In My Family

Occasionally I reread past blog posts, a bit like one might reread a journal, for I have eight years of my life well documented in these pages.  I notice that in many of my posts, I say "in my family we..."

Value education,
Love words,
Write protest letters,

Have strong opinions,

Value creativity, 

Make use of failures,
Speak up...

All defined within the construct of a family, one which now has lost those two central people who created it.  Fortunately my sister had two daughters and so the family continues. My nieces were close to their grandparents and absorbed much of those underpinnings directly, as well as through my sister and perhaps a bit of me.

 I've also written about my grandparents who were immigrants and how that immigrant history informs my politics. Who we are doesn't spring out of nowhere. It is born in a family of beliefs, in a family of experiences that are passed down to us and within a heritage and cultural history. It is one of the most important things we get from family.  Whether we concur or rebel, it influences our world view.

Some of us grow up in a religious tradition that influences our perspective. Mine was as a Reform Jew and it echoed and supported the beliefs of my family, one grounded in questioning and challenging, in speaking up for what we believe is right.  That perspective is

My niece's cape at the DC Women's March

*

often the wellspring of creativity.  Questioning allows us to see the world through fresh eyes.

We also grow up in a community.  I grew up in downstate Illinois in what was a pretty conservative area. Sometimes we define who we are in opposition. I found little to rebel against in my family's belief system, but I did define myself in opposition to the politics around me. In high school I used to work in political campaigns to meet people who thought like I did. My candidates invariably lost.

We each have a story defined by family, religion, community and our life experiences. We also absorb the experiences of our family as if by osmosis, not always realizing the source, but absorbing the message.  As a reader I have always valued story, it is the focus of my artwork and my writing.  

I've been working on a project for many years that grew out of interviews with Jewish elders. It has grown from interviews to artwork to public speaking and hopefully in time will be available in a book.This project has been important to me because I think it is important to acknowledge and understand the history that defines who we are, that underlies our beliefs which in turn feed our actions. Family history tends to become important to people as they age and begin to lose the people who embodied that history, but even if we don't take that deep dive into family history research, it is important to share our family stories and their embedded values with children and grandchildren. As I explored questions around family history, I ran across the research by Marshall Duke and his colleague Robyn Fivush.  They work within Emory University's Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life and have found that young people who know about their family history have more effective skills in dealing with life challenges. They call this awareness our "intergenerational self." For this reason alone we all need to be family storytellers, linking past to present and ultimately to future.

But it is not just about the next generation. We also need to remember our stories ourselves, to keep ourselves centered in challenging times, to remember the values and traditions from which we come and to act in ways that are consistent with that which is integral to who we are. In this time of turmoil, I take a deep breath and remind myself, "In my family we value education, we value creativity, we write protest letters, we have strong opinions, we speak up ..." 

*Text on cape: My Great-Grandma Immigrated, so my Grandma could Learn so my Mom could Work, so I can March so my nephews will see women as Equals

Validating Instincts

As a genealogist, I have learned to trust my instincts. They often lead me to pursue what might seem like a tenuous link to some, perhaps merely a coincidental confluence of facts, but for some reason they call to me. My challenge is to validate the connection through records to confirm that it is more than a coincidence, to prove or disprove my hypothesis.

In my latest project I was asked to identify the towns of origin for both sides of my client's family. My starting point is what I know which in this case was very little except for grandparents' names. This is a fairly typical beginning point. This client reached out to other family members who offered some rumored ports of arrival, all helpful information if applied wisely. While I use this in my search, I am always careful not to let it blind me to other possibilities. Often family members immigrate separately or in small groups so while I assumed at least one family member followed the route of family folklore, I also explored alternate routes.

As always I began by searching for census records on ancestry.com which tell me at least the approximate year of arrival so I can narrow my focus. With that information, I turned to stevemorse.org which allows me to search for immigration records on many variables. After a number of searches I found some immigration records for each family which revealed the towns of origin. Mystery solved, but wait a minute. One record noted Warsaw as the town of origin. I've learned that many immigrants will note a nearby large city rather than the smaller town in which they live. My grandfather's marriage record notes he was from Warsaw when in fact he came from a town an hour away. I wondered if this might also be true in this case.

I did a search on JRI-Poland.org with the given names of both husband and wife along with the married name. I was searching for Leon and Bella, but first I converted Leon to Leib and Bella to Bayla, the non-Americanized versions that they went by in Poland. Only a few index entries came up and the most promising was a marriage record for a town about 80 miles from Warsaw. The entry had the correct surname and the given names of Szija Leib and Bayla Brandel. Close, but no certainty, still very much in the realm of hunch.

This was just the index and I wanted the actual record. Records can be located in one of three ways. Some records are held at the Family History Library in Utah. The JRI-Poland site will often tell you the film number or you can search the FHL catalog on-line to learn whether they have the film for the year or town in question. You can order a film to review at one of their church libraries or if it is an isolated record for which you know the precise coordinates you may ask them to send it digitally.

If not at the FHL you can contact the appropriate arm of the Polish Archives to order the record, sending them a wire for the cost involved. Needless to say this is the most cumbersome means with potential language barriers to navigate.

The third way is fairly new. The Polish Archives are beginning to digitize records and in this case the index advised me that this specific record was on-line and provided a link. It took a while to navigate the all-Polish site, but with the year and record number I was able to ultimately locate it.

The record was in Russian so I deciphered enough to believe it was still a possibility. I decided to cross-check my translation by posting it on Jewishgen's Viewmate translation site in hopes that a kind and fluent researcher might translate it for me. After a few days I had received my translation.

To verify this record I needed to know one more detail, what was on their tombstones. Jewish tombstones have the Hebrew names of the individual and that of their father, the same information that is in a marriage record. I circled back to my client who sent me photos of the tombstones. Then I began to see how the information matched up.

So what did I find? The record showed Szija Leib's father as Mechil and Bella's father as Izak. Their tombstones showed Menachem and Yitzhak, a pretty close match in the art of tombstone matching. I then looked at the Hebrew tombstone names. Leib's appeared to be Joshua Arieh and Bayla's was Bayla Brina. I knew that Szija is derived from Isaiah which comes from the same root as Joshua. I soon learned from baby naming sites that they all translate to God is salvation or God saves. Similarly Areih and Leib both mean lion. Bayla's name in the marriage record was Bayla Brandel, not far from Bayla Brina.

My hypothesis has strengthened, but still reliant on comparable names, not a perfectly clean match. How else can I prove this out? I decide to return to immigration records, but this time using the town's name from the marriage record I had discovered. Searching with this new piece of information I found the immigration record of Bayla and several of their children. There are two pieces of data on which I focus, nearest relative in Europe and who were they going to. In this case I had a perfect match as she named her destination with her husband's name and town. Even better she gave her mother's name as nearest European relative, a perfect match of both given name, surname and town to the marriage record.

So what's next? With a firm foundation, we can begin to look for related records. On JRI-Poland I find indices for birth records for both Leib and Bayla, a marriage record for Bayla's parents and a death record of a Leib with the correct last name just one year before the younger Szija Leib's birth. Given the time proximity it may well be his grandfather after whom he is named. I need only order the records from the Family History Library and settle in to await further discoveries.

And there we have it, puzzle solved.

Ordering Films from the Family History Library

I’ve been doing some genealogy work for others and recently ordered some films from the Family History Library in Utah.  When I first began doing family history I went to the local Church of the Latter Day Saints where they had a small library with microfilm readers that was connected with the Family History Library in Utah.  At first I was a bit intimidated by the fact that it was in a church.  The very helpful volunteers were a close knit group who referred to each other as brother and sister.  I used to listen to the hum of their background conversation while immersing myself in an equally foreign world.  Before I worked up the courage to order a film, I looked at Polish films that were in the files.  I remember studying the records written in this strange language and script trying to make sense of them.  I have always retained a memory from when I was a child.  I recall studying a page in a book, a picture of a deer in the upper left corner and typeface that I so wanted to decipher, a moment when I could not yet read.   This was not too dissimilar an experience.

Over time I got bolder and ordered films from the Family History Library in Utah and later began to go to Utah directly.  I poured over those films, gradually finding the birth, marriage and death records of my family.  Polish began to seem like an old friend as I learned the key words to look for as markers.  Then when I hit the mid 1860s the records suddenly changed to Cyrillic Russian and I panicked at this strange language.  A few community ed classes later and Russian too began to feel more familiar. It now seems quite long ago and in fact the library process has changed quite a bit.

On my early visits I used to have flashbacks to my job in college when I worked in the research department of the university library.  Surrounded by microfilm readers, not much had changed many decades later. But change is beginning to happen.  When I wanted to order records this time I discovered that I could only order on-line.  The site required me to register and select a library.  The small one near my home that I had begun with was no longer on the list.  It appeared that they had consolidated resources, perhaps to have a larger presence and more hours at the available libraries.  One of the challenges when I first began my research was that there were quite limited hours as it was staffed by volunteers.  I was pleased to see that the hours had been greatly expanded.  The fee for the films had increased to $7.50 and when I arrived at the library I noted that they now had a scanner similar to what I had used in Utah, although in Utah scanning had been free.  Here they charged the same for a scan as for a hardcopy, still a bargain when weighed against airfare to Utah.

I was accustom to searching the online Family History Library Catalog. In the past I had searched for a country and city and then gone to the category of Jewish records.  From there I had ordered the relevant films and carefully studied them, looking for family names in that ancient script. While that is still available, you will want to first do a name search in hopes that the records you are looking for have been indexed.

The research I was doing was for a Catholic German family. I knew that family came from Mehren, Germany so first I tried the old method.   I went to the catalog and I input Mehren, Germany.  I came up with two categories, a book on Genealogy and a some films of vital records, one of baptisms in particular.  In the old days I would have proceeded to look at each record on that baptismal film looking for family names.  If I was fortunate there might be an index. Now there is a much easier path, to the same information.  At familysearch.org, I entered the names I was searching.  Up popped census records as, well as baptismal records by name, each accompanied by the film number.    When I went to the film, I was able to quickly locate the correct record because the indexed record had revealed the year plus I had the certainty that the record would be there.

JRI-Poland has previously indexed many of the Jewish records so I’ve had the benefit of some indexing, but for the most part my past research still required painstaking searching through foreign records.  Now that process was greatly simplified, at least if you are one of the fortunate ones whose family has been indexed.

I pulled the 1800s baptismal records and turned my attention to the other film, a family history that someone else had invested the time in creating.  As this was a family that came to the US in the mid-1800s the research was primarily US based.  The research in Germany included the baptismal records and a marriage record, but had not gone further back. My client had a suspicion that there might be Jewish history in her tree and was interested in exploring that further.  If so, I concluded it was not in the US branch which had a healthy number of priests and nuns in the tree.  One of the things I was looking for to test her theory was naming.  Ashkenazic Jews name children after a deceased grandparent or great-grandparent and I thought the naming pattern might have persisted.  Nothing in that vein as of yet.

If you are considering a search for your family records I would encourage you to first try your luck at familysearch.org and if films exist venture out to one of the local church family history libraries.  They are open to the public and you need not be affiliated with the church to make use of their resources.  It was my first step many years ago and set me on a fascinating journey.

Blogging from the Other Side of the Keyboard

Have you ever wondered when you read a blog what it is like on the other side of the keyboard?  I’ve been thinking about that lately as I realized that I have passed the two year anniversary of this blog.  I was originally introduced to the idea of blogging by an artist friend who pointed out a variety of arts blogs designed to share one’s latest work with a community of artists.  A blog solely on artwork seemed too limiting to me and as I had been painting family and cultural history it soon morphed into a family history blog with an arts component.  Over the last several years I have traveled widely in Eastern Europe with trips to my ancestral towns in Belarus, Poland and the Ukraine.  Soon I was writing about travel as well.  As I am a voracious reader, the occasional book review also finds its way into the blog if related to family and cultural history.  It’s a broad swath, but I write about what I care about and hopefully attract readers who share some of the same interests.

So a few observations…  I’ve learned that blogging requires deep commitment to sustain the effort.  A compulsive personality is an asset when it comes to consistently blogging.  I began this blog when I was traveling to Lithuania to study Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute.  While time is often limited when traveling, material is not.  Seeing a new region through fresh eyes offers a wealth of new material.  The challenge arises when one isn’t traveling.  There have been times when my life was quite full, but not specifically related to genealogy or family history travel or artwork so little blogging occurred.   And then there are times when new material overflows and I seek to capture it as fast as I can.

One of the things that I struggle with is how much personal information to put out there.  Juxtaposing being a fairly private person with a web presence is challenging. A private blogger is a bit of an oxymoron.  Of course I share family history information, ever hopeful that someone related will stumble across my blog and uncover an entirely unknown new branch.  One can always hope.  When I was writing about my oral history project on Jewish Identity & Legacy, I debated how much of my own background and thoughts on Jewish identity to include.  I’ve since concluded that if it is relevant to the topic, then it is appropriate.  My cultural Jewish identity was relevant to my interest in exploring the topic of identity and thus made its way into the blog.

People blog for many reasons.  For me it is much the same reason that I create Shtetlinks (now Kehila links), websites for those searching family from a particular town.  I’ve learned a lot in the course of my search and I hope that others find it useful.  I’ve had many people reach out to assist me as I did my research and this is a way that I give back to that community.  And of course, I like to write.  I doubt most people write blogs if they don’t.  I often find that writing is a way that I organize my thinking.  Many times I have started to write about a discovery and in the process of writing I think of an important new direction to explore.

I always appreciate those who send me comments as it gives me some flavor for who is reading the blog.  I also make use of the statistics available through Google on the blog.  It is reassuring to realize that even if I never wrote another blog entry a significant number of people around the world will continue to find my existing entries.  Google provides statistics on the number of hits, which blog entries and from where they were referred.  It also tells me geographically the number of people who are reading the blog from around the world.   I must confess to some fascination with these statistics.  This week I had readers from the US. the UK and Germany leading the pack, but also hits from Canada, the Czech Republic, Belize, the Ukraine, Chile, Austria and Russia.   Blog entries on Prague and Cracow seem to be most in demand, usually a blip that corresponds to travelers to those regions.

Over the period Google has tracked these results, the US accounted for about two-thirds of the hits with the balance largely composed of Canada, Germany, the UK, Russia and Israel.  Of the almost 120 blog entries that I’ve done there are three blog entries that have generated the most interest.  Stalking the Shtetl Stork is the all-time leader with a focus on a shtetl visit to Pilvishok.  I can only guess that there is a devoted group searching family from that particular shtetl.  Tied for second place is Principles for Basic Genealogy Searches and Archive Day.  Principles is very appropriately named which may account for its hits.  As I was doing research for others, I detailed out my process and the basic principles that guided my search.  It is a good primer for anyone beginning genealogy research.   Archive Day describes my time at the Radom archives doing research.

Two years ago I didn’t imagine that I would still be writing the blog after my Lithuanian travels.  It is quite possible that it will morph over time as I’ve completed most of my Eastern European travels and uncovered many of my family history mysteries.  So keep reading and together we’ll see how this evolves.