← Family Tree Magazine Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
The air is getting crisp and for many of us, that means a little extra time to dive into our family history. As genealogists, we spend years building out family trees. But what if you could do more than just connect the dots? What if you could bring those names on your tree to life? This is where Newspapers.com comes in. Imagine reading your great great grandparents wedding announcement, finding an article about your ancestors business, or even seeing a photograph of the house where your Grandma grew up. Newspapers.com is an incredible resource for anyone passionate about genealogy. With more than 29,000 historical newspapers, you can search for your family's names, their hometowns, or important dates and discover the small personal details that transform a name on a page into a real person with a real story. And with the Holidays approaching, a Newspapers.com gift subscription is the perfect present for the family historian in your life. It's a gift of discovery, of connection, and of countless untold stories waiting to be found. Just head over to newspapers.com familytreemagazine to learn more and purchase a subscription for someone special. That's newspapers.com familytreemagazine. Your favorite genealogist will thank you. Welcome to Family Tree magazine's Best Websites podcast. This is the podcast devoted to finding the best websites to help you with your genealogy research. I'm Lisa Louise Cook. Today our Featured website is jewishgen.org here to tell us more about it is Caitlin Hollander, Wash. She's the chief genealogist at JewishGen. Hi, Caitlin.
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B
Hi. Thank you for having me.
- [01:59]
A
We're delighted you're here. This is a wonderful website with so many valuable resources. I'd love to have you just start us off giving us an overview of the mission of the website and kind of what it offers the genealogist.
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B
So essentially our mission is to preserve our Jewish family history and heritage for future generations. So what we are is we are the global home for Jewish genealogy. Because the Jewish people are a Diaspora people, we don't focus on a record set from a single location like many websites do. Instead, we're looking at the greater Jewish experience. So whether that means notary records from the Ottoman Empire, military records from whether that means we're looking at documents relating to voting records in the Russian Empire or name adoptions in the areas that would eventually become Germany, it's a fairly wide net of records and resources. Record sets, as applied to the Jewish people, tend to be unique among other document types. You'll run into additional records just because of the nature of the community as well as separate record sets because different laws tend to historically apply to Jewish communities. So we've been around since 1987. We're actually one of the older genealogy resources out there on the Internet.
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A
If I'm not mistaken, you make this available for free to researchers, do you not?
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B
Yes, we do. And so we have resources that are available that sort of go beyond the record sets. We also have resources such as the Yizcor books, as the community's databases, the Kahilaling, basically documents that are providing some of the context around the records. So instead of just, you know, having names and dates, it helps sort of flesh out the story of people with.
- [03:49]
A
That kind of variety of records. Like you said, coming from so many different locations. What do you suggest to the new researcher or somebody who's new to your website? What should they come prepared with so that they can get a good start?
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B
Come prepared with knowing as much as you do. So I typically recommend try and find at least a region name. You know, if you say somebody says, oh, well, my ancestors came from Poland, that's a complicated thing to say because, you know, Poland as we think of it today doesn't really exist on a map before, even before 1919, but the one we think of today doesn't exist until much later. So where are they coming from? What languages are they speaking? Are they speaking Russian? Are they speaking German? Are they speaking, you know, what languages are they speaking? What country do they say they're from? Because somebody who says that they're from Austria might not mean Vienna, they might mean Lviv, which is today in Ukraine. So sort of come in with that context of where are my ancestors saying they're from? To help yourself narrow things down, come in with the idea that the names that they're using may not be the names that are on documents. I usually recommend getting a look at a grave if you can find a Hebrew name. That tends to be a major help when you're doing the actual research and sort of come in with an open mind and willingness to ask questions. Our discussion groups and our communities are very, very active. It's one of the most active parts of our websites, and I always recommend that people sort of jump in and say, hey, can you help me?
- [05:24]
A
Well, that's fantastic to know. So you've got the advantage of tapping into the brain trust of many people doing the same type of research. I'm getting the sense from the records you've been describing and talking about where they're from that is this more European focused or US focused or just a mix. And if it's More on the European side, should we spend some time on the US side looking at US records to find potentially what the name of that country or that village might be.
- [05:56]
B
So I typically recommend, because we are global websites, so we have records from the US we have records from the uk, we have records from South Africa, we have records from different countries that I could describe as, you know, destination countries, countries people moved to. The records that we have from those countries tend to be the religious records or the records pertaining to the religious life. So spend some time looking through civil records from the country that the family. But we're not a European exclusive website. Like I said, we have records from the Ottoman Empire, we have records from Syria, Iraq. We're not, you know, we have records out of some of the Chinese Jewish communities. It's a very, very global website.
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A
So if you have ancestors that came here to America and you find a record and it mentions a village or a location and you're not sure where that is or if that even still exists, if that's the right name to be researching, how do you really zero in? What kind of tools do you have on the JewishGen website that can help them make sure they're looking in the right place?
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B
So we have a tool. It's actually probably one of my favorite tools out there. It's one I use probably 10, 15 times a day at this point. It's the JewishGen Communities database. So if you go onto our website and click Discovery, there's an option for what's called the Town Finder or Communities database. And what that allows you to do is search for a Jewish community that has existed historically under any of the names that it has historically existed under. The town where my great grandfather was born has multiple names. It has names. It was part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, so it has a name in German, it is now part of Poland, it has a Polish name and it also has a Yiddish name. And there's variations upon all of those names. If I search, not only is this a phonetic search, so I'm looking for anything that is phonetically similar to maybe a town that I only heard from a great grandparent, but I'm also looking under all of the names of that town. So I'll get the Russian translation, I'll get the Yiddish translation, I will get all of the variations that this town has gone by. Because many towns of course have their names changed. You know, you might have a town that at one point is part of Prussia, is now part of Poland and has two completely different names historically so that's really going to be the first major stop. And once you click on the Towns database, not only will it give you that context, tell you what country this town was in at various times in its existence, but it will also tell you if there's something like a Yizcor book, if we have a cemetery database page, anything along those lines, and it'll give you the location on a map, which is always extremely useful for giving some context.
- [08:36]
A
Yeah, that's an invaluable tool. You've mentioned several different things so far there on the site. What other tools or collections or functionality on the website do you feel like people should just not miss?
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B
Our Yizcorp books are something that. I know I keep using that term, but it is something that is invaluable not just in the context of the Holocaust, which is usually how people look at them, but also in the context of understanding where somebody was from. So I typically describe a Yizcor book to people who've never heard of them as it's like a eulogy for a town. So after the Holocaust, survivors from different areas got together and they wrote about the place that had been. So, like a eulogy, you talk about the person's life and then you talk about the end and what comes after. Similar with these Years Corps books, it talks about the history of the community in the town. This is where we are. This is what it was like growing up here. This is what my teachers were like. This is who made her shoes. This is what the market days were like. This is how we celebrated the holidays. And it gives this beautiful, rich tapestry before it goes into the horrors that were suffered by the town. And typically eyewitness accounts and then listing off the names of those who were killed. So it provides an incredible amount of context both for what was before and then what happened.
- [10:02]
A
So those are under the discovery tab@jewishgin.org and it's Y, I Z K O R Yizkor book. And I see translations here.
- [10:13]
B
Yes, search it. Yeah, because they're originally in everything from Yiddish. They're in Hungarian, Czech, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hebrew. So we actually have a team of volunteers that does the translation work for them.
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A
I see that you have training, information, you've got education there. So if somebody feels like, oh, I'm new to this, I don't even know where to begin, tell us a little bit about the kind of education they can get at the website.
- [10:39]
B
So there are a couple of different options. We offer regular webinars, but we also do have a more robust education program that involves regular classes, assignments, and really in depth education on how to do genealogy. In addition, we also have if somebody is located in New York City or happens to visit New York City, we do have an on site location where you can sit down with one of our genealogists, including myself, and we'll actually sit down with you and work on a problem. And that's going to be located at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, which is our parent institution in New York City.
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A
That would be the perfect trip for anybody doing this kind of research. And of course today they can head right over to jewishgen.org and get started. Kaitlyn Hollander was Thank you so much for sharing, really this invaluable website. I loved your stories. I'm with you. I think sometimes those signatures, just knowing that they were holding that pen, that pen hit that paper and that's them speaking to you through a record is just tremendous. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
- [11:42]
B
Thank you.
- [11:46]
A
Thanks so much for joining me for the Family Tree Magazine Best Websites Podcast. You can find a link over to this month's best website@familytrainmagazine.com best podcast. Also, while you're at the website, I would encourage you to sign up for our free email newsletter. It's the perfect way to stay in touch with everything we've got going on at Family Tree Magazine, including our other podcast, the Family Tree Magazine Podcast. I'm Lisa Louise Cook and you can find me at my website, genealogygems.com where you'll find links to my Genealogy Gems podcast and our YouTube channel. Until next time, have fun climbing your Family Tree.