The Sugihara Refugee Story: Survivors and Those Without Whom This Story Would Not Be Told

Speaker: Mark Halpern Most Jewish genealogists know the story of Chiune Sugihara, known as the Japanese Schindler. Sugihara issued over 2,000 Japanese transit visas that enabled many Jews to escape war torn Europe in the summer of 1940. But there is so much more to the story. There were many people – Europeans, Americans, Japanese – who helped to save these people. We will identify some of them and talk about their exploits. We will trace one Polish Jewish woman’s journey from Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Poland to Santa Monica, California using her Sugihara transit visa to ultimately obtain US citizenship. Her journey ...

The Rest of the Story: Finding Your Family in Online Newspapers

Speaker: Janeen Bjork Janeen Bjork will share her search methodology via several case studies that illustrate how anyone can find and preserve family items from online newspapers. The presentation begins with a lesson on OCR (optical character recognition, the technology that allows newspapers to be searched online), and how to get around its significant failure rate. It continues with best practices for conducting research in about a dozen popular newspaper resources. There will be examples and a walk through the websites that you’ll want to explore. If you leave out online newspapers from your genealogy research toolbox, you are missing out on ...

Eliciting Stories in Genealogy

Speaker: Zack Ellis   For genealogists, storytelling and interviews can add the elusive historical texture that factual documents simply cannot provide. Zack will demonstrate the use of The Hero’s Journey storytelling framework as a guide for preparing for an interview, eliciting compelling stories, asking follow up questions during the interview, and effectively retelling those stories.  Zack is the founder and CEO of TheirStory, a web-based, interviewing and storytelling platform that allows individuals, families, and oral historians to record, archive, and share stories they want to remember. Meaningful stories and conversations (whether done individually or between people talking live from across the world) can ...

SURVEYS AND MAPS OF GALICIA: VISITING TOWNS AND MEETING NEIGHBORS

Speaker: Dr. Andrew Zalewski  Co-sponsored by Gesher Galicia Galicia under Habsburg rule (1772–1918) was home to the largest Jewish community in the multiethnic empire. Austrian censuses, postcards and maps, together with newspaper clippings and pamphlets, bring to life Jewish presence in cities, such as Lwów and Kraków, and other, smaller towns. Market squares, streets, and schools—situated close to synagogues and churches—provided shared spaces for Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians. Those attending will also “enter” 19th-century homes to meet Jewish inhabitants—all illustrated by Gesher Galicia’s archival collections. Reconstructing the life in former Galicia, a province of Austria-Hungary and today divided between Poland and Ukraine, ...

Researching New York Resources Remotely

Speaker: Jordan Auslander Co-Sponsor: JewishGen As the cosmopolitan gateway to the United States, New York City has always been a magnet for immigrants. Throughout the United States an estimated 40 million can trace roots to an ancestor who lived in Brooklyn. While many families passed through or settled in Gotham, not all family members came to the US, and some of those who remained in Europe and elsewhere may have lost contact with their American cousins. While on-site research is the optimal approach to research, this is not always convenient or feasible, especially now. Nevertheless, much can be accomplished in advance ...

Rescue and Resettlement: Researching Refugees from Nazi Europe

Speaker: Karen Franklin Co-Sponsors: JewishGen in Partnership with Leo Baeck Institute For more information and to register, go to: https://www.jewishgen.org/live   Karen Franklin is Director of family research at the Leo Baeck Institute; co-founder and president of the jury of the Obermayer German Jewish History Awards; Past co-chair of JewishGen's Board of Governors; Past president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, and recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award; Past President of the Council of American Jewish Museums.    

"Welcome to the Family": A Story of Hidden Jewish-Polish Heritage

Speaker: Marysia Galbraith Co-sponsor: Jewish Genealogical Society, Inc. and American Friends of POLIN Museum Cultural anthropologist Marysia Galbraith conducted research on Polish national identity for 20 years before she realized she would never really understand her personal connections to Poland until she confronted a family secret: her mother’s family was not just Polish, but also Jewish. Since 2011, she has found family photographs, collected memories from relatives, searched archives, and traveled to the towns and cities of her ancestors. Not only has she traced her ancestors back into the 18th century, she has also, more importantly, found living relatives—in the US, Israel, ...

A Forgotten Land: Growing up in the Jewish Pale

Speaker: Lisa Cooper Co-sponsored by the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute at the Center for Jewish History Based on recorded conversations Lisa Cooper’s father had with his mother, Pearl, about her early life in Ukraine, A Forgotten Land is the story of one Jewish family in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, set within the wider context of pogroms, World War I, the Russian Revolution, and civil war. Many Jewish immigrants to the West refused to talk about the ‘old country’, choosing to forget the unhappy times, not to pass on their memories. Lisa is fortunate that her ...

Researching Your Litvak Roots...with LitvakSIG and More

Speaker: Judy Baston Do you want to know more about your Litvak heritage? LitvakSIG’s searchable All Lithuania Database (ALD) provides the primary foundation for Litvak genealogical research, with translations of over 2.2 million Jewish records, census and vital records key among them.  Also in the ALD database are data from records in Lithuanian archives for a number of towns in Belarus and Poland. This presentation will survey the LitvakSIG database and website, as well as other major resources for Litvak research, such as JewishGen, Yad Vashem and district research groups. Learn how to determine what records are available and how to ...

Lithuania to Brooklyn: Preserving a Family Collection & History

Speaker: Diana Korzenik Co-sponsored with the Brooklyn Jewish Historical Initiative Brooklyn native Dr. Diana Korzenik first conceived of her book, Lithuania to Brooklyn, The Rabbi Daniel and Minnie Shapiro Family, as a way to preserve and document her collection of her maternal grandparents’ family objects now in New York’s Yeshiva University Museum. In that process she uncovered facts about the treasures — and the pains — of her grandparents' and parents’ lives, revelations that signal a departure from her family’s years of silence about the Old World, so familiar to many immigrant families. Dr. Korzenik will first detail her learning how to preserve her ...