UK: Hull Jewish history and new book

The myth of the "Wandering Jew" and early Hull Jewish history came to life again in a recent program at a local synagogue.

Importantly for Jewish genealogists and family historians whose families had a connection with Hull, a new directory - compiled from books and registers - will detail the Jewish history and residents of the community.

Hull was also a major migration stop for European Jews, and is one of the three oldest Jewish communities in England.

The BBC covered the event.

Speakers included Hull attorney Max Gold, Hull University history professor Dr. Nick Evans, and Hull Jewish community historian and archivist Dr. David Lewis.

Gold noted the recorded Jewish presence and influence in the Roman Empire where some 10% of the population was Jewish and how Jewish traders were believed to have been regular visitors to Cornwall some 2000 years ago.

Among other topics discussed: Sephardic history in Spain, Columbus' likely origin as a converso, the 1290 expulsion of Jews from England and their return in 1655.

Hull's first recorded Jewish inhabitant in 1766 being Michael Levy, a watchmaker. In 1788 a local jeweller, Aaron Jacobs, created an 'elegant crown' to adorn the brow of King William the Third's (King Billy) equestrian statue on the centenary celebration of his victory over King James the Second.

Gold said that the Max Factor cosmetics company family came from Hull before moving to the US.

Lewis spoke about the creation of a directory of the community's history and people from books and registers. It covers the community's vital role for many immigrants moving on to Liverpool and also to North America.

The directory, which is now at first draft stage, when finally complete will be passed to Hull's new History Centre where it will be made available on-line for use by historians and descendants of early transmigrants exploring their family origins.

Read the complete story at the link above.

JGSLA 2010: Friday afternoon

The new JW Marriott at LA Live is a huge property.

Public area furnishings are spare; the lobby features couches with pillows set in alcoves along the far wall, while modern seating is near the check-in area.

Room

The guestrooms are large; our color scheme seems to be beige and turquoise. Lighting seems fine with wall lamps and goose neck reading lights. There's a full-length mirror on an interior closet door. The bathroom is spacious with excellent lighting. There's a huge flat TV monitor, and hook-ins for computers and other devices on the side of the desk.

Adequate closets, many more shelves and drawers than normal, and a room safe large enough for the largest laptop.

Surroundings

I haven't been in downtown Los Angeles for more than 20 years, and the change has been substantial. Back then, you wouldn't want to walk these streets after dark. Today, there are new buildings - commercial and residential - and restaurants featuring sidewalk seating.

People

The first genners I saw were Roni Seibel Liebowitz and her husband Jerry (New York). I've said hello to Stan Diamond and his wife (Montreal), Herb Huebscher and his wife (New York), actress Miriam Margolyes (UK, of "Harry Potter" fame), and saw Arthur Kurzweil - the genealogist-in-residence - entering the kosher Shabbat dinner down the hall.

One of my roommates, Jonina Duker (Washington DC area) is already here and we grabbed a quick dinner at a Persian cafe a few blocks away. She's been looking around the hotel and reported on the outdoor rooftop pool and tempting whirlpool.

My schedule already includes two meetings tomorrow (breakfast and late afternoon).

I'm trying to get more of the Seattle sessions into posts before this conference completely takes over my life for the rest of the week.

More tomorrow!

Historic Newspapers: 40 million pages to digitize

A partnership between the British Library and online publisher brightsolid will digitize some 40 million pages of historic newspapers over 10 years.

According to the press release, brightsolid (FindMyPast, AncestorsOnboard, Friends Reunited and GenesReunited) is taking on the project's commercial and technical risks, with no direct costs to the British Library.

Some important points from the press release:

-- The firm will digitize content from the British Library Newspaper Library, which it will then make available online via a subscription website to launch next year. It will be available for free to users onsite at the British Library.

-- The goal, according to the press release, is to build a ‘critical mass’ of material for researchers – particularly in the fields of family history and genealogy."

-- The project will include out-of-copyright material from the
newspaper archive – pre-1900 newspaper material – and the partnership will also seek to digitize in-copyright material, with the agreement of relevant rightsholders. This copyrighted material will, with the publishers' express permission, be made available on the planned website.

-- The Library’s newspaper hard-copy collections will be moved from the current building at Colindale to a purpose-built storage facility (£33m funding) in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire. Access to the collection will be via microfilm and digital copies at the Library’s main site at St Pancras from 2012. Read more here.

-- It will help the collection remain relevant for a new generation of researchers, who are more used to accessing information via laptops than travelling to a physical location.

Copies of scanned materials will be held in the library in perpetuity.

Parts of this resource will be available online for the first time. The Library's collection spans 350 years and includes 52,000 local, regional, national and international titles. Its Newspaper Library in North London is used by 30,000 researchers in many subjects, including family history and genealogy, and the resources are mostly hard copy and microfilm.

A minimum of 4 million pages will be digitized in the first two years.

The Library's Dame Lynne Brindley outlined how the partnership will transform access to this collection and added that the success of the 19th Century British Library Newspapers website demonstrated the public’s huge appetite for digitized historic newspaper content:

“Historic newspapers are an invaluable resource for historians, researchers, genealogists, students and many others, bringing past events and people to life with great immediacy and in rich detail. Mass digitisation unlocks the riches of our newspaper collections by making them available online to users across the UK and around the world; by making these pages fully searchable we will transform a research process which previously relied on scrolling through page after page of microfilm or print. brightsolid have an excellent track record of digitising archive materials and making them available to new audiences – I look forward to announcing the web service resulting from this partnership, which will launch and then steadily grow from next year.”

Digitized material will include extensive coverage of local, regional and national press across some 350 years, and will focus on specific geographic areas, along with periods such as the census years between 1841 and 1911. Other categories will be developed.

It will help the newspaper collection to remain relevant for a new generation of researchers, more used to accessing research information via their laptop than travelling to a physical location.”

Chris Paton's Scottish Ancestry has a five-minute video of the announcement.

Tracing the Tribe looks forward to more information on the planned new subscription website.

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.

UK: 13th century Jewish cemetery

Over in the UK, the city of Northampton has begun to excavate on the site of a possible 13th-century Jewish cemetery some 17 years after skeletal remains were found nearby.

Experts believe the cemetery, which is one of only 10 such sites in England, was situated in what is now Lawrence Court, in the town centre, between 1259 and 1290.

Their research seemed to be confirmed when bones discovered by workmen in a collapsed culvert in neighbouring Temple Bar back in 1992 were dated to the same period.

Now a team of forensic archaeologists from Birmingham University has begun a survey of the area, hoping to discover evidence of the cemetery's enclosure walls, grave cuts and associated buildings.

Anglo-Jewish historian and Northampton resident Marcus Roberts is leading the project and said: "This is potentially the last unexcavated known Jewish cemetery in the country and perhaps the only one accessible for study, so it is a site of huge national importance.

The project plans to use non-intrusive methods, and not to start digging things up, as it is a sacred burial site.

"If we do find evidence of the cemetery from this survey we may consider taking a look at the buildings or boundary walls but we would not want to dig up the graves."

The team recently marked a grid to begin the survey.

A Birmingham University archaeology student was quoted as saying passing electrical current through the ground could determine if there had been graves in the past.

"If you dig a grave you aerate the soil and a lot of moisture gets caught up in the soil. So when we look for grave cuts we look for an area of very low resistance, possibly with a mass within it causing high resistance, if there is all or part of a skeleton buried there."

Read the complete story here in the Northampton Chronicle & Echo.

UK: Searching Jewish ancestors

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain offers a series of well-written guides to researching Jewish ancestors in the UK and elsewhere.

Rosemary Wenzerul's newest book (July 2008) is "Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians." (ISBN: 978 1 84415 788 4; Pen and Sword Family History Books, www.pen-and-sword.co.uk)

This lively and informative guide to researching Jewish family history will be absorbing reading for anyone who wants to find out about the life of a Jewish ancestor.

In a clear and accessible way she takes readers through the entire process of research. She provides a brief social history of the Jewish presence in Britain, with descriptions of the principal communities all over the country. She gives a concise account of the history of genealogy and looks at practical issues of research – how to get started, how to organize the work, how to construct a family tree and how to use the information obtained to enlarge upon the social history of the family. She describes, in practical detail, the many sources that researchers can go to for information on their ancestors, their families and Jewish history.

Vivid case studies are a feature of her book, for they show how the life stories of individuals can be reconstructed with only a small amount of initial information. In addition, there are chapters on Jews in the armed forces and Jewish heraldry. Her invaluable handbook will be essential reading and reference for anyone who is trying to gain an insight into the life of an ancestor or is researching any aspect of Jewish history.

A JGSGB council member and trustee, Wenzerul is active in its educational and family history work.

Other publications in the series include "Jewish Ancestors: A Beginner's Guide to Jewish Genealogy in Great Britain," "Genealogical Resources Within the Jewish Home and Family," "Jewish Ancestors: A Guide to Organising Your Family History Records," "Jewish Ancestors: A Guide to Reading Hebrew Inscriptions and Documents" and "Jewish Ancestors: A Guide to Jewish Genealogy in the United Kingdom."

UK: Genealogists angry, project delayed

Researchers in the UK are miffed as a £16m plan to put family history online collapses and it is back to "smudgy" microfilm records once again, according to this Guardian story.

A government website, which had promised direct access to 171 years of family records, has been delayed indefinitely following failure of a Whitehall computer project.

An attempt to scan, index and digitise 250m records of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales from 1837 to the present day was supposed to result in a new public website that would let people trace their ancestors at the touch of a button next February. Now, three years after the government awarded the £16m contract to German computer giant Siemens, the deal has been terminated with only half the work done.

It had been hoped that the online system would cut costs and make it easier and faster to find roots. The problems mean searchers must keep requesting documents by mail, at a fee of £7 or £10 a time.

Genealogists were already angry that the government had removed access to the paper ledgers (indexes of births, marriages and deaths) at the family records center when the decision was made to start the website.

The agency responsible for the records -The General Register Office (GRO) - said only 130 million records had been scanned, and shelved plans to make the index public. The missing records include birth records 1837-1934 and death records 1837-1957. The GRO is run by The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) which said it had only paid half the fee as a result.

On August 15, according to the story, IPS couldn't say when the project would be completed or how it would pay for the rest.

Quoted were Sue Hills of Ancestral Footsteps, which offers genealogy holidays: "This is a devastating blow. Everyone was incredibly excited because this was going to be a fantastic research tool and one of the big events in the world of ancestry."

Ancestry.co.uk's Simon Harper, managing director of the subscription site (which charges for index access), said the delay was "not good news for the amateur genealogist," and called it "hugely frustrating."

With the popularity of such shows as BBC's Who Do You Think You Are, more people in the UK are searching their roots. The show's consultant, genealogist Nick Barratt, estimates that one in three Britons have done online research on their ancestors.

The National Archives' visitor numbers doubled to 56.8 million in 2007 from 23.2 million in 2006, according to the story, which also includes comments from union officials, touches on the controversial decision to outsource work to India for the project, data security and more.

Read the complete story at the link above.