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2024
January, 2024
Speaker: David Forman Cornell University Library recently acquired a set of materials offering a vivid picture of continuity and change in Jewish immigrant life, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. The Jewish Institutional Ledgers Collection, acquired from an anonymous collector and donated to Cornell by the Friends of Cornell Jewish Studies, contains over 300 items, including accounting books, meeting minutes, memorial books, membership lists and other material from Jewish institutions primarily in New York City. Most of these are synagogues and Landsmanshaft organizations. Highlights of the collection are by turns visually striking, poignant, and directly relevant to our ...
February, 2024
Speaker: Ed Mitukiewicz Identifying the towns and villages where our ancestors used to live can be a critical step in finding relevant sources of genealogical information.  However, locating some of those places often becomes quite a challenging task, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, where use of multiple languages, spelling or transliteration errors, appearance of similar names in different locations and countries, frequent name changes and shifting national borders tend to introduce additional complications.  Readily available web-based resources—including digital repositories of historical maps and geographic information databases—can help to overcome many of those challenges.  This presentation demonstrates the methods and techniques of using such ...
March, 2024
Speaker: Renée Carl Stolen passports, pleading letters and fake visas all appear in the US State Department’s Records of Foreign Service Posts. These documents tell harrowing tales of families separated by WWI, and the incredible lengths people went to in order to leave war-torn Europe and reunite with relatives in America. In the years before WWI, husbands immigrated to the USA, intending to send for their family after getting settled, but the outbreak of war turned temporary situations into lengthy separations. Other cases illustrate a short visit to see family in the Old Country morphing into a years-long ordeal. Both during and particularly ...
April, 2024
Speaker: Gil Bardige Did you get your autosomal DNA results from any or all of the 4 testing companies? Do you, have tens of thousands of matches that they tell you are close relatives, only to find that they don’t share a surname or town in common?  Confused?  Frustrated?  You are not alone.  So, take a deep breath and join us in understanding your results of ethnicity and matches; how to prioritize them, and reduce the thousands of matches to numbers you can research and maybe find keys to expanding your genealogy family tree.  This webinar is for beginners and others who are ...
May, 2024
Speakers: Anna Wiernicka; Hadassah Lipsius Polish business court records began in 1916 and continued into the 1940’s. From 1915 until November 1918 Poland was under Prussian rule, which began with the appointment of a governor – Hans Hartwig von Beseler. One of his decrees issued in August 1916 required residents to register every business activity. Those commercial and industrial enterprises under his rule, both small, single person and larger enterprises, were subject to taxation. Poland attained independence in 1918, and the new head of state, Józef Piłsudski, decreed in February 1919 the establishment of a Commercial Register, thus continuing the requirement for ...
June, 2024
Speakers: Alex Calzareth, Emily Garber, Renee Steinig For our third annual members’ talks, Alex Calzareth, Emily Garber, and Renee Steinig will each present a case study that demonstrates how they solved a genealogical problem and made new discoveries in their own family research. Alex Calzareth: Alex's grandfather was born in Czechoslovakia, but the family story was that his grandfather's grandmother, Bertha Jacobsen, was actually from Hamburg, Germany, about 400 miles away. That family story was confirmed but another mystery quickly emerged: what happened to Bertha's mother, Rebecca? Alex will detail his search for Rebecca in records of three different countries using census, newspaper, probate and other ...

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