Jamboree 2011: Family History Writers Conference

The Southern California Genealogical Society's Jamboree holds a special place in Tracing the Tribe's heart.

The first time we spoke at this annual event was at its family history writers breakfast several years ago. Our topic - "Creating Hope" - focused on how writing on family history for mainstream publications raises awareness and interest in readers. The presentation presented several Holocaust-related reunions and stories on other topics.

Tracing the Tribe will once again be speaking at Jamboree 2011 and also attending the second GENEii Family History Writers Conference from 8.30am-4.30pm (with an optional buffet lunch), on Thursday, June 9, while the main event begins on Friday and runs through Sunday.

Speakers for the Thursday program - which requires separate registration - include outstanding writers, genealogists and speakers:  John Colletta,  D. G. Fulford, Dawn Thurston, Biff and Nancy Barnes, and publishing panelists Lou Szucs, Lisa Also and Tom Underhill.

Register by April 30 to receive discounts (early-bird and SCGS members) for this special activity. Thursday registration: SCGS members, $100; others, $125. The optional buffet lunch: SCGS members, $35; others, $38.

Subscribe to the Jamboree 2011 blog to receive all updates for the conference, including detailed posts on the speakers for the writers' conference. Click here to read about John Colletta, well-known to attendees of the annual IAJGS International Conferences on Jewish Genealogy.

For more information on Jamboree 2011, the writers' conference and more, click here.

Tracing the Tribe looks forward to meeting readers at Jamboree 2011.

Colorado: Memoir writing workshop, May 13

If you don't write the history of your family, who will?

The Jewish Genealogy Society of Colorado, under the leadership of Ellen Shindelman Kowitt, is an active group offering several programs each month.

The next program is a "Memoir Writing Workshop for the Family Historian," with Susan Jacobs, set for 6.30pm, Thursday, May 13, at Temple Emanuel, Denver.

Discover the joy of memoir writing in Jacobs' stimulating and fun workshop for family historians, regardless of whether or not they've written anything previously.

Jacobs holds a BA in oral interpretation of literature (USC) and an interdiscplinary gerontology certificate (University of Denver). She has 30 years of teaching experience and 18 years teaching memoir writing at such venues as Regis University and the Denver Jewish Community Center.

In addition to monthly programs, the JGS of Colorado also offers a community genealogy education series for which it received some interesting grants which could be duplicated in other communities. For more information on the JGSCo's programs, including resources and useful links, see the website above.

For more information, click here.

Melbourne Conference: Writing Ancestral Stories

Following Ambassador Yuval Rotem's family history journey, Australian author Arnold Zable discussed techniques involved in writing family stories.

His own family is from Bialystok; his books and stories reflect those roots.

At the heart of good writing, he said, is imagination. He clarified this by focusing on the meaning of "image," and the process of creating and seeing the image - of a place.

"If you can 'see' it, you can write it," he said. Walking the streets of that place, talking to people who came from there - all adds to the "image." Newspapers of the time provide more material and photographs. "If I can't 'see' it," he said, "I know more research is needed."

He described a Melbourne place called Cafe Scheherezade, named for the woman who told 1,001 stories. Zable said the place was once - it no longer exists - filled by people, each of whom could tell their own stories - just as many and just as well.

He discussed the scenes that Ambassador Rotem used in his own family history journey, describing vignettes and memoirs, all of which provide missing links in an ancestral chain, and help to explain the mystery of those missing links.

Zable advised researchers to look for their ancestry, to find where they come from and to share their stories.

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

San Diego: Write your life story, April 12

Writing your life story is more than listing facts and dates. If you do that, your future descendants will be bored to death.

The biggest lesson journalist Marsha Kay Seff learned from her deceased parents, Manny and Toba Seff, is “without laughter, growing old is no laughing matter." To keep her sense of humor honed she is teaching classes in “Writing Your Life Story.”

The San Diego Jewish Genealogical Society will host Seff in a program on writing the story of your life at its next meeting. It begins at 1pm, Sunday, April 12, at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla.

Seff - a reporter for 40­ years - knows the secrets of writing a life story and its milestones, and how to to highlight life's ups and down. Learn how to leave your descendants a part of you they will cherish.

A San Diego Union Tribune columnist for 24 years, Seff knows how to make a story. For 12 years, she wrote a column on aging and caregiving until she left the paper in 2008. She'll show how her years of caregiving influenced her writing.

For more information on this event and the SDJGS (founded in 1982), click here.

ISFHWE writing winners named

Winners of the 2008 International Society of Family History Writers and Editors Excellence in Writing Contest were announced May 14, at the NGS conference in Kansas City, during the annual ISFHWE banquet.

I'm happy to be in the good company of my distinguished colleagues Colleen Fitzpatrick and Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak in Category II - Articles, and congratulate everyone recognized this year.

Here is the complete list as provided by 2008 contest coordinator Yolanda Campbell Lifter:

Category I-Newspaper Columns
First Place: Mary Alice Dell, "Land Ho"
Second Place: Julie Miller, "Dear Lucy, Love Phil: A Cotton Family Legacy"
Third Place: Mary Penner, "Union Vets Joined Posts Across Nation"

Category II-Articles
First Place: Colleen Fitzpatrick, "Clues Left Around a House"
Second Place: Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak: "Found! Serial Centenarians"
Third Place: Schelly Talalay Dardashti: "Planting the Family Tree"

Category III-Original Research Story
First Place: Hazlehurst Smith Beezer, "Dr. James Hill: Skeleton in the Hall Family Closet"
Second Place: Terry R. Barnhart, "Unraveling the Mystery in Ginghamsburg"
Third Place: Nancy Waters Lauer, "When a Brick Wall Crumbles Onto the Wrong Path"

Category IV-Want-to-Be Writer/Columnist
First Place: Debra A. Hoffman, "Bricks & Mortality"
Second Place: Harold Henderson, "City Directories as Clue Factories"
Third Place: J.H. Fonkert, "Celebrate Minnesota's History by Starting Your Own"

Congratulations to all the winners!

Yolanda Campbell Lifter, 2008 Contest Coordinator
Malabar, FL

New Jersey: Write your family history, October 18

"Writing Your Family History," with Susan Amsterdam, is the topic of the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of North New Jersey.

Amsterdam will offer suggestions for organizing what may seem like an overwhelming mass of information obtained from many sources and provide ideas for conducting oral histories and writing one's own autobiography. Learn how to deal with sensitive family information and how to tell the story in an interesting way.

The meeting begins at 7.30pm Thursday, October 18, at the YM-YWHA in Wayne. For more information, click here.

Have you recreated your shtetl?

Nancy Holden is editor of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles's journal, Roots-Key.

She is planning a special issue focused on "Recreating Your Shtetl." It will be an analysis of the ways genealogists tell the story of a family or group of families in one place at one time. This issue will focus on Belarus.

Not all archives in Belarus are easy accessed as primary records, so secondary sources must often be used to recreate our family shtetls. Happily, many researchers have created family trees, conducted surname searches and built Web sites to encourage networking with others whose families lived in the same areas.

Roots-Key is soliciting articles on the techniques used in putting together the socio-economic culture, the history and the life and times of your Belarus shtetl. Did you:

• Create Excel spreadsheets from collected family trees?
• Search the Internet to create and analyze lists of resources, records, and record groups?
• Form a common interest group? Collect archival data together?
• Put up a Web site? What information did you want to share and what information did it bring to you and others?
• Create a cousin tree from South Africa or South America to Southern California?
• Use the JewishGen Family Finder and online White Pages, search passenger lists or create common surname data?

Nancy would like to hear from you if you have made the transition from your family story to documenting the common story.

If so, here's an opportunity to share your work in unraveling the mysteries of recreating your family in time and place.

Send all enquiries and articles to Nancy Holden.

Writing memoirs to keep history alive

In San Francisco and elsewhere, writers are recording their memoirs as a legacy for future generations.

Ken Colvin, 82, made his living in the field of agricultural marketing. But his life was forever changed when, as a 19-year-old Army surgical technician, he helped liberate Nazi death camps in 1945. It was an experience so searing it defined him ever after as an American and as a Jew.

Years later, with the birth of each of his seven grandchildren, the San Francisco native would write a long personal essay, a kind of letter of introduction. But he found he had even more to tell, and so in 1989 he set down his memoirs, which he titled “Cause and Effect.”

Helen Lewison, 82, a San Francisco housewife turned author, has been busy since she wrote her first memoir following her husband's 1992 death. Her latest, "The Butterfly Chronicles," includes her arrival in the Bay Area at age 31. “I went to a B’nai Brith dance in Oakland,” she recalls, “met Mel and married him 11 days later.”

Jewish community activist and real estate magnate William J. Lowenberg is an 80-year-old Auschwitz survivor who wrote a self-published memoir just for his family. His daughter convinced him to put his life story into book form, and he then worked with Susan Rothenberg, a social worker and editor of five memoirs.

"Susan and I met every Wednesday afternoon for a few hours,” he recalls. “She put a mike on my tie, and I talked and talked. Then she would write up what we discussed and send me a copy from the previous week. It wasn’t painful to talk about it. I look at it as an obligation. The world has to know.”