Eyewitness: Who Do You Think You Are LIVE!

Although I had to cancel my planned trip to London's Who Do You Think You Are LIVE! fair, several gen bloggers did attend, including WorldVitalRecords communications director Whitney Ransom, blogger Dick Eastman and others.

Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE Report by Whitney Ransom:

This week several members of WorldVitalRecords.com attended Who Do You Think You Are? Live, which perhaps is the largest family history and genealogy conference in the world. With more than 15,000 conference attendees, the conference hall was packed with individuals ready to learn, listen to speakers, visit the vendors to see some of the latest genealogical products, and even non-genealogical products (such as Nintendo, Cadbury), and simply have a wonderful time brushing shoulders with genealogy enthusiasts, experts, and historians from all over the world including Alistair McGowan, Nicky Campbell, father and son duo, Peter and Dan Snow as well as Time Team presenter Tony Robinson.

Another exciting part of the show was the "Ask the Experts" area. This was a place where conference attendees could go to set up a free, 30-minute consultation with more than 25 specialists and genealogists to receive assistance and guidance on their research and genealogical interests. The speakers at the show provided sessions for beginning to advanced genealogists and ranged in topics from Irish records in London to Scottish Records Before 1800.

WorldVitalRecords will soon be posting video clips and other fair-related information.

Dick Eastman posted three WDYTYA LIVE! entries:

In his first day's post, Dick indicated there may have been even more genealogy-related exhibits than last year and that it was better organized all around. He also posted photos. He collaborated with Roots Television to tape interviews and other highlights and those will be posted here.

The second day - Saturday - showed a much bigger crowd as Friday was a regular work day for most people. In his second post, he covered the venue - Olympia Exhibition Hall, built in 1886 and covering four acres. There were stage shows all day. Dick mentioned his favorite booth was the Italian gelato stand (Italian ice cream). It was nice to know that he enjoyed pistachio - my favorite flavor.

Sunday was the third and final day and Dick feels that the crowds were bigger than last year's report of some 13,000 people - he's estimating 15,000+ paid admissions.

So far no total of paid admissions has been posted, but that's a great turn-out for a three-day event covering so many aspects of genealogy and family history.

Read Dick's postings here, here and here.

Family Tree Magazine's eyewitness report was by Richard Heaton, a 30-year British family history veteran.

But it’s not just the numbers that make this show stand head and shoulders above the rest — it’s the scope of what’s available for visitors. It has representation from many UK local family local history societies, the online research database companies such as FindMyPast, software suppliers and expert lectures.

But it’s also attended by major archives in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; experts on local history, military history, archeology, conservation, the History Channel; even the London Times digital newspaper archive (below). All under one roof for three days.

Making available a great variety of resources and knowledge —some not immediately connected to family history as we’ve known it — gives the show appeal to a wide audience. The common theme? All exhibitors and visitors share a passion for history.

Heaton covered a lot of the fair, and mentioned a Jewish family history research program, as well as military history and archeology exhibits.

He was volunteering at the event to help visitors with research queries in two booths: Guild of One-Name Studies (UK) and Society of Genealogists (UK). Most visitors were from the UK, but others came from the US, Canada, Ireland and Australia.

Eyewitness: Bad Arolsen, Jewish genealogists

The best-made plans of mice and men - the mice won this round!

I had big plans this month. I had planned to blog from the just-concluded Who Do You Think You Are? Live genealogy fair (May 2-4) in London, and also to participate in a a first-ever Jewish genealogists' trip (May 4-9) to Bad Arolsen, Germany, to work directly with records at the recently-opened ITC Holocaust archives.

Unfortunately, because of family illness, I had to cancel both trips with sincere regrets.

The AP story on the first-ever professional genealogists' trip to Bad Arolsen is here

The story quotes Gary Mokotoff and Sallyann Sack, who arranged the trip, as well as some of the other researchers from the US, the UK Israel, Australia.

BAD AROLSEN, Germany - A mother and child separated. A father's war wound. An uncle's name on a list.

The unrelated and disparate items are among the discoveries made by 40 Jewish genealogists who spent the past week plumbing a trove of Nazi documents made public after 60 years.

For genealogists of Jewish families, the Holocaust is both a tragedy and a black hole, because so many of the 6 million Jewish victims disappeared without a trace. For years, researchers hoping to fill the gaps have longed to dive into the more than 50 million documents held in this German spa town and entrusted to the International Tracing Service, or ITS.

"The Nazis took away our names and gave us numbers. Our role is to take away the numbers and give back the names," Gary Mokotoff, a genealogist who helped organize the group from Israel, the U.S., Britain and Australia, said Thursday. "There is a wealth of information here."

For decades after World War II, the files were used only to help find missing persons or document atrocities to support compensation claims. But in November, the last of the 11 countries that govern the archive under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross cleared the way for public access.

The archive's deputy director Erich Oetiker says the staff of 400 processes some 1,000 tracing requests each day, and there are now almost daily visits from historians or individuals who want to trace someone's fate or view an original document.

American genealogist Sallyann Sack suspected for years that the collection held answers to questions about her family.

In the 1980s, she put in a request trying to trace the birth parents of her adopted cousin, who had survived Buchenwald as a 9-year-old boy, then been brought by her aunt and uncle to the United States. A form letter came back saying the search had turned up nothing.

But digging deeper during her time here, Sack was able to cross-reference the birth mother's second given name and access records of search requests made to the ITS since it opened in 1955 — often detailed letters by individuals who reveal nuggets of family history while seeking a missing loved one.

"I found here that his mother, who was separated from him when he was less than five years old, also had survived," she said. "She came to the U.S. in the same year that he did, in 1949." The mother, if alive, would be 93 and Sack presumes she is dead. The cousin is in his 70s and still alive, but Sack asked not to identify him.

"They never found each other," Sack said of her cousin and his mother, her voice breaking. "If these records had been opened earlier, they might have found each other. I could have found those documents 20 years ago, when she was still alive."

The USHMM in Washington, DC has compiled a list of more than 150 German terms with English translation to help researchers understand the documents. There is a link below to that list.

Tom Weiss of Newton, Mass., found his uncle's name on a yellowing Gestapo list of Jews arrested in France.

"When you see his name on these original lists it has an emotional impact," he said. "It sent chills down my back."

Esther Mandelayl, an American who immigrated to Israel two years ago, wanted to see what she could find. Her parents survived but her late father never talked about his experiences or the scar on his neck.

But her unusual family name came up on an index card from a displaced persons camp in Italy. It contained detailed information about her father. "It listed every place he had been," she said — from Russia, to Tashkent, to surviving a shot to his neck by the Nazis by falling into a cellar and being left for dead.

She said she could barely believe it: "I have every answer to all my questions about my father's story — the scar, everything."

Read the complete story here.

The AP story was written by Melissa Eddy and Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to the report.

There are also links to additional internet resources:

International Tracing Service

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Yad Vashem

Institute of National Remembrance

Glossary of terms to interpret documents

Click here for more information on the trip on the ITS website.

And for three pictures of participants (Gary Mokotoff, Sallyann Sack and Valery Bazarov), click here, here and here.

Netherlands: Jewish libraries

I have previously posted about Salon Jewish Studies - Gateway to Sources for Research in Jewish History and Culture, which provides information on a variety of sources.

A new section is on Netherlands resources:

The Bibliotheek van de Universiteit van Amsterdam - Library of the University of Amsterdam hosts the famous collection of Hebraica and Judaica. Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana (more than 6000 titles). search the catalogue here .

The core of the important and extensive collection of Hebraica and Judaica of the University of Amsterdam is the library of Leeser Rosenthal (1794-1868) from Hanover. In 1880 this library, which consisted of approximately 6,000 volumes, was donated by Leeser's children (Georg, Nanny and Mathilde) to the City of Amsterdam and housed in the Municipal Library - afterwards University Library of Amsterdam. Since then the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana has been enhanced considerably through donations and by pursuing a specific policy of acquisition; the collection ranks among the largest in Europe.

The Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana does not only comprise a large collection of printed books, the earliest of which date from the 15th century, but also periodicals, manuscripts (from the 13th century onwards) engravings, photographs and archival material.

It includes Hebraica and Judaica from the Northern Netherlands from the 17th century to the present, an almost complete collection of Menasseh Ben Israel and Jacob Juda Leon Templo; Inquisition material and Sephardic Judaica in the Cassuto Collection; history of the Jews in the Netherlands and Germany, and Jewish book history.

The Bibliotheek Ets Haim - Livraria Montenzinos Amsterdam hosts more than 30,000 titles. The catalog is not yet available online.

The 'Ets Haim Library - Livraria Montezinos' has been part of the 'Ets Haim' seminary since 1616, and has been housed in the 'Esnoga' complex of the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam since 1675. Its 30,000 printed works and 500 manuscripts encompass all aspects of Jewish scholarship, and many aspects of literature, history and the natural sciences. The library's collections provide a detailed picture of Sephardic culture as it emerged from its roots in the Iberian peninsula.

Resources include some 500 manuscripts (1280-20th century), about 30,000 printed works (1484-today). Of 20,000 volumes, about 65% are in Hebrew. Printed materials also include 6 Hebrew incunabula, 400 Hebrew unica, 400 unique Spanish and Portuguese printings and some 750 special event printings. There are also some 250 prints and scores of choral music.

The collections include all standard Jewish works in many editions; languages include Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, English and Yiddish.

The Bibliotheek van de Universiteit van Leiden - Library of the University of Leiden hosts a huge collection of Hebrew books and manuscripts. search the catalogue here.

The Oriental Department in the Library of Leiden University houses a considerable and varied collection of Oriental material, consisting of both handwritten and printed pieces, which originate mainly from the Middle East and Indonesia. Smaller collections from Japan, China and India and books and texts in Hebrew and Syriac also form part of the library. The library has been the depository of Oriental books and manuscripts from its very inception in 1586. The first voyage by the Dutch to the Indonesian archipelago, just before the end of the 16th century, resulted for the Leiden Library in the acquisition of a Javanese manuscript on palm leaves, which is now one of the very oldest in existence.

There are also two substantial photograph collections.

San Diego: Lithuania, Latvia roots, May 10

Thanks to my gen blogging colleague Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings, I learned that the San Diego Genealogical Society will have a program focusing on Jewish roots in Lithuania and Latvia, with speaker Dr. Franklin Gaylis.

Dr. Gaylis will share his amazing research experiences from his 2001 travels to retrace his roots to the Baltics. Many records had only recently become accessible with the downfall of the Soviet Union in the areas where his grandparents fled at the turn of the 20th century.

He developed an interest in genealogy in his early 40s when the Soviet Union started unraveling and the countries from which his grandparents had fled at the turn of the 20th century, the Baltics, became more accessible.

According to the announcement, Gaylis has read extensively on the history of the Jews in Lithuania and Latvia as well as the past 3,000-4,000 years.

Born in England, raised and educated in South Africa, Gaylis, a urologist, and his wife Jean immigrated to the US; his practice is in San Diego.

The meeting starts at noon Saturday, May 10, at St. Andrew's Lutheran Church (8350 Lake Murray Blvd (at Jackson Drive), San Diego. Meetings are free and open to the public; beginners are welcome.

The San Diego Genealogical Society was founded in 1946 to promote interest in genealogy and family history; offers a research library, educational and research opportunities. It also collects, preserves and publishes San Diego County, California genealogical and historical records.

Food: Culinary heirlooms

We connect family memories and family history with comfort food, no matter our ancestral origins in Italy, Iraq, Iran, Eastern Europe or Ireland. Mother's Day (Sunday, May 11, in the US) is the perfect time to remember our mothers and grandmothers and our culinary heritage.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger published a story on cooks searching for a link to the past.

Families today are looking back to favorite dishes made by Mom or Grandma as they move forward, re-connecting to their culinary heritage by preserving beloved recipes and the unique family traditions associated with them.

The story details some New Jersey cooks and some books they've written or are currently preparing.

Another trove of recipes is never far from the mind of Aviva Djiji Levy, 55, a graphic designer in Leonia. Born into an Iraqi family in Israel and raised in Iran, she plans on self-publishing the unique Iraqi-Jewish recipes collected by her mother, Sally Djiji of Fort Lee. The task is daunting, however.

"My family doesn't have much recorded history," said Levy. Her efforts to set down her family's culinary background have been complicated by the need to locate sources for exotic ingredients, such as dried limes; analyze the Indian, Kurdish, Turkish, Persian and Russian influences on her family's cuisine; transliterate Arabic names into English; and test the timeless recipes to make sure they work in a modern kitchen.

Her friends in Iraqi-Jewish communities in Montreal, London and Israel keep asking her when she'll complete her book. "I'm hoping this year," she said. In the meantime, family gatherings offer Levy the opportunity to pass on her family's food traditions, such as the baking of the cheese-filled crescents known as sim-boo-sak b'je-bin, to her 19-year-old son, Darryl.

Here are some of the other books and cooks' comments:

"Cooking is a bright spot in our shared history. Nourishing one another and making sustenance -- these are good things to pass on if you can," noted Laura Schenone, 46, of Montclair, author of the newly released "The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family" (Norton, 2008).

Schenone also co-created the "Antique Recipe Road Show," an illustrated culinary blog, with artist and writer Nancy Gail Ring.

Ring learned to make the mandelbrot, rugelach, matzo ball soup, brisket and kugel of her Eastern European ancestors from her mother and grandmothers. "I still feel like my grandmothers are in the room with me when I'm baking," she said.

Schenone details her search for her paternal great-grandmother's Genoese ravioli recipe, consulting relatives and strangers on both sides of the Atlantic, and threw out mounds of dough as she tried to recreate the dish. Along the way, she inspired others to recreate lost treats.

Some individuals in the story are still pining for a perfect dish they had decades ago, such as Isabelle DeAngelis's search for a German dark chocolate ice box cake made by an elementary school classmate's mother. She's never found anything like it.

Suzann Brucato with Calabrian roots says: "The stronger the roots, the stronger the tree. It's significant for me to pass on as much as possible to them, and hopefully to their kids. How long that goes on, who knows?"

Read the complete story at the link above.

Tel Aviv: Dutch Ashkenazi cemeteries project

The next meeting of the Israel Genealogical Society's Tel Aviv branch will focus on the digitization project of Ashkenazi cemeteries in the Netherlands.

The meeting - in Hebrew - begins at 7pm, Monday, May 12, at Bet HaTanakh, 16 Rothschild Blvd., Tel Aviv. Non-members, NIS 20. The library will be open from 6-7pm.

Ben Noach of Akevoth (specialized in Dutch-Jewish genealogy) and the Nederlands-Israelitisch Kerkgenootschap (Organization of Jewish Communities in the Netherlands) will present a new website, Stenenarchief.org.

Launched in January 2008, it focuses on photographs of all Jewish gravestones in the Netherlands. Currently, the photographs and accompanying data for the first group of 18 Jewish cemeteries are available online. Each gravestone's Hebrew text is transcribed to Dutch and also contains the Dutch texts on the photographs.

For more information, click here.

Deep South: Jewish resources

if you have roots in southern US states, if you're trying to find information about ancestors who lived in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Northwest Florida; about synagogues and institutions in this geographical region, then consider contacting the Deep South Jewish Voice, the paper that covers this area.

The DSJV carries, in addition to its regular international and US Jewish news, local Jewish history stories, such as this one on French Jewish history in the South.

Last year, sociologist Anny Bloch-Raymond gave two talks on Jewish life in New Orleans in a series co-sponsored by the French Consulate in New Orleans, the Alliance Francaise of New Orleans, and the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans.

Bloch-Raymond, with a master's in American civilization from the University of Paris, and a PhD in social sciences from the University Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, is a member of the National Center of Scientific Research at the Center of Social Anthropology. She teaches Jewish culture in the anthropological department of the University of Toulouse LeMirail and in the Institute of Jewish Studies.

She's working on a new book - "Jewish Migrants from the Banks of The Rhine to the Banks of the Mississippi" - and her current field of research is migration from France and Germany to the American south during the 19th-20th centuries.

The two programs were "Languages, ways of cooking and religions: French inspiration, Jewish rites, and Creole practices" and "From the banks of the Rhine River to the banks of the Mississippi: a long story of the presence of the French Jews in Louisiana."

The first explored how French Jewish immigrants in New Orleans adapted their cuisine to include Creole traditions.

The immigrants who settled in New Orleans maintained their French Jewish heritage even if they had adjusted it. Cooking combined French and Southern mode, gumbos and matzo balls, gefilte fish, kugels, and pecan pies. Many families compiled their own recipe books. Some became professional cooks, such as Beulah Ledner, who created a French doberge adapted from Austrian cake, and opened a bakery in New Orleans in 1933, becoming very successful.

Her second talk focused on the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine who, in the mid-1880s, left their homes, landed in New Orleans and mainly settled in small towns along the Mississippi River.

They gave their names to the towns of Geismar, Klotzville, and Marksville in Louisiana. They owned plantations in Bunkie, White Castle, and Reserve. There are still dry goods stores and general stores bearing their names: Abraham Levy, Wolff, Lemann, Lorman, Fraenkel. They were founding members of synagogues in New Orleans, Donaldsonville, Alexandria, and Opelousas, along with the German migrants that they married ...

Other resources for the area include the private, non-profit Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life (ISJL), dedicated to providing educational and rabbinic services to isolated Jewish communities, documenting and preserving the rich history of the Southern Jewish experience, and promoting a Jewish cultural presence throughout a 13 state region.

The Institute began as the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in 1986. Now a subsidiary of the ISJL, the museum helps to define southern Jewish culture through traveling and permanent exhibits. In recent years, the Institute has dramatically expanded cultural offerings in both small towns and big cities throughout the South.

Innovative regional programming includes annual Jewish film festivals, concerts highlighting cross-cultural music, literary programs, dance and theatre performances, and other activities that promote artistic interpretation of the Southern Jewish Experience.

New York: Genetic counseling forum

New York University Law Professor Arthur S. Leonard reports and comments on law, music, film, current events with a special emphasis on sexuality and the law.

He covered a panel at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, co-sponsored by The Jewish Week - "A World Without Genetic Disabilities: A Mixed Blessing?"

The event was inspired by New York Times journalist Amy Harmon's two articles published in May 2007 and focusing on ethical issues raised by genetic counseling. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the impact of DNA knowledge on our lives. Harmon also participated in a genetics panel at the 26th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy (August 2006, New York City).

Harmon introduced and moderated panelists Dr. Harry Ostrer (NYU School of Medicine, Director of Human Genetics Program), Adrienne Asch (Yeshiva University, Director of Center for Ethics), Rabbi Mordechai Liebling (Reconstructionist Rabbi, Father of Lior in the film Praying with Lior, the story of a Down syndrome child preparing for his bar mitzvah), and Nancy Neveloff Dubler (Einstein Medical College, Director of Center for Ethics and Law in Medicine).

A short description of the problem might go this way: as our scientific knowledge expands making it increasingly possible to foretell or predict physical and mental "abnormalities" by genetic testing of prospective parents, embryos conceived in vitro, or fetuses in situ (amnio testing), the question becomes what tests should be offered, what tests should be performed, how the results should be communicated to prospective parents, and who ultimately should be making decisions about which children should be conceived and carried to term.

Leonard describes the panelists' range of opinions as well as those of attendees.

As the panel moved from presentations to Q&A, it became clear that there were bigger differences than had first appeared, most notably between Rabbi Liebling, who had gone with his family to D.C. to lobby Congress in support of a proposal to adopt federal statutory standards for genetic counseling that would require "balanced counseling," presumably to avoid the assertedly common situation of counseling that channels parents into deciding to abort Down syndrome fetuses based on a wholly negative recital of the facts, and Prof. Dubler, who argues that these issues should be handled by rethinking of ethical standards and professional practices within the self-governing professions and not by legislation. Another opening was between Dubler's insistence that certain kinds of tests should not be offered or given (for example, tests for genetic markers for personality dispositions, as opposed to tests for markers for severe medical or mental disabilities), as against Asch's contention that all tests that are possible should be made available.

Read the complete posting here.