Digital Preservation: What do teens know about it?

What do teenagers know about digital preservation?

Learn more on the new Library of Congress digital preservation blog, The Signal.

The first line - "It’s many adult’s worst nightmare: how to entertain and (try to) educate 30 8^th graders for an hour?" - brought back memories.

As co-founder of the Las Vegas (NV) Hebrew High for post-bar/bat mitzvah students, I had major misgivings about teaching family history to a class of eighth-graders. Having taught English to this age group at the Iran-America Society in Teheran long ago, I knew it wasn't easy.

However, the Las Vegas class turned out to be one of the best I've ever had. Students used the major reference works from day one and understood how to navigate the sometimes strange phonetic spellings in Alexander Beider's books. They contacted grandparents and long-lost relatives and asked questions, wrote reports, created family trees and they involved their parents and extended families.

So I was intrigued by digital archivist Butch Lazorchak's post today in The Signal.

He advises that the first thing to do is to try and think like the teens, and used the example of a Florida middle school class trip to Washington, DC.

It wasn't the first time the LOC has worked with students on digital culture. In 2009, high school students from Virginia visited. The “Digital Natives Explore Digital Preservation” video illustrates their knowledge, ideas about preservation and who should do it.

The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP; say it "n-dip") at the LOC has participated in the National Book Festival and hosted Personal Archiving Day events, but there are differences in outreach to adults, teens and eighth-graders. Here's the program that focused on digital photos.

There were some interesting items in a 2010 Pew study of myths about how teens use cell phones and social networks. It indicated that after texting, the most popular features were taking and sharing photos. The middle-school students' program focused on helping them understand "how to capture, describe and preserve their own digital photos," About half the group used digital cameras, while the others used phones.

The split is important, because the primary distribution (and possibly only long-term storage) strategy for many of the phone users was to upload their photos to a social networking site such as Facebook.

We explained some of the issues with using a social network site as a primary storage option (history has shown that those sites don’t stick around forever), and talked about how it’s best to save your photos across a range of devices (thumb drives, CDs, external hard drives, online storage) and geographies (your house in Florida, your friend’s house across town, your grandma’s house in Seattle).

And we were pleasantly surprised by the student’s degree of knowledge on the issues. Most of them recognized that their digital photos were “at-risk” in some way (one had filled her camera by shooting 800 photos in one day and was worried about how to save them when she ran out of space), and many had perfectly reasonable back-up and replication strategies already in place. Our presentation “teased-out” more detail on these strategies, and got both the students and their parental chaperones to think a little harder about saving their photos with something that resembled a long-term strategy.

NDIPP attempts to raise awareness of digital preservation issues and encourage people to take personal action to preserve their own materials in today's absence of comprehensive tools to help them do so. According to the author, "the personal photographs of the students at South Lake could become the valuable cultural heritage materials of tomorrow, but only if the students take care of them first."

Read the complete article at the link above.

Seattle: 150 years of Jewish history, May 9

Rabbi Jim Mirel will speak on 150 years of Jewish history in Washington State at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Washington State on Monday, May 9.

The program includes powerpoints by Jeff Adelson and the Washington Jewish Historical Society.

Doors open at 7pm at the Stroum Jewish Community Center on Mercer Island. Admission: free for members and one guest per year; others, $5.

Rabbi Mirel will talk about the three waves of Jewish immigration into Washington, including Ashkenazi and Sephardic populations. He'll give highlights about Jewish individuals and families who affected the state and Seattle history. He'll show historic pictures of these families, their synagogues, businesses and social life.

Senior Rabbi of Bellevue's Temple B'nai Torah, Mirel has served there since 1985. Previously, he was rabbi at Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Seattle.

He was educated at Reed College, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Washington, and was ordained at Hebrew Union College.

The author of "Stepping Stones to Jewish Spiritual Living," Mirel has served as president of the Washington State Jewish Historical Society, the Pacific Association of Reform Rabbis, University Kiwanis, Washington State Coalition of Rabbis, and is a founder of the Jewish Archives at UW. He has lectured at most colleges in the state and at many local churches and mosques.

For more information and directions, click here.

London: 'Sounds of Silence' Lithuania exhibit opens May 5

A free exhibit - Sounds of Silence - is dedicated to the annihilated Jewish communities of Lithuania, and will open May 5, at the Spiro Ark Centre in London. It will run through June 17.

Hours are Monday-Friday, 10am-5pm. The Center is located at 25-26 Enford St., London W1.

Photographs capture the images of the cemeteries, prayer houses, and other buildings and sites, portraying the remnants of the Jewish golden age in Lithuania.

Attendees will learn about the Yiddish and Lithuanian names of towns and villages where Jewish inhabitants made up a large proportion of the inhabitants - if not the majority of the population in the 19th-20th centuries.

For more information on Spiro Ark, click here.

Michigan: Success & Strategies, May 1

Genealogical success stories and strategies are on the program for the Jewish Genealogical Society's next meeting on Sunday, May 1.

The meeting begins at 1.30pm at the Farmington Hills Library Main Branch, 32737 W. 12 Mile Road, Farmington Hills. Admission: Members, free; others, $5.

Three JGSMi members will relate start and subsequent research in Jewish genealogical pursuits. Hear them recount their experiences as they share their successes and tips.

Jonathan Haber
will discuss what he has accomplished researching his grandmother’s nine siblings and their descendants.

Richard Jaeger
has discovered many relatives he didn’t know a thing about through a large collection of photographs he received.

Alexandra Goldberg
will talk about her breakthrough in finding the missing link affirming her descendancy from a rabbinical family with possible roots to King David.

For more information and directions, click here.

New York: Balkan Jewish life exhibit, March 31

"Images of a Lost World: Pictures & Stories of Balkan Sephardic Life" will open at 6.30pm Thursday, March 31, at the Center for Jewish History, New York City.

Originally commissioned by the Foreign Ministry of Spain, it is funded by the Spanish Embassy (Washington, DC) and Casa Sefarad/Israel (Madrid), with the generous support of the Consulate General of Spain in New York. It is co-presented with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

It is based on family stories and pictures pulled from Centropa's archive of more than 200 interviews conducted in Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Croatia. The pictures and stories take us back into the world of Balkan Sephardic Jewry in its last decades, and through these personal stories of going to school, falling in love and recalling family holidays, Jewish history comes to life.

A program follows, moderated by Edward Serotta, Director of Centropa.

Tickets: $12 General Admission/$8 ASF/YIVO members. Advance registration requested.

Sweden: ArkivDigital offers free weekend access

Are you searching family that lived in Sweden?

That country will celebrate Genealogy Research Day on Saturday, March 19. Genealogical societies, archives and libraries will be hosting events many localities.

ArkivDigital and its online service - ADOnline2 - will be free this weekend on Saturday and Sunday.

According to a communication from ArkivDigital, "We hope that this offer also will help genealogical societies and archives to demonstrate what modern genealogical research is all about."

The site is the biggest private provider of Swedish church and historical records online. Some 500,000 images are added each month to the current 24 million images available. The digital color images are available via online subscriptions or as CDs.

There is a list of Swedish counties. Click on each county to see the parishes and volumes available.

Genealogists know that good digital images are as readable as the original register pages. While previous efforts were made to photograph the registers, ArkivDigital believes it was important to do it again, in color.

The site details the imaging (1948-1963) of records by the Mormon Church and recent changes in technology:

Future - digital photographs in color

During the 90's and 00's both SVAR and Genline digitalized many of the old microfilms. Many people think that the original books at the archives are as black, and in many cases, unreadable as those images sometimes are. Fortunately that is not the case. It is the copies that are black and hard to read because the technology in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s was not as advanced as today and the copies have been transferred several times since then, making the digital images copies of copies of copies. Since ArkivDigital photograph the old unique source material using modern technology the readability is far superior to the old images.

The site offers a good example of the old imaging (left) versus the new image (right):

Tracing the Tribe is sure that all of us have seen record images as difficult to read and wished that new projects would be undertaken to produce better images.

The procedure for obtaining free access this weekend is somewhat complicated, but check out the instructions here.  It involves installation of the ADOnLine2 program.

Do look at the ArkivDigital site if Swedish records are relevant to your research.

Florida: Photo Genealogist 'Sherlock Cohn' to speak March 9

Ava Cohn - AKA Sherlock Cohen - Photo Genealogist - will speak at the Jewish Genealogical Society of Palm Beach County on Wednesday, March 9.

The meeting begins at 12.30pm at the South County Civic Center, 16700 Jog Road, Delray Beach, Florida. The main program follows a brick wall session and brief business meeting. The Poland/Belarus SIG will meet from 11.30am-1215pm. Admission: JGSPBCI members, free; others, $5.

"Clued-In: Case Studies" is the name of the program, which will detail the mysteries of heirloom photos unlocked by Cohn, who brings a lifelong fascination with heirloom photographs and a multidisciplinary background to photo dating and interpretation.

Cohn holds a Theatre Arts BA (Brandeis University), and has done coursework in decorative arts, art history and costume history at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. A former marketing executive, she has been studying her family history as a hobby for more than three decades, and full time since 2005.

For directions and more information, click the JGSPBC website.

As Sherlock Cohn, the Jewish genealogy sleuth, she will demonstrate how and why it is important to mine the clues our ancestors left in their photos. Whether families came from Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Galicia, Romania, Germany or other parts of Eastern Europe or the world, whether they were Ashkenazic or Sephardic, they left very personal records of their lives in the photographs and portraits for which they sat. Analyzing Jewish family photographs presents unique challenges unlike those of any other ethnic groups.

“Sherlock” will show how accurate photo dating, photo identification, knowledge of fashion and artifact history, and matching of vital records can illuminate relatives’ lives, and help solve some of the vexing family genealogy mysteries.

Cohn has made it her mission to help as many Jewish genealogists as possible to recover the personal information that their ancestors knew when they had their portraits originally taken and as such, specializes in the period of most Jewish photographs, 1880-1960.

JewishGen: ShtetLinks update, December 2010

JewishGen's ShtetLinks Project has issued its report for December 2010 on updates and new sites.

Updated:

Ruzhany, Belarus

New sites:

Cotopaxi, Colorado, USA (Jen Lowe)

Chop (Csap, Cop) (S-C), Ukraine (Marshall J. Katz)

Kezmarok (Kesmark), Slovakia (Madeleine Isenberg)

Park Hills (Flat River), Missouri, USA (Ross DeHovitz)

Some shtetlpages were created by those who can no longer maintain them. Here are some orphan pages up for adoption:

Borisov, Belarus

Krnov (Jaegerndorf), Czech Republic

Lask, Poland

Rozdol, Ukraine

Contact Susanna Leistner Bloch if you wish to create a new webpage for your ancestral shtetl or adopt an orphan page.

JewishGen: Worldwide Burial Registry update

JewishGen has added to its Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR) database with 171,000 new records, 32,700 new photos, 360 new cemeteries, updates/additions to another 213 cemeteries in 21 countries.

Total holdings now include more than1.57 million records from more than 3,050 cemeteries or sections in 47 countries.

To check the database, click here. Learn how to use it here.

Donors of material include individuals, Jewish genealogical societies, historical societies and museums, including dedicated transliteration by JewishGen volunteers. Here are the highlights:

• Lodz, Poland.  Added some 39,000 making a total of some 50,000 records from the “Organization of Former Residents of Lodz in Israel” burial registers. The next update will include surnames beginning with K, P, R and S. These will also be added to the JRI-Poland database.
• Melbourne, Australia.  The Melbourne Chevra Kadisha submitted more than 29,000 records from 49 cemeteries in Melbourne and environs.
• Wisconsin, USA.  The Jewish Museum Milwaukee submitted some 27,000 records from 50 state cemeteries
• South Africa.  Stan Hart submitted nearly 17,000 records from more than 135 cemeteries, and hope to add photos in future updates.
• Virginia / Maryland, USA.  The Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington, Inc.  (DC) and a volunteer team (coordinated by Marlene Bishow, Ernie Fine and Harvey Kabaker) for 5,000 records and 4,800 photos from Arlington National Cemetery and more than 1,500 records from the B'nai Israel Congregation Cemetery (Oxon Hill, Maryland).
• Ontario, Canada.  Allen Halberstadt (lead contributor, Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada, Toronto’ Cemetery Project) submitted and updated some 120 cemeteries with 5,000 records from Bathurst Memorial, Lambton Mills, and Mount Sinai cemeteries. More than 4,000 photos from Dawes Road Cemetery are included.
• Georgia, USA.  Ruth Einstein (special projects coordinator, The Breman Jewish Heritage & Holocaust Museum; Atlanta, Georgia) submitted 4,000 new and updated records from 17 Atlanta area cemeteries.
• California, USA.  Peggy Hooper (California Genealogy and History Archives) submitted 3,400 records with photos from sections of Eden Memorial Park, Temple Beth Israel, Home of Peace (LA), and Home of Peace (San Diego) cemeteries. Eden Memorial photos were taken by Dr. William A. Mann.
• Czeladz – Będzin, Poland. Jeff Cymbler submitted more than 3,200 records and 3,100 accompanying photos.
• Florida, USA.
• Susan Steinfeld (cemetery project coordinator, Jewish Genealogy Society of Broward County) and her team submitted more than 3,000 record and photos from selected sections in Miami's Star of David Cemetery.
• Ina Getzoff (JOWBR coordinator, Jewish Genealogical Society of Palm Beach County)  submitted 150 new records and 450 photos from the South Florida National Cemetery.
• Petah Tikvah / Segulah, Israel.  Gilda Kurtzman refined records and added 3,000 new photos. Current holdings for this cemetery are now nearly 60,000 records and 17,000 photos. .
• Sighetu Marmaţiei, Romania. Vivian Kahn (H-SIG coordinator) for 2,950 records from the Sighetu Marmaţiei cemetery register, with more to come.
• Roman, Romania.  Claudia Greif and Rosanne Leeson submitted 2,100 records from the Roman cemetery register from Roman (Moldavia region, Romania).
• El Paso, Texas, USA.  Sandy Aaronson updated and photographed B’nai Zion and Temple Mt. Sinai cemeteries with 450 records and 2,100 photos.
• Ferndale, Michigan, USA.  Stuart Farber submitted 2,000 records from Beth Abraham Cemetery Association.
• St. Joseph, Missouri, USA.  Deena Sandusky submitted more than 1,700 records from Adath Joseph and Shaare Sholem Roches cemeteries.
• Latvia / Lithuania / Ukraine.  Christine Usdine permitted JOWBR to include various Latvian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian cemetery records and photos from her site at http://usdine.free.fr/ Translations are by Sarah Mages.
• St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.  Eileen Wegge (eighth grade public school teacher) who during her Holocaust history curriculum coordinated a cemetery indexing project with her students at Chesed Shel Emes Cemetery.
• Greensboro, North Carolina, USA. Gene Baruch indexed and photographed 1,000 stones at the Greensboro Hebrew Cemetery.
• South Carolina Cemeteries. Ann Hellman (president, Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina) for 1,000 additional records from various South Carolina cemeteries.

Without dedicated volunteers in all spheres of Jewish genealogy and history, researchers would have many fewer records to work with.

If you live in or near a Jewish cemetery or section that has not be catalogued, researched, photographed, now might be the time to start a project, either on your own or in conjunction with a local genealogical or historical society. These types of records and photos are invaluable to researchers living around the world who may never make it your town, city, state or country. Your contribution of material can potentially help thousands of researchers globally.

You might even belong to or know of a local group or organization which may already have such records or photos in their own archives. Perhaps they may wish to donate that material so that a wider audience might find it useful.

For more information, check out the JOWBR link above or contact JewishGen's vice-president of data acquisition (and JOWBR coordinator) Nolan Altman through that link.

New York: HIAS photo archives, Dec. 19

A picture is worth a thousand words.

What is more precious to a family historian than the treasured photos of our families through the generations?

Valery Bazarov of HIAS will present “HIAS Photo Archives: Faces of Immigration,” at the JGS of New York's annual members-only brunch on December 19.

The event will begin with brunch at 11am, followed by the program at 12.40pm, at the Brotherhood Synagogue 28 Gramercy Park South (near 3rd Avenue), in Manhattan. Admission: JGSNY members, free; others, $5 at the door for the presentation at 12.30pm only.

In every family, such photos are treasured and relished – even more so in the family of HIAS that amounts to more than 4 million Jews who immigrated to America. Forty linear feet of the archival collection contain 22,000 images taken at the most crucial times, when ties with the past were severed and a new life was still unknown. These pictures chronicle a period that lasted more than 100 years.

Refugees from persecution, pogroms, and poverty, escapees from death and famine – they all pass before our eyes when telling the story of their suffering and hope. The first Seders on Ellis Island and Jewish children in Yokohama, the internment camps in Vichy France and displaced persons on board the military transports that brought them to safe havens, Hungarian and Cuban refugees, North African Jews and the Soviet Jewry exodus – these images will leave no hearts unmoved.

Valery will also present case studies of rescued and resettled families at different periods of immigration history.

He is the director of the HIAS Family History and Location Services, which helps immigrants of different generations find family members and friends – often in other countries – with whom they have lost contact over the years, sometimes decades. He is committed to finding and honoring the heroes, Jewish and non-Jewish, who rescued European Jews during the Holocaust.

Tracing the Tribe's good friend Valery researches HIAS history and reports on his findings as frequent lecturer at international and national Jewish genealogy conferences and societies.

For more information, click here.

Belarus: A few shtetl Jews survive

Many readers of Tracing the Tribe have roots in Belarus, where some 98% of rural Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Our TALALAI family lived in both Mogilev and in the agricultural colony Vorotinschtina adjacent to the hamlet of Zavarezhye - some 12 miles southwest of the major city of Mogilev, lost some 300 souls on one day in 1941. The only ones to survive - a mere handful - had been away that day. Other branches were murdered in Gorki, north of Mogilev. Some branches were evacuated to Tashkent and returned to find nothing. And, of course, there was the Minsk ghetto, where other members were murdered.

Fortunately, our closest family had immigrated to the US beginning in 1898 and through 1920. From family documents and partial family trees found among the earliest immigrants' belongings, we know they stayed in touch with family back home, and were aware of what happened.

When Minsk researcher Yuri Dorn visited the colony a few years ago, he sent me photos of still beautiful green fields, of dilapidated houses and also spoke to the few elderly people in the area. One elderly woman had remembered some of my relatives, whom she knew as a young girl.

Judith Maloff of The Forward recently traveled to Belarus and visited with some of the remaining elderly and ill shtetl Jews.

Her story offers historical facts of those times, along with the photos and stories of some of these individuals.

The interviews we see in Holocaust documentaries are but fragments of lives. Subjects talk about their horrendous concentration camp experiences, and the story ends. But suffering has continued in Belarus for many of the elderly, who are among the poorest Jews in the world. Unlike survivors who moved to relatively comfortable circumstances in Israel or the United States, those who remained in Belarus endured religious intolerance under the Soviets after the war. Now they are finishing their days with further deprivation.

It’s a lonely life for Jews who returned to their shtetls after nearly everyone else was massacred. More than 600,000, or 90%, of Belarusian Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. Today, most of these market towns have but a handful of Jews left struggling to get by on pensions so slim — sometimes no more than $120 a month — that they sometimes have to choose between heat and food. These survivors are often sickly, and unlike most Belarusian elderly, they lack extended family to take care of them.

The story mentions the Hesed welfare centers, supported by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which provides home visits, food and aid in the winter. The JDC also distributes compensation funds to Nazi victims.

These few souls are the remnants of nearly-vanished shtetl life.

Maloff interviewed them and Diana Markosian photographed them, in evocative black and white

-- Grigory Hosid, 86, of  Grodno. Prewar Jewish population was 21,000; today, 600.

-- Riva Lazarevna Katz, 85, of Ivenets. Prewar Jewish population was 1,200; today four.

-- Faina Paley, 75, of Bobruisk. Prewar Jewish population was 27,000; today, 1,260.

-- Grigory Kagan, 79, of Kirovsk. Prewar Jewish population unknown, today, one.

-- Ida Mikhailna Kaslova, 75, of Buda-Koshelevo. Prewar Jewish population was 500; today, one.

Do read the comments to the story, which also provides a link to the Survivor Mitzvah Project of Los Angeles, which provides additional help.

Footnote.com: The Great Chicago Fire, 1871

Footnote.com is a wonderful resource for original documents.

October 8 was the anniversary of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, and the site has a special collection of research material based on Chicago Tribune contemporary reports.

Primary sources available on Footnote.com for this historical event include:

--The original Chicago Tribune Article
-- Photo of Fire's destruction
-- Illustration of the Fire
-- Map of the Destruction
-- The Great Chicago Fire Footnote Page

Click here for more. Although Footnote.com is a subscription site, some collections are free and searches produce hits for free and fee materials. See what you can find in tthe site's extensive resources and you might find that a subscription could further your research.

On October 8, 1871, around nine o'clock in the evening, a fire started in the O'Leary's barn at 13 DeKoven Street and quickly spread throughout Chicago's business district.. Although legends hold O'Leary's cow responsible for causing the fire, the actual source is still unknown.

The blaze raged for two days, killing hundreds, destroying millions of dollars in property, leaving thousands homeless, and ravaging almost four square miles.

From the smoldering ashes, the citizens of Chicago began to rebuild and a new era began in the city's history. The resulting boom in building construction made Chicago one of the most populous, most economically profitable, and most modern cities in the United States. The Great Chicago Fire was a tragedy, but out of this disaster emerged the modern metropolis of Chicago.

Latvia: Riga Ghetto Museum opens, Sept. 21

The Riga (Latvia) Ghetto Museum opens September 21.

More than 70 000 local Jews and nearly 20 000 Jews deported from Western Europe were executed in Latvia in the World War II. The Museum is located in the historical part of the city near the borders of former ghetto.

The opening of the first exhibit includes the names of more than 70 000 Latvian Jews who faced the Holocaust, with stones from the streets of Riga Ghetto. A photo exhibit includes anti-Semitism propaganda, Holocaust in Latvia, the Resistance and the Righteous Among the Nations.

Jewish history in Latvia dates back some 450 years, and a section of the exhibit documents this history.

According to director Rabbi Menachem Barkahan:

Riga Ghetto Museum is not just a museum. I do hope that it will become the significant memento of the dreadful events that occurred in the history of Latvia and should never ever be repeated again. The Museum is becoming a center of culture and education, a source of tolerance and mutual respect.

Earlier this month - on September 1 - a new Jewish calendar was released and dedicated to the history of Jewish development during Latvia's First Republic.

There is also a database with the names of Jewish children who perished during the Holocaust in Latvia.

Click here for more information about the Jewish Culture Festival 5771 in Riga, with a video and photos.

For more information about the community organization Shamir in Riga, send an email.

Vancouver BC: "Caring for family photos," Sept. 26

"Caring for your family photographs" is one of the interesting programs and workshops offered by The Jewish Museum & Archives of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Join the museum's archivist Jennifer Yuhasz MAS, on Sunday, September 26. The workshop runs from 2-4pm. Fee: $25; JHSBC members receive 10% discount. Seating is limited; reservations required.

Have you ever wondered what to do with all those old family photographs that are stored in drawers, shoe boxes, falling apart photo albums? Did you know that putting photographs into albums can actually do more damage than good to your photos?

Here's your opportunity to discover and learn how to save family photos for future generations.

Participants should bring family photographs to this hands-on session.

For more information on other events and activities, click here.

Sacramento: Dating photographs, Sept. 20

What clues should you look for to determine when a photograph was taken?

Learn more about this at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento when Sandra Harris, a professional photographer for 48 years, will share tips to answer that question, on Monday, September 20.

The meeting begins at 7pm, at the Albert Einstein Residence Center, 1935 Wright St., Sacramento, California.

Harris and her husband operate the Harris Studio in Sacramento, provide photography services for families, children, weddings and other events; as well as copy and restoration assistance. She has presented programs to genealogy groups on how to care for and date old photos.

Clues include clothing, hair styles and even photographic props and posing. Harris is also knowledgeable about California History Room resources at the State Library and has worked for researchers in the US and abroad.

For more information, visit the JGS of Sacramento website.

Bechol Lashon: New issue online

The face of Judaism is changing. It includes Jews of many diverse backgrounds and origins.

As Judaism changes, Jewish genealogy must also change.

Bechol Lashon (In Every Tongue) is an organization that brings people together, and its new online issue is now available.

Read about diverse Rosh Hashanah traditions, African-American Orthodox Jews, communities around the world (Yemen, Guatemala, Rwanda, Uganda), Jews-by-choice, events in New York and California, photography exhibits, music and much more.

Read it here.

IAJGS 2010: Photos wanted!

Photographs taken at IAJGS 2010 are wanted!

Did you attend the conference and take photographs? There were hundreds of digital cameras there this year, so many people must have good images.

The event's program committee is asking attendees to share those images, writes program chair Pam Weisberger:

If so, can you please email me any pictures you have of the events, speakers, resource room, Market Square Fair, meals, lectures, hallways, and participants as soon as possible?

I've had requests from several people for photos that they can use in their JGS programs detailing conference activities, and the JGSLA also hope to put up some on our own web site soon.

The conference organizers were too busy running around to snap much of anything, so we're depending on you!

Photos should be JPG and high-resolution (for clarity), which usually means 300dpi. Send photos to Pam here. If you have a number of large-size photos, send them together in a zip file.

Remember your shoebox filled with photos without names or dates?

I'm sure you do - we all have one - so pretty please caption your photos with important details and the names of people in the image.

HINT: Use standard format when captioning, such as "From left: XXX, YYY" or "Standing: XXX, YYY; Sitting: XXX, YYY" or "Front row: XXX, YYY; Back row: XXX, YYY."

If you know of others who took photos, please let them know about this image-gathering effort.

The Galitzianer: Call for articles

Gesher Galicia's journal - The Galitzianer - has issued a call for submissions for the November 2010 issue.

According to managing editor Janice Sellers of San Francisco, submissions may be articles and/or graphics, original or previously published, and relevant to Galician genealogical research.

These may include articles on recent trips to Galicia, reports on your own research, historical and recent pictures relevant to Galicia.

Electronic submissions are preferred, but not required and may be from Gesher Galicia members or others.

Contact Janice for more information. The deadline for the November issue is October 15.

Boston: NEHGS launches AmericanAncestors.org

The venerable New England Historic Genealogical Society, founded in 1845, has launched AmericanAncestors.org, the new website of the expanding and growing regional and national repository of genealogical resources.

Information below is from the press release. I accessed the site several times today but cannot load it now, most likely due to a heavy usage.

The site will contain all of NEHGS's New England and New York content, features, articles, resources, in addition to weekly updates and databases in regional and ethnic specialties, such as sources for mid-Atlantic, Irish, and African American research. The website provides access to 2,400 databases containing 135 million names. Many databases are restricted to members who pay $75 annually, but there is a free section.

The new site provides online access to important research tools and resources, a new image viewer, faster navigation, faster search results and more unique content. Society members and the public will benefit from the improvements. The oldest and largest non-profit genealogical organization has some 26,000 members nationwide.

NEHGS president/CEO D. Brenton Simons said:

"This website marks a transformative experience in our 165-year history, the first genealogical society founded in America. It represents the next major step ahead as we continue to expand our resources." Simons added, "AmericanAncestors.org is a new, dynamic platform from which we will grow in our position as a leader in American genealogy and as the nation’s largest genealogical society."

He added that New England will always be the greatest strength and primary focus, and that the new site will add 25 million more New England names to search. According to the press release, the site will provide:

-- More unique, searchable materials for New England, New York, and other regions.
　
-- A new "master search" to search across all databases and other web-based content, faster results and easier navigation.
　
-- A social networking feature for NEHGS members to develop an online profile, input family research information, and share it with others.

-- A state-of-the-art new image viewer for easier saving and viewing of images and data.
　
-- More news on the homepage and an enhanced blog - "The Daily Genealogist" - to provide stories and helpful research tips

Readers are invited to sign up for the NEHGS "Guest User" free registration for access to weekly news stories, special access to some databases, resources, articles and other research tools. Read more at AmericanAncestors.org.

"American Ancestors" is the new brand identity for NEHGS. In October 2009, it began publishing "American Ancestors Journal," an annual supplement to its quarterly "The New England Historical and Genealogical Register," while its quarterly member magazine was renamed (earlier this year) "American Ancestors: New England, New York, and Beyond."

Located at 99-101 Newbury St., Boston, NEHGS has some 28 million books, journals, manuscripts, papers, photographs, documents, and other artifacts, many centuries-old.

Netherlands: Photos of child Holocaust victims

Gaby Laws of CemeteryScribes.com has informed Tracing the Tribe about a project to create a memorial book for young Dutch Holocaust victims.

Athough CemeteryScribes.com focuses on photographing headstones and recording inscriptions, this request touched on those who have no headstones. Their only memorials are names on lists.

Aline Pennewaard, a freelance writer and Jewish history student, and author Guus Luijters are compiling a "Memor-book" for Dutch children who were transported and killed. The project is similar to Serge Klarsfeld’s "French Children of the Holocaust."

Pennewaard and Luijters have already collected some 2,200 photographs of Dutch Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust. The hope is to find more photographs before the book is published in February 2012.

According to Pennewaard's link above:

Together with Guus Luijters I'm working on a memor-book about Dutch-Jewish children till 18 years, who were deported and never returned. The book is scheduled to be published in February 2012. At the same time there will be an exhibition in the Amsterdam Historical Museum.

I'm looking for as many photos as I can find from children who were deported and never returned. At this moment we have around 2200 photos. If you can help us, or if you're looking for more information about your own family, please contact us.

Tracing the Tribe readers are asked to help in this project. Do you have photos of Dutch Jewish children who did not survive?

If you have such photos and wish to share them for this project, let me knew via a comment to this post or to ask@tracingthetribe.com (include your real email address so I can provide contact information).

Click on Pennwaard's link above for an excellent site with links to the Jewish Historical Museum (Joods Historisch Museum) (English/Dutch), Jewish Historical Childrens' Museum, Hollandsche Schouwburg Monument, The Spanish Portuguese Synagogue, The Bibliotheek Ets Haim - Livraria Montezinos, Joods Digital Monument (Engllish/Dutch), and the Menasseh ben Israel Institute (English/Dutch).

Gaby also noted the Dutch Community Joods Monument, which has thousands of member-uploaded photos of gravestones.