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'.
When I started researching our family history I thought the US Census was the best source of information out there. Little did I know that it is full of mistakes, missing info, duplicates and some of the weirdest spelling variations possible. In fact, sometimes the Census can leave you scratching your head more times than it will leave you smiling.
So here's an interesting story. My wife's Uncle Glenn met a woman in Florida that turned out to have the same maiden name as his original last name, Hytowitz. This is a fairly uncommon name and many of the Hytowitz's have changed their name at one point or another to Hyde. So needless to say, they were very surprised to find each other. They had no idea if there was a family connection between them or not (and we still don't know).
I got a message on Geni.com from this woman the other day where she told me that he grandfather had a son, who was not listed on our tree for some reason. She wanted to know how to add him and his wife as well as their daughter, Jacqueline Hyde, who was a Hollywood actress and had roles in Woody Allen and Sidney Polack movies amongst several other roles. I might write another post just about her and using media sources to find out about recent relatives.
I was confused as to why her parents were not in our tree. My early Hytowitz research through the US Census was pretty exhaustive and I managed to scrape together several families and even connect some of them. But Phillip Hytowitz and Ruth Peller were missing. Until I searched for Ruth by herself.
When I found Ruth things started to fall into place. Here is the 1930 US Census for this family:
Jacob Peller owned the house at 708 Greene Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. The home was valued at $15,000 and he had 3 other families paying him rent to live there. Must have been a big house to hold 14 people in it. The shenanigans start when you see that Walther and Ruth Hytowitz are listed at the bottom of the household. He is 21 and she is 19 and they have been married for 2 years.
Originally, I had no way to connect this Walther Hytowitz to any of the other families I had found in previous Census years. So I had him listed as a separate family. He is listed as being born in New York State, with both his parents from Russia. So I just lumped him under the Russian Hytowitz generic names I used for all the families that I could not connect yet.
But if you look three rows above Walther Hytowitz, you see another Walther. This is Walther Peller, the son of Jacob Peller. Could it be that son and son-in-law were mixed up when the enumerator wrote down the names? Since we don't know who provided the information, could it be that one of the other 14 people in this house gave erroneous information? The only reason I know that the name Walther is wrong is that a living relative told me about her Uncle Phillip and Aunt Ruth.
So I tried to find out where Phillip was in the 1920 and 1910 Census. Finding them in 1910 was tough because Ancestry.com had a transcription of Hertowich, which I updated to a 'variation' of Hytowitz. The 1910 Census lists Phillip as being 4 months old. The names of his older sister and parents match the 1930 Census as well as all other information.
1920 was even harder and I eventually tried to use the enumeration district numbers and went page by page to look for this family. Eventually I tried a different approach. I entered just the first names and left the last name blank. There are a lot of Samuels married to Sadies who lived in Brooklyn and were born around 1883! I then decided to search for the children and entered the oldest child, Lena, along with the first names of her parents. Bingo!
Seriously? The name in the index is Sam Heckowitz with a correction to Sam Herkowetz. How was I supposed to find them? Anyway, all the children are there including Phillip who is now 10 years old.
Oh and thank you very much mister enumerator for barely pressing down when you wrote. It is so hard to read what is written, no wonder there were so many mistakes.
So to recap, this family lived in three different places in 1910, 1920 and 1930. And their names were Hertowich, Heckowitz and finally Hytowitz. The were not around in the 1900 Census because the in 1920 it says the immigrated in 1904.
And that in fact is the biggest find of all. Because now I can check immigration documents and try to find out where Samuel came from and maybe I can find out who his parents were. That might connect some of the Hytowitz families I am trying to find common ancestors for. But that's a story for another post.
I haven't submitted a post to a carnival in a while, but this one is too good to pass. I actually have three stories, but have photos for two so far (I know the third exists but I don't know where it's hiding). This is my submission to the 78th Edition of the Carnival of Genealogy: Pony Pictures.
1. The Ponies in Los Angeles
This is a funny one because it is one of my daughter's favorite bedtime stories. On our second family trip to the US in 1982, we did the west coast tour and also visited Mexico. When we were in LA, my mom's cousin took us pony riding. I am not sure where it was exactly.
The ponies rode around an elliptical track and every 5 minutes or so they would be corralled back and new riders would get their turn. While standing in line, my sister and I started eying the ponies we wanted to ride. My sister wanted the slow, mellow pony, who calmly strolled around the track. I obviously wanted the fastest one.
So we get our turn and get on the ponies we wanted. But as soon as the ponies were released, my sister's shot out of the gate like he was at the derby. Mine on the other hand decided to take a bit if a break:
Yes, those are real tears on my poor sister's face. For 5 minutes she yelled and screamed for that pony to stop, which he didn't.
I just found out that we have an old home video that my parents converted to VHS, so now I am waiting for my copy on DVD.
2. The Mule in West Virginia
I love this photo. According to my wife's uncle, Glenn:
This was taken in Parsons, WV, Summer of 1950 at a family reunion at a second cousin's house. Jackie (left) and Lois (right) standing, Bunny (back) and I (front) on the mule. Grandma was there too, but she got her hand caught in the door of my dad's new 1950 Mercury just before this picture was taken. We were up near Black Water Falls. Somewhere out there is another photo with Jackie on the mule, taken at the same time.
Don't worry, I asked for more details and will share when I get them.
UPDATE: More from Uncle Glenn - This was at a Rightmire great-aunt's home. The Aunt we visited lived very basically in the country with a mule for a work, as a beast of burden and a hand pump well for water in the back of her home. She made us kids eat carrots and other things she grew in her garden. I know it was very near Black Water Falls because we went to the Falls that day and walked in the back water and did a swing bridge. This was just before we moved to Ft. Lauderdale later that year in Nov. 1950.
3. The Love Story
I've heard the following story in several variations, but this is the one that my sister wrote in her roots project:
This is the story about how my grandparents met. Grandpa managed a store in Tashkent and had a business relationship with Grandma's father. He would always tell him about his daughter but refused to let them meet because he said my grandfather was a punk. They met on accident when he spotted her walking with her father one day. Her father tried to avoid their introduction by trying to go down a small alley but because my Grandpa was riding his horse he quickly caught up to them and that's how they met. It was love at first sight and a year later they were married.
Somewhere, there's a photo of my grandmother on a horse, which I need to find and post. But I love this story and had to include it in this post.
Just to show you all how much more information there is about my wife side of the tree I went ahead and created the 5th generation RM4 ahnentafel for her ancestors:
16. Jesse Travis BRANNON: born 2 Feb 1837 in Georgia; married 20 Aug 1861 in Gwinnett County, Georgia. USA
17. Isabella Elizabeth ATKINSON: born Feb 1843 in Georgia; died in Georgia. USA
18. Calvin Rufus BISHOP: born 3 Jan 1852 in Spartanburg County, South Carolina; married; died 6 Jan 1880 in Beech Springs, Spartanburg County, South Carolina. USA
19. Margret TIMMONS: born bet 1852 and 1860 in South Carolina; died 14 Jan 1912 in Atlanta, Georgia. USA
20. Alexander McD. "Alex" WILEY: born abt 1844 in Pennsylvania; married.USA
21. Emily GREENAWALT: born Mar 1846 in Pennsylvania. USA
22. Rev. Milton B. TUGGLE: born 2 May 1845 in Oglethorpe County, Georgia; married 9 Jan 1894; died 12 Jan 1910 in Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia. USA
23. Anna Frances DEAN: born 17 Nov 1866 in Floyd County, Georgia; died 27 Jun 1947 in Dekalb County, Georgia. USA
24. Jacob HYTOWITZ: born 1864/5 in Russia; married abt 1882; died 9 Sep 1937 in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. RUSSIA (probably Lithuania)
25. Rose "Rosa, Rosie" FRANK: born bet 1866 and 1868 in Poland; died 11 Feb 1941 in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. POLAND
26. Thomas Ward RIGHTMIRE: born 11 Aug 1849 in Webster, Taylor County, West Virginia; married 22 Dec 1882; died 25 Oct 1922 in Parsons, Tucker County, West Virginia. USA
27. Edith Mae CONLEY: born 15 Nov 1858 in West Virginia; died 16 Mar 1917 in Tucker County, West Virginia. USA
28. Conrad J. AUTH: born Jul 1832 in Hesse-Cassel, Germany; married 1864; died 19 Jan 1911 in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. GERMANY
29. Elizabeth BANNANTINE: born Feb 1839 in England; died 9 Oct 1933 in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. ENGLAND
30. Thomas KEARNEY: born Apr 1840 in Ireland; married 1868. IRELAND
31. Maria : born Jan 1843 in Ireland. IRELAND
Yep, we have 10 born in the USA (4 GA, 2 SC, 2 PA, 2 WV), 1 RUSSIA, 1 POLAND, 1 GERMANY, 1 ENGLAND and 2 IRELAND. If I go further back and try to see where all these US folks are from, I have several generations until I find them mostly in IRELAND, ENGLAND and FRANCE. But most lines have been in the southern USA for a couple of centuries.
Looking at this list I see that I have a lot of work to do on my wife's side as well. I am missing death/burial dates/places and other important information.
Does anyone have any time to spare? Yeah, I didn't think so :-)
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!
What are third/fourth/fifth cousins? They are descendants of your ancestors that you never knew you had. Almost every week I make contact with new distant cousins through Geni.com and I love it. So far I have discovered family in:
Argentina
Puerto Rico (previously living in Cuba)
Miami
Spain
Israel
There are several cousins who I know of that I have not been able to contact yet, but I know I will some day.
Here are a couple of stories for you:
1) One of my Kreplak cousins wrote this amazing story a while back when I just started my research:
12 years ago I went to the US after the army and I worked in a moving company. One Sunday I was at home and and a friend that owns a different moving company ask me to do him a favor and do a job for him. I went because he was my friend. When I got to the customer's house I was amazed to see it was a Kreplak family in Florida! It was unbelievable! When they opened the door I told them to look at my ID. They were in shock. We were relatives!
2) Here's another story that will amaze you:
My wife's uncle, Glenn, met a couple in Florida and the wife's maiden name turned out to be Hytowitz. Since it is such an uncommon name they tried to see how they were related but could not make the connection. A few weeks ago I got a response from another Hytowitz on Geni. I have about 8 Hytowitz families in my database and have not been able to link them all up yet. Turns out that this man is in one of these trees and he lives in one of the Atlanta suburbs. I gave him a call and we had a great conversation. Later that evening, I sent both him and uncle Glenn and e-mail to introduce them to each other. After a little discussion it turns out that the woman in Florida that known Glenn is a cousin of the man from Atlanta. The families have lost contact about a decade ago. What a small world.
3) You may have read my post detailing how my cousin from Argentina found the blog while Googling his surname. I have been able to contact him and get him on the Geni Tree. He had a few changes to make, like adding another brother! I also got in touch with third cousins in Spain, Miami and Barcelona through Geni. One thing I try to do every time I see that someone has joined the tree is to send them a quick message and welcome them to the tree and see if they have any questions.
Geni is a great site but I still have my issues with the speed of the site and the lack of an admin tool that will give me access to everything that is happening in my tree. I am also working with the folks at MyHeritage by giving them feedback on some of the features and functionality of their site. If you haven't checked it out, you should see how cool their photo tagging is and what celebrity you look like.
I got another package yesterday from my wife's uncle, Glenn. Big box, full of crumpled newspapers and inside them a Seiko box. I carefully opened it to find a heavy piece of black cloth all rolled up in a ball. I took out the cloth and slowly stretched it out on the kitchen counter. It was completely covered with gold and silver swimming medals that Louis Milton Hyde (my wife's grandfather) won during his swimming career at Langley High School! I noticed that some of the ribbons have started to deteriorate and several medals have come loose. I tried my best to figure out what went where and eventually ended up with this:
I will go through them one by one at some point, scan them and place them in some sort of container for safe keeping. This is an amazing collection and a cherished memory of a father who died too young.
Some of the medals are inscribed on the back with the actual events:
- Senior H.S. Swimming Championship 1932-33 Relay - Gold
- Senior Life Saving 1930-31 Retrieving Object - Gold
- Senior H.S. Swimming Championship 1932-33 100 Yd Free Style - Gold
And those are just the top three in the right corner!
The fronts say things like:
- Tis Deeds Must Win the Prize - Pittsburgh High Schools Dept. of Hygiene
- Carnegie Institute of Technology - Relay
- Allegheny Mountain Assn. of the A.A.U.
It looks like the whole family was seriously into swimming. I received the following e-mail from one of Uncle Gelnn's cousins (I am going to keep names private unless I get permission to use them):
I have Mema's (Aunt Toot's) ID, track & field & swimming program from the 1936 Olympic Time Trials in Astoria Park where she competed in breast stroke and placed 3rd. The 1st & 2nd place went to the Olympics that year. The lady that beat her out was disqualified on the ship over to Berlin, Germany, that year. I can't remember her name but she got caught drinking.
I also have pictures and articles of all the "Hyde" girls in the Pittsburgh paper as winners in many events. I believe there is even one with them dressed in mermaid costumes. My daughter has Mema's box of swimming memorabilia. I can make copies and send them to you.
See what I said about the family getting involved? Isn't this wonderful?
I don't even know where to start. I guess this will turn into kind of a to-do list.
1) Uncle Glenn sent his father's medals and they are amazing. I will put up a post shortly with some pictures and more stories. Apparently this was a swimming family, including Olympic trials.
2) The Geni.com site is a hit with everyone. People are logging in, sharing information and updating the tree. I think this will be fantastic.
3) I've found a lot of similar (and rare) surnames in the Geni.com site and I have contacted a lot of people with questions about possible family connections.
4) I've done a lot of work on the Smorgonski (paternal grandmother) and Kilchevsky (paternal grandfather) trees with the help of Eilat Gordin Levitan who runs the Dolhinov site.
5) I have been reading a lot of testimonies by my relatives from Dolhinov about their escapes, joining the partisans to fight the nazis (no freakin' way do I capitalize that word, no matter what spell-check thinks) and memories of their beloved town. I found the Yizkor book (online at the NYPL) where my grand-uncle Shlomo Shamgar wrote some beautiful chapters. I am going to try to do him justice and translate them and post them here and on the other sites (JewishGen and Eilat's site).
6) I found a not so distant cousin on my wife's side who was the Governor of West Virginia in the early 1990's. I will have a post about him as well.
7) And I have a bunch of photos I need to scan and tell stories about.
8) I backed up my blogs to WordPress after reading about one too many blogs being crushed by the Google empire.
So much to do, so little time.
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.
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?
On the way to dinner with my wife last night, we discussed my new hobby and how enthusiastic I am about it. I lamented the fact that I would really love to have some actual physical evidence to work with, rather than websites and online databases. I want to roll up my sleeves and dive into some photographs and aged documents. Most of that stuff on my side of the family is scattered amongst my relatives in Israel. I don't know how difficult it is going to be to pry it out of their hands, but I will give it a shot.
My wife said she thinks she might have some old photos and perhaps a copy of the eulogy for her grandmother given by her priest. She sent herself a reminder to check it out when we got home.
BINGO!
One of the storage boxes she had so neatly organized was titled "Brannon Family". When we opened it up we found a lot of scattered photos, documents, war bonds, letters and a photo album. Some of the photos were labeled with names and dates. Some had complete stories printed on the back. Some were in great shape and some not so much. But all I could think of was, wow! This stuff is awesome!
Turns out my wife's great-grandmother, Pattie, was a photographer (among some of her talents). She even had these little stamps on the back stating that the photo was taken by her and what her address was. Amazing!
After going through the box I decided to see what else was in that cabinet. I found some additional photos from the Hytowitz side (my wife's maternal lineage) sent two years ago to my mother-in-law. They are reproductions of older photos by they are splendid. I also found something I had tucked away and had forgotten about. The last copy of The Wall Street Journal for the 20th century and the first copy of the 21st century. You can see those in the photo above.
The album that was discovered is a travel journal of my wife's grandmother, Emily-Ann, traveling to Germany with her husband who served there with the US Air Force. It included beautiful portraits and even some postcards sent to her from her husband while he was away on a mission looking for a downed bomber in North Africa.
Today I started organizing all these photographs. I saw that there were a lot that had the same theme, size and texture, so I grouped them together. Then I saw that on the back they had some markings, like a studio stamp with 3-4 numbers and sometimes a letter. I used those to group the photos again. I tried to find out what these mean, but was unsuccessful. Any one have an idea about these markings?As you can see from the image on the left I laid them all out on my poker table and tried to get an idea of what I was dealing with. This afternoon I went to Michael's (the craft store) and got a photo organizer box that can handle about 2000 photos in separate compartments. So now all the photos are nicely sorted in that new box. I have a lot of work ahead of me.
I'll leave you with a portrait of Joseph W. (Hytowitz) Hyde, who would have been 100 years old last month. Handsome fellow, don't you think?
UPDATE: I added a sample of the markings on the backs of the photos I found. Click to enlarge:
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.
