Speaker: Steve Stein

One of the earliest projects of the Jewish Genealogical Society of New York was the documentation of the approximately 100 Jewish cemeteries in the New York metropolitan area. The society’s website, jgsny.org, provides extensive contact and location information about these cemeteries in the New York Metropolitan area, including links to their websites. The follow-up Burial Societies Project, begun in 1989 aimed to identify the names and locations of all Jewish burial society plots in the New York area. Included were plots belonging to landsmanshaftn, or hometown associations, whose membership often conveyed the right to be buried in a society plot; synagogues; family circles; fraternal organizations; and labor unions. It contains geographic references if applicable. The database serves as a kicking-off point for cemetery research using cemetery and public interment sites, death certificates, obituaries and other resources in the New York metropolitan area. This talk examines these resources in detail and presents several scenarios for research.

Bio:

Steve Stein, President of the Jewish Genealogical Society of New York, is a retired software professional and manager in the telecommunications industry. He has been researching his own and his wife's genealogies for more than 45 years, whose origins include Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine and Romania. Steve has volunteered for the Hungary Research Division and JOWBR, manages the KehilaLinks site for Nyasvizh, Belarus, and is completing one for Kupil, Ukraine. He has spoken to several groups in the New York area.

Meeting: