UK: Tracing the Tribe noted in gen mag

When one is recuperating from a bug, it is nice to hear from friends providing good news.

Such was the case with two emails in two days - from geneablogger FootnoteMaven and Jeremy Frankel (president of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society - both informing Tracing the Tribe that we were featured in the spring issue of the UK genealogy magazine, Your Family Tree.

Jeremy, now visiting in the UK, is bringing back a copy of the issue for us.

Alan Crosby wrote an excellent article about genealogy blogging and mentioned the "Top Three: Unsung Heroes," including Tracing the Tribe.

It was very nice to be recognized alongside Heritage of Wales and The Victorianist.

His story noted another good friend - Thomas MacEntee of Geneabloggers.com. Crosby mentioned that Thomas now lists some 1,200 categorized genealogy blogs, but a more accurate count is now in the neighborhood of 1,700!

Dick Eastman and other US and UK geneabloggers were mentioned in the story, which gave a nuts and bolts take on setting up a genealogy blog.

It also shows off Tracing the Tribe's logo, designed by the above-mentioned - and very talented - FootnoteMaven!

Thank you, Alan Crosby!

Tablet: A fine young criminal

Tablet magazine is presenting a series of articles based on historic newspaper accounts.

The introduction to the series reads:

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But we tend to know less about the lives of average Jews, who didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the intellectuals. That began to change in the late 19th century, when the Yiddish press hit the streets, for the first time recounting the lives of the unwashed masses of Jews in the public record. Tablet Magazine offers some of their stories, reconstructed from century-old newspaper accounts.

Tablet previously carried the Benjamin Nathan case, and today's piece is the story of Yitzhok Farbarovitsh, a yeshiva boy who became a gang member and then wrote about it in plays which "portrayed the street life of Jewish pimps, prostitutes, and criminals in its own raw reality, complete with nasty language and foul behavior."

Read Eddy Portnoy's story about Farbarovitsh, later known as Urke Nahalnik (Yiddish, brazen master criminal).

Yitzhok Farbarovitsh was known as a good kid in the shtetl of Vizne, a small town in Russian-ruled Poland, in the years just before World War I. He excelled in cheder, Jewish elementary school, and, when he reached his tweens, was sent to another town in the Pale of Settlement to attend a yeshiva. Yitzhok was on track to fulfill his mother’s dream that he become a rabbi. But not long after his bar mitzvah, his mother died, sending the Farbarovitsh household into a depression, and throwing Yitzhok’s life onto a different track.

The detailed story contains blockbuster elements: sex, crime, religion, jail, bad boy makes good, theater, spicy Yiddish slang and mentions YIVO along the way.

About one of his plays, the story relates:

Warsaw’s Jewish underworld was not the only group dissatisfied with the play. The socialist Bund’s arts magazine fulminated angrily against what they called theatrical “trash.” On the front page, an editorial griped that “when the prostitutes are on stage, talking their dirty talk, and the thieves are doing business in their pubs and hideouts, it’s ugly, it’s disgusting…. For three hours, the audience and the theater is dragged through the mud.”

The critics didn't like it, but the people did and it was a minor hit.

Farbarovitsh was also involved in some of the first attacks on the Nazis, according to the article, and demanded funding from Jewish underground leaders to organize attacks against the Nazis. Although they refused, he returned to his town of Otwock, outside Warsaw, where he sabotaged rail lines to Treblinka and helped Jews escape the trains and hide in the forest.

He was caught by the Germans in 1942. As he was being led to his execution in Otwock, he attacked his guard and nearby soldiers fatally shot him.

Read the complete story at the link above. Tracing the Tribe is waiting for the next article in the series.

Wolinsky's wild cards

Tracing the Tribe's friend and colleague Howard Wolinsky has a new story in Ancestry Magazine, detailing how wildcards helped him end a 30-year search. The techniques may help you, too.

Read the complete story here.

It seemed so simple. I could barely contain myself.

I ended a 30-year search — a long journey littered with false starts, dead ends, and bottlenecks — with a major breakthrough. At long last, I had found my grandfather ­Henry Wolinsky.

Henry, named Hillel when he was born in 1871, had always been a mystery to me. He died before I was born, but I felt a special affinity with him because I was named for him in the Jewish custom. My religious name in Hebrew is Hillel. The “H” in my first name is in Henry’s honor as well.

My father, Sidney, told me when I was a teen that the original family name was Schrogin. That has been an important bit of data in my search for my family origins. But it turned out not to be the whole story because of translations, misspellings, and name changes, a fact I nailed down only a year ago.

Howard addresses the original surname SRAGAN and that SCHROGIN was the Americanized version. The old name was found in Czarist records.

Wildcard searches helped me overcome these stumbling blocks. Such was the case when I typed Hillel Sra*g*n into Ancestry.com. The * is a wildcard, a character that may be used in a search to represent one or more other characters. If your relative is hidden among permutations of a name created by misspellings, bad transcriptions, poor penmanship, or mistranslations, a wildcard can help root him or her out. Up popped the name “Hillel Sragan,” my paternal grandfather, in a record. I’d found him. Finally.

We are all delighted for Howard.

How did his family get the name? In the early 1800s, Jews in the Russian Empire were required to select a family name. The roots of the name date to the Middle Ages, and involve the name SRAGA (which means "light"). It is also a kinnui for the Hebrew-Yiddish names of Shraga Feibush, which also carry the same meaning of "light" in both languages.

As Tracing the Tribe writes frequently, a great myth of Jewish genealogy is that no records can be found in Eastern Europe. We have been told that they were destroyed during wars, that they have disappeared. Of course, we've discovered that this is not true, and there are indeed major record collections all over Eastern Europe.

Like many of us who have been in this game for a long time, Howard heard the same thing when his quest began three decades ago. Over the years, he's found records showing Hillel was born in Keidainai (Kedain), Lithuania - a branch of my own BANK family is also connected to that town.

Howard has always questioned how and when Hillel became Henry Wolinsky. He knew Henry took his brother's surname but not how Wolinsky was added to the picture.

He's tried to determine the truth to a story that the brother bought a business with the name Wolinsky and then changed his own name. Or, was there something else involved?

Howard did what we all have done and continue to do. We check city directories, ship's manifests from various ports and new databases as we become aware of their existence. He found nothing related to the name change how and why, but he did find new data on his grandfather and his brother.

And now comes the happy DNA dance part of the story. Tracing the Tribe loves DNA. DNA as a genealogical tool was made for this. While this story did not exactly involve a DNA technology match, it did bring together Howard's DNA friends and genetic cousins, who have met over the years via their mutual research revealing a long-ago common ancestor.

Many of his DNA contacts are also experts in old-fashioned paper trail research, such as Rebekah Canada in Iowa and Jill Whitehead in London. Tracing the Tribe is on many DNA lists and Rebekah and Jill are familiar names.

Rebekah helped with a complex wildcard search and found his grandfather's brother - Isaac Sragan - who arrived in New York by way of Glasgow in 1884. Howard used her technique to find his grandfather in the Hamburg passenger list showing his arrival in 1892.

A British records expert, Jill found Howard's grandfather - "Halel Seagan" - in the UK National Archives. Now that Howard had another "official" spelling to work with, a Boston arrival record was revealed for "Hilel Seagren."

Howard has found many "official" name variations in various databases, including Schrogin, Sragan, Srogen, Shrogin, Sragen, Seagren and Seagan.

While many people think that my own surname of interest, Talalay, is relatively (pun intended) easy to spell, there are some 30 or so variations in various databases. Who would have guessed that such a simple phonetic name could be transformed into some really unrecognizable forms?

The bottom line? Never give up. Keep checking databases (and look for new ones), construct many wildcard searches, and enlist your relatives (including genetic cousins) in the quest.

Howard still doesn't know where Wolinsky fits in, but I'm sure he won't give up and will tell us as soon as he finds out. Take a cue from him - never give up.

Yes, I know I wrote that twice. It is that important. If you don't find what you're looking for today, look tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. With so many records coming online or new record groups being made available onsite in different places, the chances of success increase exponentially.

Jewish genealogists worldwide are a collaborative group. We try to help each other and we never know where the next clue to our quest may come from.

Read Howard's complete story here for inspiration and creative ideas, and make sure to read his other stories (click here) in Ancestry Magazine.

NOTE: To see a segment of a UK show covering Howard's trip to Hull to trace his grandfather's voyage, see this YouTube clip. The host's accent and the music track is as good as the story itself.

Ancestry mag's archives online

A curious group of stories began appearing in Tracing the Tribe's Google alerts a few days ago.

There were many stories with Jewish content coming from Ancestry Magazine. I've seen stories from as far back as 2000 and some as new as August 2009.

Over the years, the magazine has included quite a number of Jewish genealogy content articles, which are now easily accessible online along with the redesign of the website.

Of course, many of the older ones (and even a very new one) leave out great resources for Jewish genealogy, such as Tracing the Tribe, but for those just starting out on personal quests for their Jewish ancestors, the articles will provide interesting content. The DNA articles by my colleague Howard Wolinsky are also listed.

In the magazine's homepage Search Box (upper right corner) just enter the keyword Jewish. Scroll down to see the long list of articles arranged chronologically from most recent to oldest. Not all the articles carry the Jewish tag, but the articles produced by the search do mention Jewish genealogy or ancestry in one way or another.

It was, however, a bit disconcerting to see an article titled National Church Repositories (published in 2000), based on a 1994 list of church repositories in the US and Canada. The Canadian Jewish Archives was included as a "church repository."

Thanks, Ancestry Magazine, for making these available and accessible online.