TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Jewish Historical Documents Expand

ADVERTISEMENT

By SHARON TATE MOODY

Tribune correspondent

Published: November 16, 2008

Ancestry.com's collection of Jewish historical documents has grown to 26 million, and they're available for free.

Additions contributed by JewishGen and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee include photographs, immigration and Holocaust records that have never been available online before. The new databases are available at www.ancestry .com/JewishFamilyHistory.

Here are some of the records available for searches:

•Jewish Transmigration Bureau Deposit Cards, 1939-54, show the amount of money paid by American Jewish citizens to support the emigration of friends and relatives from European countries during and after WWII.

•Munich, Vienna and Barcelona Jewish Displaced Persons and Refugee Cards, 1943-59, list the displaced Jews who were provided with food, medical care, clothing and emigration assistance.

•The JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry, lists the names of more than 1 million names of Jews from nearly 2,000 Jewish cemeteries around the world.

•Yizkor Book Necrologies, includes names of those killed in the Holocaust.

•A Holocaust Database of 2 million names includes the 1,980 inmates in Oscar Schindler's ("Schindler's List") factories in Plaszów, Poland and Brünnlitz, Czechoslovakia.

•Jewish Records Indexing Poland and All Lithuania Database, has more than 2 million indexed names from databases in Lithuania and Poland and vital information on the regions.

New Online Course

The National Genealogical Society is offering "Working With Deeds," a self-paced course that explains the importance of various kinds of deeds and how genealogists can use them to solve research problems.

To register, society members pay $35, or $50 for nonmembers, log in and download the course files. It is a self-graded course, so no certificates of completion will be issued.

To register for this and other society courses, go to www.ngsgenealogy.org/Courses/Course.cfm.

The society also has some handy publications worth ordering. The Research in the States series includes booklets for Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.

Paper versions are $14.50 each for society members and $17.50 for nonmembers. You also can order e-books to download from the site for $8 for members and $10 for nonmembers. They're at www.ngsgenealogy.org/BookStore.

Reader Tip

A genealogist wrote recently to share a research experience that she calls a good lesson in why perseverance pays.

Judy Jouglet, president of the South Bay Genealogical Society, explained that her second great-grandfather Anton Weiskopf immigrated to America in 1868 and settled in Chicago. She badly needed his date of death for her family history, so last summer, she visited his grave and found the date on his tombstone.

Being a good researcher, however, Judy did not assume that date was correct. She needed a death certificate as the best proof.

She discovered that Illinois has its death record index online. Using the family's spelling of the name, Judy got no hits on her ancestor. The Illinois system allows a search on just the first two letters of a surname so Judy entered "We" and got several thousand names in return.

"Each day I took 25 to 50 names and examined them," Judy wrote. "After about two weeks of looking, there was Anton Weeskoph and the correct date of death ... what a thrill!"

Judy's case illustrates that even when we have the correct spelling of our ancestors, the clerks making the records or indexing them, didn't always get it right.

"Wade through all those names and be patient," Judy advises. "Don't give up even though you know you have it right."

Getting Started

If you would like to spend a couple of hours learning how to get a genealogy research project off the ground, join me from 2 to 4 p.m. Dec. 11 at the SouthShore Regional Library, 15816 Beth Shields Way, Ruskin.

I'll be presenting Laying a Foundation of Your Genealogy House in the library's classroom. No advance registration is required, and seating is on a first-come basis. The library staff will begin issuing tickets about an hour before class time - just check in at the information desk. There is no charge.

Sharon Tate Moody is president of the Association of Professional Genealogists. Send your genealogy questions and event announcements to her in care of Getaway, The Tampa Tribune, 200 S. Parker St., Tampa FL 33606 or wmoody3@tampa

bay.rr.com.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT