Spain: Cervera's Notarial Archive project

In 2008, the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy (Jerusalem) awarded a research grant to Maria Jose Camps Surribas of Barcelona.

A former attorney, a consummate researcher and genealogist, my very good friend Maria Jose knows the archives of Spain very well. Her languages include Catalan, Spanish, English, Latin and French.

On my trips to Barcelona, we have visited numerous archives together, including Lleida where she located a Talalay document from 1353, and other mentions in indexes and documents in the Crown of Aragon Archives in Barcelona. Maria Jose has also provided excellent research for other US-based Sephardic researchers. On my last trip, we even visited Cervera together.

Maria Jose's project is titled "The Notarial Archive of Cervera, Catalonia: a source for the study of Jewish genealogy, migrations and life in the Middle Ages."

Cervera is a Spanish Catalan town with a rich cultural and Jewish past. From the beginning of the 14th century there was an established Jewish community, which survived the Black death (1348-49) and various restrictions imposed on it by the nobility and the Church, but not the Expulsion in 1492. Well-known historians have done interesting work on specific subjects covering short periods of time of the life of the Jews in Cervera but until now there has been no extensive study of this important medieval Jewish community, utilizing primary sources.

The project will examine the town's Jewish community of the 14th-16th centuries from records in the Notarial Archive of Cervera.

She is looking, in depth, at the town's Jewish community from the perspectives of historical genealogy, onomastics and migration studies.

All Jewish families referred to in the archive will be traced, from the earliest 14th century documents onwards, and the names of Jews and Conversos in those documents will be studied.

Cervera was an important crossroads on routes leading from France, Barcelona and Girona to Lleida, Zaragoza and other parts of Spain. Many Jews coming from France and other areas of Spain settled in the town, and, of course, Cervera's Jews moved elsewhere.

It is an exciting project on which Maria Jose is hard at work, and which will provide much information for those whose ancestors are Sephardim from Catalunya and elsewhere.

Sephardic researchers are looking forward to the results of her research.

UPDATE

When Maria Jose read this post, she emailed me with some in-the-trenches comments:

At the moment, I'm working on more than 2.000 documents I have already accumulated concerning the Jews of Cervera.

And so far she has seen only 60% of the books she has chosen to view. There is so much in that archive that will provide major data for those interested in Sephardic Jews and their history.

The Cervera archive seems to be a veritable goldmine for Jewish research, and I know that she will dig out every name and every fact.

Maria Jose has followed Tracing the Tribe since it began back in 2006.

Grants Available: Jewish genealogy research

Grants of up to $10,000 are available for original research in Jewish genealogy.

The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy has issued a call for research proposals for projects to be conducted during the 2009-2010 academic year. Proposals must be submitted by August 15; results will be announced September 15.

Criteria include the extent to which proposed projects broaden the horizons of Jewish genealogical research and/or create innovative tools or technologies to assist Jewish genealogists and family historians in their work.

These may be in the categories of pure genealogical research or interdisciplinary research, or may seek to provide Jewish genealogists and family historians with innovative tools and technologies to advance their work.

Click here for 2008's proposal guidelines, which include history, Rabbinics, onomastics, interdisciplinary (Jewish genealogy and sociology, migration studies, genetics, demography, statistics), computer science/technologies, and sources.

Proposals will be judged for academic excellence by the Academic Committee and must meet rigorous standards for substance, originality and importance.

For information, click the IIJGS website. Look in the left sidebar for PROJECTS -> Upcoming projects -> Call for Projects (2009). Follow instructions carefully; proposals not submitted according to the rules will not be accepted.

Look at the current list of funded projects to get a better idea of the grant program's scope.

Romania: Blogger receives project grant

Congratulations to fellow blogger Ruth Ellen Gruber who writes the Jewish Heritage Travel blog.

She recently received the Hadassah Brandeis Institute's Michael Hammer Tribute Research Grant. HBI awards 20-30 grants annually in support of academic and artistic projects about Jews and gender.

Ruth's project - (Candle)sticks on Stone: Representing the Woman in Jewish Tombstone Art - focuses on beautifully carved women's tombstones in the Jewish cemetery in Radauti, Romania, where her great-grandmother - Ettel Gruber - is buried.

The tombstones - with candlestick carvings - will be photographed. The images will be combined with historical research, personal reflection and memoir to create an interdisciplinary online gallery and exhibit to be supplemented by anecdotes, literary references and personal stories.

Sabbath candles are a common symbol on the tombstones of Jewish women. This is because lighting the Sabbath candles is one of the three so-called "women's commandments" carried out by female Jews: these also include observing the laws of Niddah separating men from women during their menstrual periods, and that of Challah, or burning a piece of dough when making bread.

She will likely include several other nearby northern Romania towns - Siret, Botosani, Gura Humorului, Suceava - focusing on the same carvings. Ruth plans to set up an additional blog where she will report on the project's progress.

For more information on the project, see Ruth's post.

Take a look at the rest of the 2008 awards at the HBI page under "Scholars and Grants." I learned that our cousin Galeet Dardashti received an Arts award for "Voices of Our Mothers: A Middle Eastern Musical Midrash for Today."

There are many interesting awards that may spur some of dedicated genealogists to propose their own projects. Categories include biography, history, Judaism, Yishuv & Israel, Film & Video, and Arts. Guidelines for the 2009 series will be posted in June.

DNA: Tracing medieval manuscripts

DNA testing may unlock secrets of medieval manuscripts according to an article at ScienceNews.com. This interesting article may result in advances in various research areas including the Jewish world and genealogy.

Thousands of painstakingly handwritten books produced in medieval Europe still exist today, but scholars have long struggled with questions about when and where the majority of these works originated. Now a researcher from North Carolina State University is using modern advances in genetics to develop techniques that will shed light on the origins of these important cultural artifacts.

Many medieval manuscripts were written on parchment made from animal skin, and NC State Assistant Professor of English Timothy Stinson is working to perfect techniques for extracting and analyzing the DNA contained in these skins with the long-term goal of creating a genetic database that can be used to determine when and where a manuscript was written.

"Dating and localizing manuscripts have historically presented persistent problems," Stinson says, "because they have largely been based on the handwriting and dialect of the scribes who created the manuscripts – techniques that have proven unreliable for a number of reasons."

The researcher believes genetic testing could resolve such issues by creating a baseline using the parchment DNA of a relatively small number of manuscripts that can be reliably dated and localized. Each may provide rich genetic data as a typical medieval parchment book includes more than 100 animal skins.


He intends to create a baseline DNA database of known dates and localities and can then take samples from unknown manuscripts and compare them to determine the relationship degree between them. He hopes this comparison will make it possible to identify genetic similarities indicating the general time and locale where a book was written.

On a larger scale, Stinson says, this research "will also allow us to trace the trade route of parchments" throughout the medieval world – a scholarly achievement that would provide a wealth of data on the evolution of the book industry during the Middle Ages.

On January 23 in New York City, Stinson will present early research findings at the annual meeting of the Bibliographical Society of America, as one of three researchers asked to participate in the society's New Scholars Program for 2009. Research funding came from the Digital Research and Curation Center at Johns Hopkins University and the Council on Library and Information Resources.


Read the complete article at the link above. On the surface, I think this new technique may prove valuable in uncovering valuable data concerning Jewish manuscripts held in archives, libraries and private family collections around the world.

New Jersey: Family traces at Bad Arolsen

New Jersey resident Janet Isenberg was part of the group of genealogists who visited the Bad Arolsen archives in May, hoping to learn the fate of 163 relatives caught up in the Holocaust.

Her story is in a New Jersey Jewish Standard article by Jeremy Fishman.

The trip for amateur and professional genealogists was organized by genealogist Gary Mokotoff of Avotaynu, a major publisher of essential Jewish genealogy reference and related publications. The international group - from the US, Israel, UK and Australia - was the first large group of individuals to access more than 26 miles of Nazi documents since they were opened to the public in November 2007.

"My father was a Holocaust survivor," Isenberg, a genealogy enthusiast, told The Jewish Standard last week. She formed a passion for genealogy when she was 17. "I have been studying the history of my family for over 35 years, so when I discovered this opportunity I had to seize it," she said.

Mokotoff said that the International Tracing Service  archives at Bad Arolsen "has a computerized index designed for in-house purposes only. It is organized in a unique manner that is difficult to navigate if you are untrained in how to use it."  The German language documents are in three general categories in separate buildings: incarceration documents, forced labor documents and post-war documents.

"What I hoped to find were people who survived that I didn’t know about," Isenberg said. "I entered inquiring about 163 relatives. [But] 158 died in the Holocaust, and only five survived. I was excited to find cousins of cousins, one in Germany and one in Israel."

Fore more details, read the complete article at the link above.

IIJG: Research grants now available

In September, I attended the symposium of the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy and made several postings (check out Sept. 10-15 entries here) about the interesting presentations.

Director Neville Lamdan just wrote to me that the IIJG has now posted a list of 20 topic areas in which the institute is seeking serious research proposals. The projects may be for one or two years. IIJG funding of up to $10,000 may be available for those projects selected.

This is, according to Lamdan, a great opportunity for qualified researchers to become involved in the developing field of academic Jewish genealogy.

For details, click here and scroll down to section 2: "Call for Projects". The deadline for submission is April 15, 2007. Proposals will be judged by rigorous scholarly standards for content, originality, importance, sources, methodology, etc.

Categories include historical genealogy, multi-disciplinary study, Rabbinics and onomastics, migration studies and exact sciences. The list of topics ranges widely: among them are the Cairo Geniza; the effects of the plague on the Middle Ages Jewish family; lineages of Conversos/Crypto-Jews in selected areas (Spain, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, New Mexico); Jewish tombstone carving/painting from iconographical and genealogical points of view; given and surnames names of Sephardic and Mizrahi communities, by period, location, type, etynologies; in-depth studies of Jewish names in "neglected" parts of Europe (Romania, Hungary, Czech, Alsace Lorraine); and broadening the the soundex system beyond Eastern European names to cover names from other major linguistic groups.