her descendents) and had an exciting story of how her ancestors went from Poland to Siberia and China. Myra found a marriage record and contacted the people in the JewishGen Family Finder with the new-to-her surname, Mularzewicz. And because of her diligence, we also made contact with three people in another branch of our family that we found online too.

I gave two presentations, went to a few SIG and BOF meetings, and attended just a few other lectures. I reprised Search as an Art on Friday and a new session called Three Adoptions and an Ethical Dilemma was on Wednesday. I think they both went really well. The BOF that I lead, the Webmasters Roundtable, was well attended; much more than I expected in Poland.

At the banquet, I received the IAJGS Award for Outstanding Project for CSI: Crowd Sourced Indexing! IGRA nominated me and made me an honorary member after the conference.

I don’t usually get a lot of photos from the conferences because my cameras don’t do well indoors, and I’m picky about good pictures. Also, crowds-at-conferences pictures never turn out the way I hope.

IGRA folks shared some other pictures that include me, but I’m just posting the ones from my camera here.

Maine – Summer 2018 Trip, Part 1

It seems to be time for me to begin catching up with my blogging. Here I am, settled into my hotel for the night in Kalisz, Poland, and I haven’t posted much of anything online about what I’ve been doing. With the other conference bloggers already on their way, I decided I’d get started.

This year’s summer trip is a big one. Just like the IAJGS conference in Paris set me on a trip a month long in Europe, so did the IAJGS conference in Warsaw.

To begin my trip to Europe, I went to Maine. Yes, the state. I began my trip to Europe in Maine.

My cousin Bonnie threw a smallish reunion. The Wolfe family was based in Portland, Maine for a while, where she still lives, so she invited a bunch of cousins to see where their ancestors lived, where they worshipped, and generally to walk in their footsteps.

I arrived earlier than most and spent a couple nights at Bonnie’s home. She drove me around and pointed things out along the way, most of which we revisited for the official reunion or I saw again on a trolley tour. We visited the two Portland area Jewish cemeteries where relatives and almost relatives were buried. And we visited four lighthouses.

Then the other cousins started showing up. I ended up rooming with Cheryl and hanging out with sisters Stacey and Sydney. As it turned out, these were the only people at the reunion who are not my cousins, but they were a lot of fun.

How are they not my cousins at a family reunion? Bonnie invited mostly people that she knew in the Wolfe branch of the family, and a few outside of it. It was supposed to be a Szleper/Shemper reunion: Moses Wolfe married Ida Shemper then Ruchel Szleper, who later went by Rose Bornstein. While a few non-Wolfes were supposed to be there, in the end, it was just me and the Wolfe pack (and spouses and significant others).

Bonnie arranged for a little walking tour, starting at the active synagogue, going to the house where Moses and Rose lived, and going to the ex-synagogue that they helped to found. The next day, we had a big meal farther south and went to Old Orchard Beach Pier. We finished off with a brunch at the community room at Bonnie’s home. Each day had a few more people join in and she left us plenty of time for touring and touristing.

It was a blast. I got to meet a pack of Wolfe cousins all in one place. I’d already met a few, but there were so many more I was already in contact with mostly via Facebook. Plus, there were a few surprise attendees too.

Besides weddings and such where a bunch of family show up and it’s sort of a reunion, this was only my second family reunion. (The first was five people, so this was really different.) I do hope that more of my relatives plan things like this. I wouldn’t be able to decide which branch of the family to do first, how big to make it, where to go, or what to do. But I’d be happy to try to help in the planning and the finding of relatives to invite.

Update: It has been pointed out to me that 50 people is not a “smallish” reunion. While I have seen pictures and heard of reunions of 100 people, I can agree that 50 was probably at least medium sized. Also that five generations of Wolfes have lived in Portland, which means, I’ve had relatives living there for over 100 years.