I watched the latest WDYTYA? episode about Lisa Kudrow as it aired on Friday night. I have a lot to say about this from many different aspects. As usual, my thought may be a bit scattered but I hope you can follow along.
1. I watched the show with my wife, who I have to say has been a trooper and has willingly watched the first two episodes with me. But I think this may be the last one she watches. I think it was just the expectation that this was going to be a family history and discovery show and not a grueling reminder of the atrocities of the Holocaust. I think the graphic descriptions of what happened to Lisa's family and the Jews of Ilya were a bit too much and may have missed the target audience. I can see this kind of discussion coming up in a Holocaust documentary, as it should. But on an 8pm, Friday night, national TV show? A bit much.
2. My first point does not in any way mean that reminding people what happened during the Holocaust is not important. It certainly is. And the best example of why it is important is Lisa herself. How can a descendant of Holocaust victims have absolutely no idea what went on? It could be the suburban, southern California upbringing. But in a Jewish family? I find that hard to believe. I hope for her sake her discussion with her father was staged for the show because otherwise she should be ashamed.
3. 6 of my 8 great-grandparents perished in the Holocaust. My father grew up without ever meeting or knowing his grandparents. My mother only knew her maternal grandparents because they fled from Beltsy, Romania (now Moldova) to Tashkent, Russia. You grow up knowing these things, even though none of my grandparents ever talked about their parents. Not once that I can recall. You could see how painful it was for Lisa's father to bring up these memories and he had never met his grandparents either. But my grandparents said where they were from and did discuss a little about their families. I remember that my grandmother had an Yizkor book about her town, Dolhinov (Dolginovo). I remember reading it as a teenager. I guess growing up in Israel makes the Holocaust a lot more real than it does anywhere else.
4. Speaking of Yizkor books, the New York Public Library has the Ilya book. If you go to image 316 which is page 312 you can find the names of Lisa's Mordechevitz family:
Mordechovitz Mera
____"____ Liba
____"____ Avraham
If you go a few pages further to image 321 which is page 317 you can read the article that Lisa read in the market square. It's the testimony of David Rubin and it's in Hebrew (it was translated on the screen by Eilat Gordin Levitan who is a very active member of JewishGen, managed several of the shtetl pages and has many websites with wonderful photographs and other information). I couldn't find this specific translation on the Yizkor pages on JewishGen, but there are several others.
UPDATE: Miriam Robbins Midkiff, from the excellent Ancestories blog, left a comment with the link to the translated page that Lisa read. It's after the list of martyrs (which also lists the Mordechovitz family). Thanks Miriam!
4a. I am going to email Eilat and see if I can get a copy of the article she translated so I can share it with my readers or at least point you to a link.
4b. I am in touch with another Rubin from Dolhinov and I sent him an email to see if he is related to the David Rubin who wrote the chapter in the Ilya Yizkor book.
5. I wonder why Ancestry did not play up it's relationship with JewishGen for this episode. Strange. I think that would have been a huge win for all involved.
6. Now just to show how much this episode hit home for me, if you look at Eilat's website and check out the map, you will see that my grandmother's shtetl, Dolhinov (number 1 on the map), is right next to Ilya (number 19 on the map):
7. Doing the kind of research that Lisa did during this show in the Polish and other state archives is not as easy as it seems. From what I know, nothing is online and most records of anything less than 100 years old is not accessible to the general public. You would either need to go there in person and hire someone who's got the right connections or you may be able to do it remotely by hiring a local person, which is probably not something regular family historians can do.
8. I loved how the Polish archivist just plopped down a phone book in front of Lisa. There's no easier way to look for living relatives right?
9. I would have liked to see how Yuri/Boleslaw was related to Kudrow. They kept referring to him as a cousin, but only at the end did they say that Lisa's grandmother was his Aunt.
10. Another important part of the show was when Boleslaw said he wasn't there in Ilya to see the massacre. He only heard about it. But the family had lived for 60 years thinking that he witnessed it. This is a recurring theme with oral histories that are handed down through generations.
11. So how did Boleslaw escape the fate of the rest of his family in Ilya? He escaped to Russia and joined the army. This is pretty much what my own grandfather did. But my grandfather lived in Warsaw, not Belarus. So "escaping" from Warsaw was not going to be as easy. I will need to get to the bottom of this story on my next visit to Israel. I am not sure how much my grandmother will be able to tell me, but I have to ask.
12. I had more thoughts during the show, but I can't remember them now. Overall, I thought that while the subject matter was extremely dark (yet extremely important), the show itself was fairly lacking when it came to actual research. Why had they not talked more about Ilya's history? What about the generation of Jews who lived there for centuries before the Nazis ended it all? I also felt that the constant recaps and previews were too much. There was very little actual footage that wasn't reused several times.
I'm looking forward to the rest of the season of WDYTYA? but I have to admit that this format is starting to get a little tiresome. Maybe they can tweak the format if they get a second season going.
I've been going over old census entries to see if I can find new clues as well as cite my sources properly. While this is somewhat tedious, I've already found a lot of information I've overlooked in the past. Here's an interesting example, the 1930 US Census for my wife's great-grandfather Saul Hytowitz and his family. Here's the interesting bit:
These are the columns 25-31 that deal with occupation, employment and veterans. I couldn't figure out what his occupation was from the handwriting although I can clearly see he worked in the shoe industry. Luckily, I ran across a blog post on Ancestories that had a link to a website that details the instructions for the census enumerators. And then I found this:
217. Distinguish a traveling salesman from a salesman in a store; the former should be reported as a commercial traveler.
I knew he was a shoe salesman because I found that out in the 1930 Pittsburgh City Directory and other sources:
But I didn't know he was a travelling shoe salesman. And guess what? His son Joe does the exact same thing.
A few other interesting things:
1. The city directory shows Saul owning the house on Straka Street with his children renting space there. The 1930 census says he's the one renting the house for $73 a month. I wonder which one is right. I wonder if he bought the house sometime during the year.
2. I just noticed that Saul's parents, Jacob and Rose are also in the city directory. Didn't see that before.
3. The veterans section of the census shows that Saul was a veteran and served in World War I. His son Joe was also a veteran. I need to figure out how to get their service records. I didn't notice that before either.
UPDATE: Steve Morse has a great little page that deciphers the occupation codes in the 1930 Census. I entered 4290 and got 'Commercial travelers' in 'Retail store or retail trade'.
I can't believe I overlooked this resource. The Internet Archive is such a great research tool with so many family histories scanned in full and other terrific resources. So I was very surprised to find 30 (yes, that's thirty!) Atlanta City Directories on the site. The earliest is 1867, two years after the end of the civil war. The latest is 1923.
The beauty of this resource is that you can download the entire books to your hard drive in searchable PDF format or you can browse it online and run searches.
Here's the link to the "Atlanta City Directory" search I ran. Enjoy!
I love Casefile Clues.
It is by far the most cost-effective, thought-provoking, research-organizing, genealogical tool for newbies like me. Michael John Neil does a fantastic job of laying out his research methodology in simple steps that anyone can understand.
You get a new casefile in your inbox every Monday and it's easy to read and understand. Then you can spend the rest of your week trying to emulate some of the methodologies in your own research.
The three things that stand out to me are:
1. Putting things in chronological order. I use RootsMagic for my genealogy database so whenever I view a person's entries I already see them in chronologcial order. But Michael usually creates a chronology for an entire family or several generations to see what else he should be looking for. That's been a real eye-opener for me.
2. Real Estate. There is a wealth of information in land records and other deeds that I never thought about before. If your ancestors were farmers then how did they get their land? What happened to the land when they moved or died? If they lived in the city, did they rent or own? These simple questions open up a lot of research avenues.
3. Have a system. At the end of every casefile there is a "what next?" section that highlights how to continue the research. There are always more places you can look for records and other clues. Did you check probate? Did you look at city directories? What about mailing lists and forums? There's always another place to look.
I am going to take some of the casefiles and apply them to my own research and write about it here. I hope you enjoy that.
But in the meantime, go sign up for Casefile Clues right now. You can also buy all the back issues. It's really a small investment for a truly fantastic resource.
As of the writing of this post Michael has a special for a set back issues (1-25) and a year's subscription for only $27.50 - That's only 35 cent per issue!
I mentioned in my last post how much City Directories have been helpful in my research and wanted to point my readers to a new site from Miriam Robbins Midkiff:
Online City, County, and Rural Directories Website
This new site has set a lofty goal to have a complete listing for city, county, rural, business, and other types of directories for the United States and Canada, and then go on to add directories for other countries. The navigation is very easy and you can quickly get to what you are looking for. Since this is a work in progress you need to check back and see what's been added recently.
Of course, there have been a lot of directories added lately to Ancestry.com and Footnote.com, but those are pay sites and they are not complete anyway. Here's an example:
I know my wife's Hytowitz line arrived in the US around 1880, but since there is no 1890 census I have a huge gap until I find them in the 1910 Census. I have tried everything I can think of to find them in the 1900 Census, but with no luck so far. Looking through the Pittsburgh City Direcotries on Footnote is extremely frustrating. But on Miriam's site I found the links to Eve and Don which are so easy to browse through.
Anyway, check out the site and Miriam, if you need any help, let me know!
I asked for your help but nobody commented. So I had to come up with my own checklist. Here is what I am going to do when researching online:
1) First thing I need to do is figure out all the spelling variations. And the best method I came up with is to go to MyHeritage and use the MegaDex search tool that lists out all the possible spelling options for last names. Here's an easy one:
Here's a more detailed one:
I am obviously not going through all these alternate spellings, but at least I know where to look if I hit a dead end.
2) Paid Subscriptions. These are sites I have annual subscriptions and I will check them first for premium content. Obviously there are a lot of things I can look for in each one that don't overlap:
- MyHeritage.com - They really have an outstanding research engine that goes through almost 1400 sites simultaneously. It's not always accurate but it will take you in directions you don't always expect.
- JewishGen.org - A lot of this content is now available on Ancestry.com but I still like the simplicity of the site.
- FamilyHistory.org - I can still find some amazing nuggets here. I've been using the pilot site with great results lately and I can't wait for them to start digitizing everything.
- General Google search - I'm still waiting for my "Google Your Family Tree" - Where is it?!?
- Books.google.com
- Any other Google tools i will about from the book. Where is it?!?
- City/State specific sites
- Geni.com Trees
- MyHeritage.com Trees
- WorldVitalRecords.com (?)
- GenealogyBank.com (?)
- RootsWeb
- One World Tree
Yesterday, after receiving the package from Uncle Glenn and posting the picture of his father on the winning swim team, I called to thank him. We had a great conversation and I pointed him to the site to check it out. He in turn sent out an e-mail to his 'cuz list' inviting them to take a look and contribute any information they had in order to grow the tree and fill it with goodies. That got me thinking.
I had decided to upload my GEDCOM to Geni.com last week in order to check it out. The interface is pretty easy to use and the social networking capabilities are very user friendly. So last night I sent out invitations to everyone who's e-mail I knew. I will send out invitations to the 'cuz list' as soon as I can figure out who's who on the list (all I currently have are their e-mails).
I already got a few responses and people are generally very excited to join and contribute to the project. The Geni.com site is in its infancy so it has a lot of performance issues, but I think for our purposes it will work just fine.
If anyone reading this has any questions for me, just leave a comment.
I received a package in the mail today from my wife's uncle, Glenn. Inside I found some photocopies of census information about his family as well as some amazing photographs. Two photos immediately caught my eye. The first is of my wife's 2nd-great-grandmother, dated around 1900. It doesn't seem to be a reproduction and is in pretty bad shape, but still amazingly clear and detailed. I need to scan it and research it some more, but this might be my oldest photo to date.
The second is a terrific picture of the swim team from Langley High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1930:.jpg)
On the front you can see 14 of the team mates in quite the serious pose. The handsome fellow in the center of the second row is my wife's grandfather, Louis Milton (Pete) Hytowitz (Hyde). Pete was a great swimmer and Uncle Glenn has a few of his medals:
When you flip this photo over you get a lot more detail:
.jpg)
Seems that the team had won the City Championship and Carnegie Teck Relay in 1930. I need to follow up on all these details and see what else I can find about these events. Also, several team members are named. I uploaded the photo to Footnote.com and added annotations and spotlights to all the people I found. I think this is a very cool feature and I intend to use it a lot. Here's another example of a great swimmer:
I am getting very excited about all these photos and can't wait for my parents to bring some over from my family on their next visit. I have some real gems on my (less documented) of the tree.
Where have I disappeared to? I have been busy. Busy with work, family and some more research. I have made tremendous amounts of progress, mostly by reaching out to people for help. I received a gigantic GEDCOM from a distant cousin of my wife's from the Bishop side and started adding it into my files. I only did this because this particular GEDCOM (as opposed to almost all the others I have seen) had a lot of sources and citations. I also got some additional information on the Kilchevsky (or should I just give that spelling up and go with the original Kielczewski?) side of the family. I also signed up with Footnote.com and started looking through their 43+ Million records. So, I have been a little busy.
Anyway, back to the medals:
1. Go Back and Cite Your Sources!
50 Citations - Platinum Medal
I am well into the hundreds here. And I have barely scratched the surface. Not only am I adding sources for everything I have, I also need to verify everything I have added from others. Lots to do.
2. Back Up Your Data!
This is definitely an important task. Let's see where I stand:
A. Prepare a comprehensive backup plan for your digital research files and a security plan for your hard copies and photos - I will make daily backups locally and then move all my files to my external drive weekly. I will also burn an image of the external drive to DVD once a month. Eventually all information will be secured off-line as well.
B. Secure your hard copies and photos in waterproof containers - That will have to wait another day. I don't have many documents and photos to begin with, so this became a lower priority.
C. Backup all your data using a flash drive, an external drive, CDs, DVDs, or an online resource - Done!
D. Have all your hard copies and photos scanned and secure them either in a fire-proof safe or off-site in a safety-deposit box/secure environment - It will take me a long time to scan everything I have, even though it's not much. And as far as off-site storage, that will have to wait as well.
E. All your data is backed up digitally and secured physically and you can recover from any disaster while losing only one month or less worth of research - Digitally yes, physically no (see D).
Completed Task A&C - Silver Medal - I have work to do.
3. Organize Your Research!
Complete five or more tasks - Platinum Medal - I have done everything but F. I'll work on that.
4. Write, Write, Write!
A. Write a summary of what your blog is about and post it on your blog – you may not have done this since you started the blog and it is a great way to have new readers learn more about your site. - This was my first post, July 29th, 2008.
B. Participate in a genealogy or family history related blog carnival. - I submitted one of my posts to the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy.
C. Prepare several posts in draft mode (if possible with your blog platform) and pre-publish. - Still a no on this one. I am an impulse blogger who can't pre-publish.
D. Write a brief biographical sketch on one of your ancestors. - Done.
E. Sign up to host a future carnival - Probably not going to happen just yet because of newbieness.
Complete any three tasks - Gold Medal
5. Reach Out & Perform Genealogical Acts of Kindness!
A. Comment on a new (to you) genea-blog. - Pretty much every day.
B. Join another genea-blogger’s blog network on Facebook Blog Networks. - Multi-done.
C. Invite other genealogists to join Facebook. - I decided to give this one my own spin. I have been talking about genealogy at every opportunity and getting people interested. I even hosted our monthly neighborhood poker night and after I was eliminated I checked some people's ancestors. So I will include this one as done!
D. Assist another researcher with a research request or look-up. - I have contributed to several researchers with small amounts of information.
E. Participate in an indexing project. - Not done. I am sure there is something that I could have done, but I just don't know where to start yet.
F. Join a genealogical, historical, heritage or lineage society. - I did not join the two I wanted (I will in the near future) but instead signed up for three SIG on JewishGen. So that should cover it.
Complete five or more tasks - Platinum Medal
Here's the final tally:
3 Platinum
1 Gold
1 Silver
This has been a lot of fun to do. Not only did I learn some valuable lessons about genealogical research, but I also managed to step up my research and incorporate some structure in it. Whatever I have not completed, I will strive to do in the next few weeks. Thanks to all who organized and spent time making sure we all have a good time.
I think I've mentioned this resource in the past, but I have been searching through it the past few days and came up with some terrific nuggets. Here is the description from the Carnegie-Mellon University Libraries page:
The Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project is composed of The Jewish Criterion (1895-1962), The American Jewish Outlook (1934-1962), and The Jewish Chronicle (1962-Present). This project serves as both an online reference source and as a digitized historical documentation of the Jewish community of Pittsburgh and its outlying areas.
The search functionality is terrific. I plugged in a few names and came up with a lot of accurate hits. The only drawback is that when the actual page comes up (scanned both as a small and large image) it doesn't highlight your search results in any way. So you have to read the entire page to look for the phrase you searched for.
I am constantly amazed at the level of detail in these old newspapers. The first thing that struck me was the donation listings. There are a lot of people donating all sums of money and everyone is listed. Even a 50 cent donation.
The second thing I noticed is the 'In Memoriam' sections. Families kept posting these for decades after loved ones had passed away. There are a lot of other family events such as births, marriages, engagements and obituaries. It has proven to be a very valuable and accurate resource for me.
Here are some of the funny snippets I have found these past few days. I guess that almost 100 years ago, other than word of mouth, this was one of the better forms of communication. I can't imagine some of these things showing up in local papers today.
On July 27th, 1923:
Miss Mabel Hytowitz, of Beeler
Street, is spending a few weeks in
Atlantic City.
On May 6th 1923:
On Sunday, May Sixth, Miss Es-
ther Weisberg, of Black Street, en-
tertained the members of the Sigma
Delta Phi Sorority with a card par-
ty. Prizes were awarded the Misses
Minnie Cooper, Mabel Hytowitz, Ruth
Schmidt and Selma Goldstein. After
a dainty luncheon had been served,
Miss Rhoda Selznick entertained with
several ukelele numbers, after which
the Misses Ruth Spector and Sara
Sbarsky, accompanied by Miss Ma-
thilda Miller, entertained with dance
and song numbers.
One of the things I noticed is that at the end of a lot of the clippings they add 'no cards':
On January 10th, 1922:
Weiner—Hytowitz
Miss Hazel Weiner, daughter of
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Weiner, of At-
lantic Avenue, has chosen Tuesday,
January tenth, as the date for her
marriage to Mr. Benjamin Hytowitz,
of this city, which will be solemnized
in the Rittenhouse. A dinner for the
immediate families will supplement
the ceremony, and will be followed by
a reception. No cards.
Does anyone know what that means?
My wife's 2nd-great-grandfather, Milton B. Tuggle, volunteered to join Company C ("Dawson Grays") of the 3rd Georgia Volunteer Infantry regiment, Confederate States of America, Army of North Virginia, commanded by Capt. R. L. McWhorter, in 1861, when he was only 16 years old. It took them a year to figure out he was a minor before discharging him.
Two years later Milton re-enlisted to the same unit and served until Lee surrendered at Appomatox on the 9th of April, 1865. He stated in his application for a pension in 1900 that he was with his command when the war ended and had his gun too.
I found this information in the notes of one of the GEDCOM files I downloaded from One World Tree, so this could all be fiction. But if someone went to all the trouble of writing this elaborate note (and there is a lot more to it, including information about his employers, address in 1900, etc.) I would assume that a lot of it is true. I will obviously mark it as a 'questionable' source and try to dig deeper and uncover the actual facts. I was going to contact the GEDCOM file owner, but alas, he/she is listed as unknown, so that's a dead end for me.
I did start to look into who Capt. R. L. McWhorter was and came across this information:
Robert Ligon McWhorter was born June 19, 1819 in Bowling Green, Oglethorpe County, Georgia, the third son of Hugh McWhorter and Helena Ligon.
He attend Mercer University and was married to Nancy Winifred Janes, who was the daughter of Absolom Janes and Cordelia Callaway. Winifred lived only four years following their marriage and died, leaving one son, Robert Ligon McWhorter, Jr.
In 1849 Robert Ligon was married to Nancy Pope Thurmond. Their five children were: James Vason, John Alexander, Hamilton, Julia Pope, and Jessie Boyd McWhorter.
McWhorter enlisted in Company C ("Dawson Grays") of the 3rd Georgia Volunteer Infantry regiment as Captain on April 24, 1861. He was elected Major and Assistant Quartermaster of Wright's Brigade on April 28, 1862. He surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865.
Robert Ligon served in both houses of the State Legislature and as Speaker of the House during the Reconstruction period.
Contributed by Thomas Baumgartner (descendant of the McWhorters of Greene County, Georgia), "3rd Georgia Volunteer Infantry Veterans - Robert L. McWhorter", http://www.3gvi.org/ga3vetrmcwhorter.html, August 2008.
How can you pass up on these kinds of great stories?
I am drowning under the amount of information and keep finding more and more methods to find additional sources. I'm not even sure how I got there, but I found a video of Miriam Robbins Midkiff talking about using Google Books in her research.
So I open up the site and plug in the first name I can think of, Conrad Auth. Conrad was my wife's 2nd-great-grandfather, was born in 1832 in Germany. He married Elizabeth Bannantine, born in 1839 in England, and lived with his large family in Pittsburgh, PA. I have very little information on Conrad and his family outside of what I could find in census data and a GEDCOM file I received from another Auth. The 1880 US Census lists his occupation as Glassblower.
I got 20 results for my search of "Conrad Auth". The first book in the list was:
Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh
By Ileen A. DeVault
Published by Cornell University Press, 1995
ISBN 0801483077, 9780801483073
194 pages
I clicked on the link and found the following section in the book (I used OCR to get it in text instead of the screenshot I took, but many books actually have a plain-text version as well):
Charles Auth entered the Commercial Department in 1900. His father, Conrad, was a Pennsylvania-born glassblower of mixed German and English heritage and national treasurer of the Glass Bottle Blowers’ Association (GBBA). Glassblowers like Auth made up almost 3 percent of the skilled workers represented in the Commercial Department. Conrad Auth, his English-born wife, five sons, and one daughter lived in a house with a fully paid mortgage near the glasshouses on Pittsburgh’s South Side. Charles was the youngest son. His two oldest brothers held manual jobs; one was a glassblower like his father, and the other was an unspecified "steelworker." During the year ending with the federal census taking of June 1900, Conrad Auth and his glassblowing son had both been unemployed for twelve full months. Even as treasurer of his national union, Auth, Sr., did not receive a salary, although he did sometimes receive per diem payment and costs for time spent on union business. Auth`s steelworker son had been unemployed for seven months of 1900. Faced with this dramatic experience of the precariousness of the skilled trades, the Auth family switched to a new plan for their three younger sons. When fifteen-year-old Charles entered the high school's program, his other two brothers worked as clerks, one for a plumbing business and the other as a grocery clerk. Unlike their older brothers, neither of these young men employed in white-collar jobs had any periods of unemployment in 1900. Since the family had paid off the mortgage on their home, their economic situation had not always been so bleak as it was in 1900. Nonetheless, the pattern of employment in the family demonstrates a change in strategy for the sons' futures over the course of the 1890s.
WOW! Look at all this information! I love it! This kind of data breathes real life into our ancestors. It takes them from a bunch of census data and source citations to an actual family, living in times of hardship and persevering. I would have had to dig deep to find out that Conrad was the national treasurer of the GBBA. And this was just the first link!
I kept going through the list and found out that he testified in the tariff hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, First Session, Fifty-third Congress, in 1893. There was a lot more information but I was already completely overwhelmed. I tried a few others and kept finding more and more.
So obviously this is a huge resource that I will use in the future. One of the things that's kind of annoying is that not all the books have full view. Some only have snippets and point you to where you can buy the book. But even these snippets can be extremely valuable.
Some of you veteran genealogists are probably snickering at my ridiculous newbie discovery. But since I have no formal genealogical training and I haven't even read an "Idiot's Guide To Genealogy" book, this is still a big deal to me.
Any more 'WOW' tips out there? I sure hope so!
I am going to recap what I have done so far in the past few weeks since I have embarked on this journey.
First, I read through my sister's roots project and got all fired up. Some of the pages in the project were printouts from Beit Hatfutzot, which is also known as the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora. They had basic information about my paternal grandparents' villages in Poland. The two villages are Radzilow and Dolhinov (wow, I just found this site when doing a Google search. There is so much information I have to go through and I have already seen several familiar names!).
From there I jumped over to the Yad Vashem site which is The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. It is the largest and most impressive holocaust museum in the world and is located in Jerusalem. I remember going there when I was younger to do a research project about the Treblinka Concentration Camp. It was a project I did for school and the reason I chose that specific camp was the fact that it only had one purpose - kill as many people as fast as possible. We'll get back to this in a minute..jpg)
I sat at the computer with my mom and we started searching through The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names and all of a sudden we both started getting chills. There, in front of our very eyes, were hand written documents (called pages of testimony) filled out by my grandfather's first cousin, Rivka Geiger. To the right you can see the page she filled out about my great-grandfather, Hanoch Meir (Heynoch) Dombek. Rivka and her sister Tamara (Tema) Fruchter were the only close family survivors that my grandfather was able to find in Israel after the war. That's a story I will have to tell in full in a later post.
Anyway, by using the easy functionality of the site I was able to find 58 pages that were filled by Rivka. We were just skimming through them, trying to figure out the names and dates. Most of the testimony is in Yiddish and hard to read, but we slowly figured out who was who. Last night I finally sat down and went through them all and I now have a chart of three generations of the Dombek family that perished in the Shoah (holocaust). I will have a full post about that soon as well. I promise.
I started a quick family tree with some free online software through a link I found on the Beit Hatfutzot site. I won't actually link it here because it has all the details of living relatives. If you want to see it please let me know. I will also figure out a way to post this tree somewhere else.
I spent a few hours with my parents, trying to map out as many relatives as we could think of. The next day my mother and I went to visit my grandmother and I grilled her for over two hours, trying to get as many details as I could.
On my return to the US, I told my wife about my new hobby and asked to see what her mother had put together a few years ago. That pretty much got me started with a big chunk of information on her side. I also found a few people through JewishGen's Family Finder (JGFF) and the Family Tree of the Jewish People (FTJP) who were nice enough to share some of their research and give me some tips moving forward. I joined Ancestry.com and found a distant relative of my wife's who has over 23K people in his tree. With his help and direction I decided to purchase the RootsMagic Genealogy Software tool. Through Ancestry.com I was able to piece together a lot of information from US Census data from 1840-1930 about the Auth, Wiley and Hytowitz families.
Well, this is becoming quite a long recap of the first few weeks and I already have several posts I promised to write. One of the things I will try to list at the bottom of each post is how many people I currently have in my family project.
7/29/08 - Current family members: 825 in 259 families.
