The Movement to Resettle Russian Jews in the American West, 1905-1914

Speaker: Jeffrey Veidlinger   In the aftermath of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, the British-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill embarked upon a quest to find a territory that could accept millions of Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire. When the New York banker and railroad financier Jacob Schiff proposed redirecting Russian-Jewish migration through the port of Galveston, Texas, Zangwill believed he had found the solution to the 'Jewish Question.' This talk examines what came to be known as the 'Galveston Movement' and asks what it can tell us about global Jewish communities, national migration policies, and regional identities in the early twentieth-century. Jeffrey Veidlinger is ...

Using the Tools at GEDmatch: Finding Relatives and More

Speaker: Kitty Cooper GEDmatch is a free third-party site of tools where you can upload your DNA test results and compare them with those from people who have tested at other companies. In addition, there are many analysis tools, some found nowhere else. There are also GEDCOM comparisons available, including yours to your DNA matches. This talk will focus on how to use the tools of GEDmatch for researching Jewish families, while sharing best practices for both new and experienced users. Kitty Munson Cooper is a well-known blogger on genetics and genealogy. She started blog.kittycooper.com in 2012 to keep track of her own family's DNA ...

The Kindertransports: The KTA, the 80th Year Commemorative Journey, and New Research

Speakers: Melissa Hacker, Wendy Henry, and Dr. Amy Williams From December 1st, 1938, through September 1st, 1939, nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish children traveled from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Danzig to the United Kingdom without their parents. This rescue mission became known as the Kindertransport. In 1990, more than 50 years later, a group of Kindertransport survivors in New York City came together to establish the Kindertransport Association (KTA - www.kindertransport.org). This unique volunteer-run organization was founded not solely for survivors, but as an intergenerational group with the missions of connecting these child Holocaust survivors and descendants, educating the next ...

Finding Records in Israel - IGRA and More

Speaker: Garri Regev The Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA), with more than 2,600,000 records, makes available to the public a wide variety of material from the Ottoman period through the early years of Israeli Statehood, as well as additional material about Jews from the Diaspora located in Israeli archives. This lecture will guide you through the resources on the IGRA website and also discuss additional institutions and websites with genealogy records in Israel, including the Central Zionist Archives, Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), Yad Vashem, Israel State Archives, Municipal Archives, Historical Jewish Press, and collections on MyHeritage. Bio: Garri Regev has ...

Researching our Families: Three Case Studies

Speakers: Steve Stein, Karen Franklin, and Hadassah Lipsius Three longtime members of the Jewish Genealogical Society, Inc. (JGSNY), Steve Stein, Karen Franklin and Hadassah Lipsius, will each present a case study that demonstrates how they resolved a genealogical question in their family research. Steve Stein will show how he discovered and then resolved a discrepancy regarding the identity of his wife’s Lithuanian great-great-grandmother, using a variety of sources, and ultimately applying the Genealogical Proof Standard. Breaking through this “brick wall” enabled the discovery of earlier ancestors as well as a host of contemporary relatives. While researching during the scariest days of Covid, Karen Franklin ...