South Africa: New newsletter online

The Southern Africa Special Interest Group (SA-SIG) at JewishGen publishes a quarterly newsletter. The latest issue (September 2009) and all previous issues are available online.

The purpose and goal of the group is to bring together Jewish genealogy researchers with a common interest. It provides information to Jewish family history researchers with roots in South Africa, Lesotho, Basutoland, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Swaziland, Mozambique, Kenya and the former Belgian Congo.

Many researchers of these areas also share a common Lithuanian heritage.

SA-SIG has published a quarterly newsletter since 2000.

At the recent Philly 2009 conference, some 22 individuals attended the SA-SIG meeting. On the agenda were the South African Jewish Rootsbank Database, which plans to document an estimated 15,000 core families who migrated to Southern Africa 1850-1950 from England, Germany, Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus.

The September issue includes articles on the Feitelberg family, on the meaning of surnames, on the late Bernhard Herzberg and more. It also details the Muizenberg Exhibition, which will open at the Cape Town Jewish Museum on December 16. More than 1,000 photos, and a lot of material will be included.

The issue also contains information on joining the SA-SIG, or click here.

NGS: Two contests set

The National Genealogical Society has announced two competitions, one for writing and the other for newsletters.

The submission deadline for both the NGS Family History Writing Contest and Newsletter Competition is December 31. Only NGS members (individual or organizational) may participate.

For the Family History Writing Contest, the winner receives a certificate and prizes (estimated value $1,500), including travel to and from the NGS Conference and Family History Fair in Salt Lake City set for April 2010. up to five nights' hotel, free conference registration and free banquet ticket. Travel has some restrictions, so see the website for details.

What is NGS looking for?

- An original work not previously published or submitted elsewhere, covering three to four generations with proper documentation using the NGSQ Numbering System.

- Time period: Early American or later-immigrant. For early American, the progenitor may have been born elsewhere, but he and his descendants must have lived in Colonial America and/or the US. For a later-immigrant family genealogy, first and second generations may have been born elsewhere, but must have immigrated and lived in the US. The writer may be included as a third generation member, but not earlier.

- Criteria: Based on how well the writer demonstrates his or her research skills by using and analyzing a wide variety of original documents and telling the story by placing the family in the relevant historical context.

For all the details: Click the Awards & Competitions section of the NGS web site.

The NGS Newsletter Competition has the same December 31 deadline. and is for genealogical or historical societies which produce outstanding newsletters. Societies must be organizational NGS members.

There are three levels: (1) Major genealogical society newsletter, (2) local or county genealogical or historical society newsletter, or (3) family association newsletter. Three copies of two consecutive issues from the current year (2009) must be submitted along with the completed entry form.

Winner will receive a certificate, one-year NGS membership, and will be featured in an NGS Magazine article. Runner-up will receive a certificate and be featured in the NGS Magazine. Winners will be announced at the Opening Session of the NGS Conference and Family History Fair in Salt Lake City, on April 28, 2010.

For all the details, click the Awards & Competitions section of the NGS web site

Roots Travel: Grave Missteps

Regina Kopilevich spoke at Philly 2009's Litvak SIG luncheon where she discussed planning ancestral shtetl trips. A popular guide and researcher, her talents were also utilized by New York Times travel reporter Matt Gross.

He wrote an article in today's Tablet Magazine on heritage travel, which focused on Marijampole and its cemeteries and mentions the slaughter of 8,000 Jews by the Nazis and their helpers at a nearby Sesupe riverbend.

A year ago, I sat in this graveyard, wondering what, exactly, I was supposed to feel. I had come to Lithuania as part of “The Frugal Grand Tour,” a 13-part weekly series I was writing for my New York Times column, The Frugal Traveler. That week in July, I was delving into my heritage, trying to track down any extant details about the great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers who had, at the turn of the 20th century, left Lithuania for the New World. For almost all of my life, I had known nothing of them or their parents—like many immigrants, they told their children little of the lands from which they’d come.

Which meant that by the time I came along, only the most meager handful of names and anecdotes remained. Great-great-grandfather Miller, on my mother’s side, had 12 children and died when his beard got caught in the millworks. Also, our name, as we understood it, had once meant “big hat.” Elementary-school assignments to make family trees went nowhere (particularly since I had but one uncle and no close cousins), and I grew up wondering what it must be like to have a big family, a history that stretched back more than a few generations, an idea of where you came from besides the Massachusetts town you lived in, an identity tied to more than just secular Judaism, New England, and Star Wars.

On the Internet, Gross acquired information. His father found immigration documents, draft cards, the original name of their town - Marijampole - and more at Ancestry.

When he decided to visit the town as part of his Grand Tour, he contacted Regina in Vilnius and she dug into Czarist-era Jewish records and amassed a folder of records. His name, she said, was not the simple Gross, but Grossmitz or Grossmutz - which in Yiddish meant "big hat."

It was really only when I’d reached the cemetery that I began to sense the limits of this brand of “heritage tourism.” Here I was, sitting at the graves of my forefathers, nibbling the maple candy bar Regina had given me, but was I any different? The facts I’d learned had helped me — somewhat sketchily — to understand the world Morris had been born into and left behind, and now I could answer with precision when relatives of my wife, who is Taiwanese, asked where I’m from.

But — and this is putting it crudely — so what? There are no family-tree assignments in my immediate future, and at the ripe old age of 35, I’m comfortable basing my identity on the here and now. Judaism matters little to me; it’s a vestigial organ, a curiosity.

Gross learned more from his travels and also from such websites as JewishGen, books and other sources.

In Vilnius, Gross learned about Litvak history at the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, although he says there wasn't much he couldn't have learned at home in Brooklyn.

In other words, when it comes to digging into the past, travel is not necessarily your best shovel. As Jews, we have a wealth of countries, languages, traditions, and histories to investigate, and one of us has likely written about a book about it already. No need to fly halfway around the world — to museums whose store of knowledge and exhibit design pale in comparison to the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum’s, to Holocaust sites devoid, for various reasons, of details and context, to the poorly marked graves of our ancestors.

The story goes on to discuss Israel, young people visiting Israel, and the idea that travel is "often a clumsy instrument for researching the past, it’s unparalleled for examining how the past and present come together in unpredictable ways."

Read the complete article at the link above.

Family Tree Magazine: Free ebook offer

What's better than getting one thing for free? How about two things for free?

Family Tree Magazine is giving away a free ebook to readers who sign up for the publication's free weekly email Update newsletter.

The book is the 42-page "Best of the Photo Detective." It's a step-by-step guide to help you examine old family photos for hidden clues as to when they were taken and who’s in them. It includes an exclusive excerpt from "Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs" by the magazine's Photo Detective, Maureen A. Taylor.

The Update newsletter delivers the latest news, tips and resources for doing family history research.

Sign up here, and you will receive a link to download the book as a PDF file.

DNA: ISOGG newsletter online

Interested in genetic DNA? Absolutely.


View the International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG) newsletter online here. The December issue offers:

- A brief history of DNA Projects


How many have you founded or participate in?

- A very interesting piece on CCR5-delta 32, which is the mutation responsible for inherited immunity to plague and AIDs.


This gene is credited with saving the village of Eyam, England from extermination during a plague epidemic in September 1665. There are links to a PBS program, clues and evidence and more. I've always been fascinated by this story.

- Roundup of recent DNA-focused stories in the news.

South Africa: SA-SIG Newsletter now online.

The June 2008 issue of the SA-SIG Newsletter is now online here; earlier issues are also available. The issue includes the following: - The South African Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth have been documenting early Jewish life in the country communities of South Africa. Three volumes of "Jewish Life in the South African Country Communities" have already been published with another two in the pipeline. A chapter about Wolseley (Vol. 2) is presented, as well as an index of Vol. 3 and an order form for additional volumes. - The South African Jewish Genealogy Society (Johannesburg) has offered outstanding programs. Chair Maurice Skikne and program chair Ada Gamsu provide a list of the lectures, 2005-2008. These may provide programming ideas for other JGSs - Ivor Kosowitz (ex-Cape Town and now Perth, Australia) offers his memories of growing up in South Africa, 1950s-60s. - Sandra Cassel writes a eulogy about her late father - Leslie Jacobson - who spent his life farming in the small community of Philippolis, Orange Free State. - Muizenberg Revisited: Joy Kropman from The Revisiting Muizenberg Team is still looking for information for a forthcoming exhibition. She particularly would appreciate information on accommodation, hotels and the synagogue. Information on how to contact the team is provided. Learn more about the SA-SIG Newsletter here.