JGSLA can help you accomplish your Jewish genealogical research
July 2006
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JGSLA DATES AND UPDATESJEWISH GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY of LOS ANGELES July 2006 |
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• Program for Sunday, July 16, 2006, 1:30 pm •
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Program: The Whole Mishpocha: Writing Family Newsletters and Planning Family Reunions Speakers: Joan Glanz Rimmon and Lori Miller You’ve spent years researching your family tree, pursuing elusive relatives and sending out detailed family histories in countless e-mails. Isn’t it time to share the fruits of your genealogical research in a more organized and productive fashion by writing a family newsletter or coordinating a reunion? Reunions are wonderful events to show off your research and share old photographs and family tree charts. Connecting with relatives you’ve never met before is a fringe benefit. Newsletters help to continue those relationships by soliciting new information that gets circulated to your extended family. JGSLA members Joan Glanz Rimmon and Lori Miller will share their expertise in making your hard work pay off by explaining the best ways to embark on these ambitious, but rewarding projects. Joan Glanz Rimmon will explain how to get started in publishing a family newsletter, and how to decide who and what to put into it. She will show you how a one-page typewritten letter to a few cousins in 1987 grew into a website and her latest publication of eight pages with photos and stories, which elicited raves from her cousins on an address list of over 900. Joan began her genealogical career in 1986 during a period of empty-nest syndrome. Her family’s six generations in America were unknown before she began researching her maternal lines and discovering her great-great-grandmother’s grave in Baltimore. With such a long history in the U.S., it was not difficult to track down relatives. Her friends say, “She opens cupboards, and relatives fall out!” Joan’s research has not been limited to America, and she has shlepped her husband, Sinclair, all over the world tracking down cousins. Lori Miller became interested in her family genealogy more than 15 years ago while interviewing her then 94 year old great aunt. Since that time she has traveled to Argentina, Ukraine and Canada to meet family members she has discovered. Her experience working in support of JewishGen for over eight years, and teaching classes and giving talks on behalf of JGSLA, prepared her for the nest step: a family reunion. Lori was inspired by a photo she found – dated 1906 – which showed five family members and a poem, inscribed in Russian, which said, in part, “When I am dead and gone…you remember me.” To that aim, in 2002 she organized 145 family members who joined together in Los Angeles to remember their aunts and uncles and thus their family heritage. Lori will tell us how she organized the reunion and incorporated her family history research into the event. *Note: If you would like to bring examples of printed family trees, photo displays, charts, newsletters and reunion photo albums to share on a display table at the meeting, please do so. We will leave time before and after the program to look over these examples and get hints and tips from other members with experience in these areas. Food: Come to Santa Monica early and have a bite at the Bookmark Café, located in the Main Library’s landscaped central courtyard. Opening at 11:30 A.M., it features salads, sandwiches, wraps, breakfast items, soft drinks, smoothies, teas and coffees. (310) 587-2665. LOCATION: Santa Monica Public Library, Martin Luther King Auditorium, 601 Santa Monica Blvd. (between 5th and 6th Streets), Santa Monica, CA 90401. (310) 458-8600 Take the Santa Monica Fwy. West, exit on Lincoln, go right (North) on Lincoln three blocks, turn left on Santa Monica Blvd. The Library will be two blocks on your right. Library garage parking is $1.00 per hour (bring change). Metered street parking is also available.
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Member Updates Debbi Korman reports that her family is “escaping” to Oregon. She wants to thank all of the JGSLA members who have shared the “thrill of the search” with her. Debbi can still be contacted at [zot8@hotmail.com].
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Share Your Hints and News Please let us know of major family events, brief research stories, exciting research successes and research hints so that they can be shared in Dates & Updates. Send your input to Hal Bookbinder, D&U Editor [hal@jgsla.org]. |
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JGSLA welcomes the following new members! Joanne Aloni-Boldon |
Cooperative Research (or Common Interest Groups) Mel Sofian [mel@jgsla.org} We need volunteer leaders from among our members for new Common Interest Groups (CIS) that are currently in formation. If you would like to share with, and learn from, others who are doing research in your geographical area of interest, and especially if you would be willing to be a leader and help coordinate a JGSLA CIS, please contact Mel Sofian. Groups are envisioned for Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. However, we are willing to set up other groups should there be interest and leadership. We hope to have at least some of these groups in place for the September 10 th JGSLA meeting. Additionally, as an assist to the various groups, we are presently creating a new index of Yizkor Books available at local libraries, including UCLA, University of Judaism, Hebrew Union College and Simon Wiesenthal Center. FEEFHS Conference cancelled, yet still on Kahlile Mehr [MehrKB@ldschurch.org] reports that the Federation of Eastern European Family History Societies (FEEFHS) Edmonton Conference, which had been planned for June 15-19, had to be cancelled due to insufficient registration. However, Ed Brandt [brandtfam@prodigy.net] reports that the East European Genealogical Society is hosting an alternate FEEFHS conference in Winnipeg during the first weekend of August. For details, see [www.eegsociety.org]. Dollarhide Census Book The Census Book by William Dollarhide is now on line and is free! It is full of helpful American and English census information as well as census schedules and sample census pages. It can be found at [www.heritagequestonline.com/prod/ genealogy/html/help/census_book.html]. |
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| Ancestry Update Bobby Furst [bobby1st@sprynet.com]Ancestry.com has added 1,003 new city directory titles to its collection for U.S. Deluxe and World Deluxe members. These databases include indexes and browsable images of the complete directories. Ancestry is available for free at many libraries including our local LDS Family History Center. Montreal Research Montreal city directories for the period 1842-1999 have been placed online by the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. The website is in French, but the early directories are in English. Later directories are in English and French. They can be found at [bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/lovell] ITS Commission Approves Public Access to Records The Commission has unanimously approved making the ITS records, located in Arolsen, Germany, open for historical research. It is anticipated that some of the member countries, notably the United States (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) and Israel (Yad Vashem) will acquire copies of these records and make them available to the public in an unrestricted manner. Cooperative Research (or Common Interest Groups) We need volunteer leaders from among our members for new Common Interest Groups (CIS) that are currently in formation. If you would like to share with, and learn from, others who are doing research in your geographical area of interest, and especially if you would be willing to be a leader and help coordinate a JGSLA CIS, please contact Mel Sofian. Groups are envisioned for Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. However, we are willing to set up other groups should there be interest and leadership. We hope to have at least some of these groups in place for the September 10th JGSLA meeting. Additionally, as an assist to the various groups, we are presently creating a new index of Yizkor Books available at local libraries, including UCLA, University of Judaism, Hebrew Union College and Simon Wiesenthal Center.
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Requests for assistance Sandy Malek [sandymalek@aol.com] Last month, we shared a request from Avrohom Krauss [krauss@actcom.co.il], of Telz-Stone, Israel, for help in finding information on a deceased LA relative, Susan Bell. Sandy soon received the following note: Dear Sandy, I’m pleased to relate to you a wonderful success story: I just received the JGSLA newsletter and discovered that Avrohom Krauss was searching for a relative of Susan Bell who passed away in 1988. I immediately recognized that she was the mother of my sister-in-law! I passed the information on to Susan’s daughter who, within hours, made contact with Avrohom. He, in turn, sent her the first picture she has ever seen of her mother’s parents! By coincidence, she and her family are visiting Israel next month, so she will meet her cousin in person soon. He already has shared with her information about her family she never knew, and she is quite excited about getting to know him. Mel Werbach [mel@werbach.com] Should you have a request for assistance, or hear of one from afar, please email Sandy so she can coordinate JGSLA help. The Jewish Virtual Library The Jewish Virtual Library [www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org] is the most comprehensive online Jewish encyclopedia in the world, covering everything from anti-Semitism to Zionism. So far, more than 10,000 articles and 5,000 photographs and maps have been integrated into the site. The Library has 13 wings: History, Women, the Holocaust, Travel, Israel & the States, Maps, Politics, Biography, Israel, Religion, Judaic Treasures of the Library of Congress, Vital Statistics and Reference. Each of these has numerous subcategories. The Reference section has bibliographies of more than 1,000 books and 1,000 web sites, and a glossary of more than 1,000 words and a time-line for the history of Judaism. |
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| Jewish Genealogy Yearbook Hal Bookbinder [hal@jgsla.org] The ninth annual edition of the Jewish Genealogy Yearbook is now available online at the IAJGS website, [www.iajgs.org]. Hal Bookbinder created the Yearbook in 1998 and continues to compile and edit it. This year’s edition includes information on 128 organizations involved in Jewish genealogy around the world, all IAJGS Achievement Award and Stern winners, all historical and planned Jewish Genealogy conferences, and for the first time, a necrology of Jewish genealogy leaders who passed on in recent years. Included are JGSLA leaders, Norma Arbit (1920-2005), Sonia Nayle (1933-2005), Charlotte Title (1922-2001) and Sylvan Zeiden (1940-2004). The Yearbook will be included as a section of the 26th IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy syllabus. Organizations covered include all of the following. If you would like to know more, check it out under the “Resources tab” at [www.iajgs.org].
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Upcoming Meetings No August meeting – see you at the Conference in NYC! Sunday, Sept 10th – Highlights of the New York IAJGS Conference and Common Interest Group Meetings, University Synagogue. Sunday, Oct 29th – Assisted Research in the LA Regional Family History Center. Check future issues of Dates & Updates and the JGSLA web site [www.jgsla.org] for any scheduling changes. 26th IAJGS International Conference Consider ordering the revised (2003) edition of Estelle Guzik’s guide to NY research, “Genealogical Resources” to plan your research activities. It is available through the conference registration website at the discounted price of $35, including shipping and handling. Check [www.jgsny2006.org].
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Dates & Updates on www.jgsla.org Dates & Updates is also available on our website, along with an index to this year’s issues. This makes using the websites recommended in Dates & Updates much easier. Just click “Publications,” then “Dates & Updates.” Sonia Hoffman, President Nancy Biederman, co-President & CFO Pamela Weisberger, Program VP Hal Bookbinder, Editor
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