UCBerkeley: Magnes Museum Jewish collection acquired

The Magnes Museum's 10,000-piece collection of music, art, rare books and historical archives will be moved to several University of California-Berkeley locations, as the university has acquired the collection.

[Photo left: Judah Magnes]

According to the press release (with accompanying photos of collection items):

The UCalifornia Berkeley announced a five-year, $2.5 million gift from Warren Hellman, Tad Taube and the Koret Foundation to acquire the Magnes Museum's Western Jewish History Archives, a 10,000-piece collection of music, art, rare books, and historical archives.

During the summer, all letters, diaries, photographs and other archival documents will be relocated to the Bancroft Library, and will be known as the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library. Musical manuscripts and sheet music will be moved to the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library.

Supported by the gift, a building renovation in Berkeley's arts and commerce district will provide lecture and seminar rooms, exhibit space for prints, paintings, photographs, costumes, and Judaica objects such as 15th-century Hanukkiah lamps and Torah ornaments.

See the press release link above for more information, photos and details.

New York: Tenement Museum launches photo database

For some two centuries, many of our immigrant ancestors settled on New York's Lower East Side.

They lived crowded together in dark, crowded buildings called tenements.

One such building - 97 Orchard Street - housed some 7,000 people from more than 20 countries from 1863-1935. Restored as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, visitors can see restored apartments and get some sense of our ancestors' experiences as new immigrants.

According to the Tenement Museum blog, an online photo database has just been launched after four years of work.

It offers images including the neighborhood, historic and contemporary photos of the museum building, as well as portraits of its inhabitants.

The photo database is part of the permanent collection, with more than 5,000 objects and 130 linear feet of archival records.

Anyone with a computer connection around the word can now access the photo archive. Researchers may save their favorite images.

According to the blog, the most popular databases are photos of former residents and their descendants (1860s-2000s); stories of families presented on museum tours, photo essays, WPA photos, Lower East Side images, photos of apartments and the building.

Check out the images here.

Seattle: New building history guide

If Seattle, Washington is important in your research, there's a new Seattle Building History Guide that may assist you.

The information was detailed in the Seattle Public Library's Shelf Talk blog.

Now, Seattle history detectives are armed with a new arsenal, a comprehensive compilation of Seattle history resources created by our own Special Collections Department. The new Seattle Building History Guide annotates a wealth of Seattle history research tools and places them in a broader context than ever before. We'll be rolling it out on May 19th at the Third Place Books History Cafe. Afterwards, the guide will be available from our website.

If you only recognize the term "cadastral records" from Polish research, know that similar surveys were done in the early days of Seattle; as well as topographical charts from 1879 and Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps from 1893.

Other resources noted:

-- King County Property viewer for building research.

-- There's also information on obituaries, census records, marriage licenses, birth records and more, along with information on Seattle Parks Department , HistoryLink.org, Seattle Municipal Archives Photograph Collection .

Readers can download the Guide as a PDF file with hyperlinks, or print it. The blog post recommended two books as well: Native Seattle: histories from the Crossing Over Place by Coll Thrush; and House Histories: A Guide to the Genealogy of Your Home by Sally Light.

Check the library site today for the new resource.

Footnote.com: A new page for beginners

Are you a new user of Footnote.com? There's now a special page for beginners.

View it here, and see these sections:

-- Discover who you are: Find and organize your family history

-- Discover through history: See Footnote's documents online.

-- Start by searching for your name among the 63 million-plus documents.

-- Are you related? Start a Footnote ancestor page for your family.

-- What do others know? Share the page you've created at Footnote on Facebook.

There's new Footnote content to search:

-- Naturalization Records: Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania
-- City Directories: Des Moines, Indianapolis
-- Civil War Union Soldier Service Records: Nebraska, Arkansas, Colored Troops
-- Homestead Records: Nebraska
-- Texas Death Certificates: more than 3 million images
-- Final Payment Vouchers Index for Military Pensions, 1818-1864

And do check out the new enhanced image viewer.

Jerusalem: Mount of Olives now online

The world's oldest Jewish cemetery just went online, according to the Jerusalem Post.

More than 20,000 gravestones have already been documented, but there are some 200,000-300,000 in the cemetery. There's a lot still to do.

Mount of Olives burials go back some 3,000 years, to the First and Second Temple periods, and continues today. From 1948-1967, when Jordanians were in charge of the area, there was severe destruction, including broken and destroyed tombstones, with others used to pave floors in Jordanian army camps. During that era, a road was paved south from the top of the mountain. The road to Jericho was widened. All of this took place on top of the graves.

Following the Six Day War, the cemetery was slowly restored. Until now, however, there has been no major effort to map and record graves or to decipher and restore names on the tombstones.

Workers identify the graves and locate them on the map. The website allows global viewers to zoom in on an aerial photo and see a photo of each grave. Each name listed shows available information and a photograph, while users can upload additional data and photos about their loved ones and others who are buried there.

Those planning a visit can also create (and print) a map and route of graves to visit.

Read the story here, about the website, which is available in English, Hebrew and Russian.

Tracing the Tribe's experience with the database:

Search the database with only one letter. I searched for D (Dardashti) and for T (Talalay/Talalai) and J/I (Jassen/Iasin), but none were listed yet, although I know some who are buried there. I'm sure they will be listed eventually. Using the first letter or the first two letters of the surname produces a drop-down list of possibilities. However, if you put in the first three letters of a surname, there is no drop-down list. However, the list appears if you put in the first three letters of a given name.

Doing a search for COHEN, I found COHEN YAZDI. I clicked on the results and found the grave of Lea Cohen Yazdi who died March 27, 1944. On the map I could zoom to the specific grave. Here's a portion of the map that showed (the red dot is the grave):

I clicked on Grave Details and saw this:

This was interesting as the burial society was listed as Spanish, yet the surname of YAZDI indicates a Persian origin.

Here is the actual gravestone photo, after using Snag-It and adjusting brightness and contrast.

According to the news story:

A new project undertaken by the City of David archeological Park, located south of Jerusalem's Old City and at the foot of the Mount of Olives cemetery, has begun the process of identifying and documenting tombstones throughout the entirety of the Mount of Olives and uploading the data to the Web.

Tens of thousands of graves on the mount have already been mapped and incorporated into a database, in the first-ever attempt to restore the graves and record the history of those who were buried there. The project includes the creation of a Web site (www.mountofolives.co.il ) that aims to raise awareness of the City of David and to honor the memory of those buried in the cemetery, as well as to inform about the tours and activities available.

Additionally, the Web site tells stories of the people buried in the cemetery and, through a simple search window, one can locate the documented graves by name.

The project's public relations director Udi Ragones hopes the web site will give people around the world an opportunity to clear the dust from generations of their loved ones' graves. The project is fascinating from both personal and historical perspectives.

Read the complete story here.

Oregon: Jewish Museum reopens

The Oregon Jewish Museum has moved to a new home in the northwest part of Portland.

Its resources include art exhibits and much more, including the Jewish historical society's archives and library (open by appointment to researchers).

Back in the 1950s, the city's Old South Waterfront was a vibrant Jewish and Italian neighborhood. There is a walking tour of the area.

The opening was on Sunday, and various exhibits included:

The Shape of Time: accumulations of place and memory
Arnold Newman – Street Scenes
The Berger Collection of Ceremonial Judaica
Deanne Belinoff – The Book of Keys
Alex Appella – The Janos Book
Shelley Jordon – Family History

The museum also conducts the Oral History Jewish Cemetery Project and the Oral History Project. Seniors' memories are a precious resource that dwindle over time, and both projects are aimed at saving these memories and archiving them.

The first project takes small groups to Portland's Jewish cemeteries to film and interview the seniors as they walk together and talk about family and friends buried there. Gravestone names trigger memories and conversation. The films will be open to archival research and eventually made public. This project is funded by the Oregon Heritage Commission, the Oregon Cultural Trust and Helen and Jerry Stern.

The second oral history project is part of the museum's mission to preserve the state's Jewish history. The current project expands the Oregon Jewish Oral History and Archive collection begun in the 1970s. Its goal is to collect a wide range of oral histories from community members across the state. Volunteers are trained to to conduct interviews and transcribe tapes.

A third project - Museum in a Suitcase - is an outreach program for elementary school students. The goal is to teach diverse students about the successful integration of the Jews, who were one of the state's earliest immigrant groups. Significant objects including Judaica are included in the suitcase, along with curriculum materials and teaching guide. The museum wants to train docents who will visit schools and organize programs. Funding is via The Collins Foundation, Oregon Heritage Commission and the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland have funded this project.

Go to the museum site (link above) and read all about the exhibit... - Shape of Time - which explores urban landscapes and public memory through the Jewish experiences in the state. It utilizes the museums extensive collection of historic photographs.

Virginia: Fairfax County Library resources, Sept. 16

Local libraries may hold genealogical treasures for researchers.

"Genealogical Resources in the Fairfax County Library Virginia Room," will be presented by Suzanne Levy, Virginia Room librarian since 1981. The program is under the auspices of the Mount Vernon Genealogical Society and the venue is room 112 of the Hollin Hall Senior Center in Alexandria.

The Virginia Room has a collection rich in regional history and genealogy, local and state government information and legal resources. Materials cover more than Virginia and also focus on Confederate Civil War military history. Other resources include maps, extensive photographic archive, manuscripts, local newspapers, and rare books.

Levy, who holds a BA in history (Michigan State University(, and a Master of Library Science (Pratt Institute), is a member of the Fairfax Genealogical Society, American Library Association, Historical Society of Fairfax County (chair, 2004-2006), and Historic Fairfax City, Inc.

She has worked as Cataloger, North Carolina Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill library; State Documents Librarian, North Carolina State Library; Acquisitions Librarian, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; and at two NYPL branch libraries.

For more details, see the link above.

Orphan photos reconnected - sometimes

AncientFaces.com and DeadFred.com are two websites dedicated to reuniting old photos with the families of their original owners. They are only two of many belonging to a subculture of amateur genealogists, antique hounds, and others who attempt to find real homes for old pictures of someone's relatives.

According to a Boston Globe story, this subculture wouldn't exist without the Internet and its features. These days, libraries are also getting involved, and the Waltham (Massachusetts) Library has joined this community.

His picture arrived in the mail at the Waltham Public Library in a small manila envelope. The well-dressed stranger wore a dark pinstriped suit - late-19th-century vintage. His hair was parted sharply at the left temple, his starched collar crisp and white.

His photo carried the trademark of a Waltham studio, called Brown, L.C. on Main Street, which hasn't existed for more than 100 years.

"Hello," the handwritten note accompanying the picture said. "Don't ask me how I wound up in Sasser, Georgia! Would you please put me on display in your library so my family can find me? Thanks! Sincerely, A Lost Soul."

What was once a treasured image of a brother, husband or son is now an orphaned photo. But though this image might be a "Lost Soul," it is by no means alone. The Internet has created a thriving community of people who have found a calling in rescuing the thousands of these orphaned photos that surface in dusty attics or estate sales, and trying to reunite them with family or friends or anyone who could identify them.

And now Waltham's library has joined that community, drawn in by the arrival of the "Lost Soul" photo in January. Library workers have posted the image and several other unidentified pictures from its files on the library's website, and in a display case outside its Waltham Room.

Librarian Jan Zwicker oversees the local collection and says the library has more than 5,000 historical photos in diverse categories.

Amazingly, the "Lost Soul" is one of only five photos without a name or history attached. It was sent in by Patrica Rock of Georgia who found it in an antique shop. The owner had some 30 photographs, and she bought those with some information on them, such as the Waltham photographer's name.

She hopes someone might recognize the man who might have been a local resident, visitor or student. The article also details some of her finds and happy resolutions:

Another one of Rock's orphaned photos, this one depicting a 19th-century girl, included a name and the name of the man she eventually married. Rock used the information to track down their grandson, an 80-year-old doctor living in Chicopee. Soon afterward, the doctor contacted her with the reaction that she always hopes for. "He was absolutely amazed. She had died giving birth to his father, and they only had one photo of her, taken when she was older. . . . He sent me a paperweight this Christmas."

The article mentions DeadFred.com founder Joe Bott. The site had 62 million hits last year, with nearly 1,300 reunions to date. More than 76,000 photos of all types are posted there.

The library's other four mystery photos have been there for years, and whether those or Lost Soul will connect with family isn't certain. His best clue is the photo studio, in business on Main Street between 1893 and 1895.

Another - late-19th-early-20th century - is a white-haired gentleman wearing a long, fur-trimmed coat, staring into the camera, and taken at a known Boston studio, Elmer Chickering in 1904. A third shows a middle-aged man wearing the clothes of a priest or minister, in a pair of pince-nez glasses. The fourth is of a large crowd, mostly men, on the steps of a large stone building, taken by mystery man Adolphe Bean, who isn't listed in any records of the period. The last is a street scene of a streetcare, showing a steeple above the trees.

Read more of the Boston Globe story on the friends of lost photos here.

Library of Congress: 'My Friend Flickr'

Here's a new online photo resource for researchers around the world.

According to a recent Library of Congress Blog posting, the LOC has taken a big step and has entered the world of Web 2.0, writes Matt Raymond, the Library’s director of communications since 2006.

Millions of people around the globe are actively creating, sharing or benefiting from user-generated content. Raymond wants to expand the reach of the LOC and and access to its collections as far as possible. The best way to do this is through the Internet.

That’s why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).

From some 14 million bits of visual materials (prints, photos, etc.), some 3,000 photos from two very popular collections are now on the LOC's Flickr page. These are images for which no copyright is known to exist.

The online digitized high-resolution images include 1,600 color images from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and some 1,500 images from the George Grantham Bain News Service.

The LOC wants people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like other photos at the website. Many images are missing essential caption details, such as where it was taken, or who's pictured. If Flickr members can provide such details, the resource is certainly enhanced.

Flickr has created a new publication model for publicly held photographic collections called “The Commons.” Flickr hopes—as do we—that the project will eventually capture the imagination and involvement of other public institutions, as well.

Writes Raymond, "this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge ... [and] to learn as much as we can about that power simply through making constructive use of it."

To view the photos, click here. It is free and you don't need an account to view the images. To add comments or tags, however, you will need to sign up for a free account.

Los Angeles: Historic photos online

Another Research Buzz resource of interest is the UCLA collection of Historical Photos of Los Angeles, from 1920-1999.

Feeling nostalgic? There's a great collection of historic photographs of Los Angeles (1920-1990). Click here.

Browse by subject (from Aaron Brothers to Zuma Canyon) or keyword. I browsed for Hollywood and got 37 results, which included thumbnails and covered subject as diverse as an Easter service at the Hollywood Bowl (1947) to Donald Duck getting his footprints at Mann's Chinese Theater (1984) to Lawrence Welk signing autographs during his appearance at the Hollywood Palladium (1961).

Search results show a thumbnail image. Click on it for a larger image, the caption, date of publication and publication.

I searched for keyword JEWISH and came up with 34 results.
Images included a Beverly Hills Passover seder; Jewish day camp in 1950; Eleanor Roosevelt visiting the Jewish Home for the Aged in 1946; kids making hamentaschen at a 1958 Purim Festival and many more.

Many pictures are group shots of children and teens from the late 40s-early 50s. If you're from Los Angeles, you might find yourself in one of these shots.

IAJGS: Footnote.com

Beau Sharborough of Footnote.com offered an entertaining session on the site and available information for those searching Jewish ancestors. Free access was provided in the conference resource room, along with other subscription sites.

Among other tidbits, I learned that tech guru Steve Morse is on the site's board of advisors.

Sharborough spoke about the availability of original source documents, not just an index, and how he views Footnote as a history site, providing original documents.

"We put up the original document even if there is a difference of opinion, or if the content is unflattering and we don't shy away from controversy," he told the audience, calling the site "Wikipedia meets the National Archives."

Site organizers wanted to know what was popular in the NARA reading rooms, and brought in archivists to say what they considered their "best stuff." While late 19th-early 20th-century records were popular, he asked if there was anything from before 1790. Sharborough said they became very excited.

As one example of early documents, he spoke about five thick books, with 40 pages on Benjamin Franklin and his original letters, along with other famous early leaders.

While there may be few early documents for Ashkenazi researchers, there is information on Sephardic families in this timeframe. Jewish records are also found in Civil War-era records such as the Southern Claims and in many other Footnote databases.

Users can go directly to the original records to learn about people of interest. After reading a document, readers can annotate what is found, and comments are picked up by the site's indexing almost immediately. While other users may comment on someone's annotation, the original annotation cannot be taken away and others cannot "vandalize" an annotation. Ojectionable comments will be removed, however, and no racial slurs or anti-Semitic statements will be permitted. Staff will review comments quickly.

Some documents or comments are in languages other than English, and Footnote counts on the genealogical community to let the site know if comments are not appropriate.

One example of annotation is interpretation of a signature transcription. Different people might see various "correct" spellings; each viewer may annotate his or her version.

Today, the subscription site is free at the Family History Library, while some academic institutions - such as UCLA - offer it. Said Sharborough, "Someday it will be in your library."

Photographs can be downloaded as JPGs and can be printed. Eventually, all documents will carry a citation or source document for future use. Noted genealogist and author Elizabeth Mills is involved with Footnote and, said Sharborough, insisted that printouts carry correct citations.

Today, the site carries about millions of original documents from Federal District Courts, State and Municipal Courts, including various naturalization and ancillary documents, such as certificates of arrival, naturalization, petitions and more. The investigative files are also very interesting and include various affidavits and investigations carried out by government bodies.

At June's Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree, I had an opportunity to work with the site and found information on a host of individuals I had not expected to see.

Philadelphia: Historic photographs online

According to the ResearchBuzz.com blog, a new historic photography archive is now available.

The Philadelphia City Archive is one the country's largest municipal archives, with about 2 million photographs dating back to the late 1800s.

Online now at PhillyHistory are nearly 25,500 images of Philadelphia; some 2,000 new images are added monthly.

You can search the images by address, neighborhood, keyword or year. Researchers can buy photographs for $10 to $20.

Eventually, this site should have many images of interest to Jewish genealogists, because Philadelphia was home to one of the earliest American Jewish communities. Those familiar with the city's neighborhoods should do better at seeing what's there than this New York girl!

Leitz, camera, action

When I saw a JewishGen posting by Howard Orenstein about the Leitz family of Leica camera fame, I clicked on the links and found a fascinating story.

The Leitz family saved many of its Jewish employees and friends by sending them off to America with brand-new Leica cameras around their necks and finding them jobs.

As late as 1967, Gunther Leitz refused to allow anyone to write about the role his father Ernest Leitz II had played.

A recent article in the Financial Times focused on an interview with California-born Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith of the Harrow and Wembley Progressive Synagogue in northwest London, who wrote a book about the Leitz "freedom train." Smith grew up in San Diego and spent his bar mitzvah money on a Leica camera.

On Feb. 9, the Anti-Defamation League honored Ernst II’s granddaughter, Cornelia Kuhn-Leitz, with the Courage to Care Award, in recognition of her grandfather's role in helping at least 41 Jews to flee Germany during the 1930s Nazi persecution. Leitz is also credited with helping an additional 23 people to circumvent Nazi laws aimed at punishing Jews and Germans related to Jews by marriage.

"Smith first heard about Leitz’s role in Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany when he was a student at Berkeley and came across a passing reference to the Leica apprentices in an article about Norman Lipton, the managing editor of Popular Photography magazine."

Lipton witnessed the arrival of scores of German Jewish refugees from the Wetzlar factory, and said the refugees were processed by Leitz's general manager and vice president Alfred Boch.

To read the complete article, click here

To see a trailer of a film being made about this, click here and scroll to "One Camera, One Life."

New exhibits at the virtual Museum of Family History

Steve Lasky never rests. His Web site is continually updated.

Some new exhibitions in his virtual museum:

"The Life of Nina Finkelstein: Recollections of a Friend" tells the story in photographs and text about Nina Finkelstein, who survived the Kovno Ghetto.

"Holocaust Memorial of Canada" is Steve's third exhibit on Holocaust memorials and includes photographs and inscriptions of Holocaust memorials in the provinces of Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia. It includes English inscriptions and the translated Hebrew inscriptions.

He's added descriptions of the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach, Florida and the Holocaust Memorial Park in Brooklyn, New York.

The Web site now includes a page of concentration camp records at the Northeast (New York) branch of the National Archives (NARA). He has found actual registration cards for people he has interviewed. Adds Steve, "For the inmates who tragically perished at Buchenwald, or at other camps they might have been transferred to from Buchenwald, there are often notations on the registration lists as to the location (camp name) and exact date of their death, i.e. whether it took place at Buchenwald or at another location."

He was able to learn the death date of an inmate transferred from Buchenwald to Bergen-Belsen in early 1945 from the microfilmed registration list at NARA. He contacted the people at Bergen-Belsen who told him when the person actually arrived there.

His latest update has added photographs of Holocaust memorials in Poland and Belarus to the Holocaust Memorials of Europe exhibition.

There are also pre-war photos of 14 Polish synagogues, in addition to family photos of the same era.

New Web pages now provide links to parts of the site about certain regions of Eastern Europe: Belarus, the Bialystok region, Gesher Galicia, Lithuania and Ukraine

Steve advises visitors to periodically check the Recent Updates page to see what's new and use the Site Map page as an index or table of contents for the entire site.

Remember that Steve depends on the Jewish genealogical community for photographs, stories of family life before and during World War II, etc. Let him know if you have appropriate materials.