Free genealogy lectures via Skype

Free? Yes, that's what the man said.

The man is Beau Sharbrough, known to many genealogists and family historians as VP of Content at Footnote, although as of November 2008, he is no longer with that site.

However, he is still posting to his blog - "The Unofficial Footnote Blog: An insider blog about the history website, Footnote.com." Of course, after his departure, it isn't as "inside" as it was, but here's his latest blog post, which should be of great interest to our crowd.

Beau is offering free lectures for your genealogy society, using Skype.

Video conferencing may be the biggest boon to international genealogy, and especially to societies located around the world. We are all aware of exactly how much it costs to fly internationally, to stay at a hotel, to eat and the time component and physical wear-and-tear of flying great distances. If we can bring in top-flight speakers via a computer connection, why not?

Here's what Beau wrote on March 22:

You read that right.

For a limited time, in an effort to debug the technique, Beau Sharbrough will speak to your genealogy society (or your genealogical society, if you prefer), for free.

There is a condition. I don’t intend to actually attend the meeting.

I propose to use free software, such as Skype, to video conference.

Preliminary tests, working with my associate, Dick Eastman, have demonstrated that free programs such as Skype and Yugma enable a person to:

- video conference. You can see the speaker, and hear them. The speaker can see you, and hear you.

- The speaker can display his or her desktop, showing a powerpoint “deck,” or demonstrating a software program, or a website.

There is some setup to be undertaken at the remote end. The goal of this introductory offer is to refine the equipment list, setup procedures, and production capabililities needed to implement distance learning in local genealogy groups.

The preliminary requirements for the venue at your end are:

- An internet connection. The faster the better.
- A computer, either PC or Mac.
- A webcam and microphone. I use a Logitech Pro 9000, which does both.
- Skype, a free program, for video conferencing.
- A skype registration, which is also free, is required.
- Yugma, a free program, for displaying the remote desktop.
- A connection between the computer and whatever public address system you have.
- A preliminary technical test is required before an event can be scheduled. A final test is required prior to the event.

Dick and I tested the basic Skype connection as part of the St George Expo in late February. He was in London, England, and I was in St George UT. I was using the internet connection on my mobile 3G modem, which can be good or bad. On that particular day, it was pretty good. Those present could see and hear Dick just fine, and he was able to hear questions from the audience.

Rather than do this for the glory of high tech, I suggest that we could actually present a program with some information of value to your society.

Lecture topics might include:

- Using Footnote.com
- Online Search Assistants
- Genealogy in 2020
- Restoring Family Photos
- What’s new at Ancestry.com
- Planning your trip to the FHL in Salt Lake
- The Genealogy Technology Hall of Fame

Skype is fast becoming a verb, and is widely used. When I logged in today, it said that 15 million people were online.

Get with it. And imagine what you could be doing in a couple of years. You might have monthly meetings, featuring luminary speakers from around the globe, without any travel expense.

Such a journey must start with a single step. I’m proposing this one.

Send an email to sharbrough@gmail.com, if you are interested in exploring this further. I will do five or ten free ones, and then decide what approach to take after that.

I suggest you contact him immediately if your group would like to schedule one of the slots.

Book: Decoding family myths

Although there's no Jewish connection in this book, we know there are universal similarities when it comes to family history, myths and legends.

The family at the heart of Danish author Morten Ramsland's "Doghead" (Thomas Dunne Books) seems like most ordinary families, according to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune review.

Ugly truths in family histories have a way of getting pasted over with flowery facades; a certain level of denial seems to be required for a clan of people to continue associating with each other through the generations.

But it's not only the bad acts that get mislabeled on the family bookshelf. Long-held grudges, feuds and imagined slights often conceal a sweeter picture than the collective memory has created.

In Morten Ramsland's very popular Danish novel "Doghead," his first to be translated into English, a matriarch's impending death instigates an accounting of all these family myths -- the good and the bad.

And, while the ultimate uncoding of the family's mysteries gets to be a bit of a gimmick, Ramsland's multigenerational family saga is a complex, engrossing tale of unique characters in situations that are sometimes funny, sometimes wrenching, often outrageous and fantastical, but always human and believable.

The narrator returns to Denmark to see his dying grandmother. He and his sister decide to take a look at the family history and its legends. They fill in the holes and investigate the lies, half-truths and misunderstandings of the family.

This sounds like an interesting read for genealogists.

Cape Verde project launched

I first heard about the Cape Verde Jewish Heritage back in 2003, when Carol Castiel spoke extensively about her hopes and plans to promote this project, at that year's International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Washington, DC.

This week, the Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project was formally launched by Aziz Mekouar, the Moroccan ambassador to Washington.


Castiel's project, which she has been trying to organize since the 1990s, includes restoration of cemeteries in the former Portuguese colony, writing the community history, descendant interviews and research.

Cape Verde includes 10 islands 300 miles from Africa's west coast. It experienced two immigration waves. The first, in the 15th century, included Conversos, escapees from the Inquisition in Spain. This community is still very secretive and thus the projects focuses on the second wave of immigrants, who came from Morocco in the mid-19th century.

The Cape Verde and Portuguese ambassadors attended the launch. B'nai B'rith helped Castiel, a Voice of America staffer, set up the project. When Castiel was stationed in Portugal she learned about the colony's Jewish history. Although there is no Jewish community today, many of its citizens of Jewish ancestry are proud of their heritage.

Also participating in the launch were Cape Verdean immigrants to the US, who descend from its Jewish immigrants.

Tracing the Tribe has written previously about the Cape Verde project here and here. The International Jewish Cemetery Project also has information, with additional links. A 1996 paper at Saudades.org offers very interesting history. The Cape Verde Project also has a blog and a Facebook page.

Massachusetts: Remembering Dvur Kralove

A Boston suburb synagogue that has held a Czech Torah scroll for 30 years, will hold a memorial to honor 123 Jews of Dvur Kralove who died in Auschwitz-Berkenau. Only recently - thanks to an Internet search - have the names of those souls been recovered.

On April 27, Temple Emanuel in Newton will unveil the names on a Wall of Remembrance, according to this Boston Globe story. To see the names, click here.

Alan Edelstein, 82, chairs the congregation's Holocaust memorial committee and it was his personal journey that led him to the Drur Kralove community.

For 30 years, Edelstein has walked by the Torah, encased in glass, in the synagogue’s lobby. And while he said he felt relief that the Torah escaped Nazi harm, something else pulled at him: Who were the individuals who once read from its scrolls, which contain the Five Books of Moses?

‘‘Walking by it, I felt something was missing, not fulfilling the Torah’s place in our community,’’ said Edelstein, 82, of Waban.

Three years, he embarked on a mission to find the names of those who belonged to the synagogue, where the Torah was once used. His motivation was not personal - he's a second-generation Bostonian - but for Jewish continuity. Edelstein and his wife funded the memorial.

On April 27, the synagogue's youth will read the names of 123 Jews from the town who perished in Auschwitz.

Wayne Goldstein, the director of informal youth education at the synagogue, said the memorial service is meant to ‘‘connect the generations.’’

‘‘The kids pass by [the Torah] every day. They don’t stop and look. Now, we hope there will be real resonance with them,’’ he said.

The Zachor (remember, Hebrew) memorial will list the names, their place of death and their age.

Edelstein's chase began by calling the Czech Embassy three years ago with few results. Then he went to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, with not much more. He sent emails to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

‘‘I got nowhere fast,’’ said Edelstein. The names of Jewish victims from the town remained a mystery.

An online search connected him to Rabbi Emeritus Norman Patz of Temple Sholom of West Essex, in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, whose congregation also has a Dvur Kralove Torah.

Patz and his wife Naomi published a monograph ‘‘Thus We Remember, ’’ which tells the story of the Dvur Kralove Jews and lists their names.

The rabbi also teaches post-Holocaust thought at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey. He said said Edelstein’s efforts to personalize a Holocaust relic is part of a larger trend in World War II commemorations.

‘‘In the early years, people talked about the huge numbers, the 6 million,’’ said Patz, in an interview from his home in North Caldwell, N.J. ‘‘But there were no names. Today, the development has been in the direction of telling personal stories with people’s names.’’

In 1942, says Susan Boyer, the US director of the London-based Memorial Scrolls Trust, the Czech Jews organized a rescue effort to save the Torahs. The Trust distributes Czech Torahs to institutions through the world.

Fifty Czech Torahs are in Massachusetts, and more than 1,000 in the US, including one at the White House. The organization lends these scrolls on a long-term loan for a donation of 2,500 British pounds. The scrolls must be used at least once a year according to the conditions set. Boyer says they are more than scrolls, they are witnesses to history.

In 1942, one year after the Nazis began mass deportations of Jews from Czechoslovakia, curators at Prague’s Jewish Museum proposed a plan to the Nazis with the hope of preserving Jewish ritual objects from destruction. The Nazis agreed to the plan, although no one knows why, since the Nazi policy was Jewish annihilation.

The result was a substantial collection held at the museum and at more than 40 warehouses around Prague of about 100,000 liturgical items. Among them were five Dvur Kralove Torahs. They remained in Czechoslovakia until 1964, when an art dealer from London orchestrated the purchase en masse of 1,564 Holocaust Torahs from the Communist government of Czechoslovakia.

Drur Kralove's community dates to 1838. Its synagogue was established in 1890 and, by the 1930s, there were 182 Jews within the town's greater population of 16,545.

Read the complete article at the link above.

Blog: This Day in Jewish History

To more fully understand the lives and times of our ancestors, genealogists must be aware of Jewish history throughout the ages and how historical events impacted our ancestors.

One of my must-read blogs that puts Jewish history into perspective is This Day in Jewish History.

For example, today's posting covers events beginning with the 1144 blood libel in Norwich, England; the 1349 massacre of Jews in Fulda, Germany, blamed for the Black Death; 1510 expulsion from Colmar, Germany, where they had lived in the Upper Alsace town for 300 years; 1546 saw an attempt to create a Jewish College in Mantua, Italy.

The listing continues from there, ending with events in 2009.

Everything is archived, so you can easily check a specific date of interest.

The blog is part of the study program for the Jewish History Study Group of Temple Judah, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Mitchell A. Levin is the compiler.

Book: A war story told in hidden letters

A workman finds hidden letters from the past that tell a young man's war-time tale.

Now a book, The Jewish Exponent's literary editor Robert Leiter reviews it here.

In 1997, Manus de Groot, the foreman of a demolition company, was tearing down a house along Amsterdam's Vrolik Street when he found two bundles of letters hidden in the ceiling of the third-floor bathroom. It struck him that the correspondence must be of some importance since there was so much of it -- 86 letters and postcards, and one telegram. They had all been written in a single year, 1942, by Philip Slier, known to friends and family as Flip, from a forced-labor camp. He was just 18 years old at the time, and his correspondence was all directed to his parents.

De Groot read through them and took them to the Dutch National Institute of War Documentation.

The only condition he made was that he eventually be told what had happened to the young man and his family, and if there were any survivors. As the book's publisher and co-annotator, Deborah Slier, states in her introductory remarks to Hidden Letters, this book is de Groot's answer.

Children's book publisher Deborah Slier annotated the letters and her company, Star Bright Books, published it - their first adult title. Slier was also personally involved as Flip was her first cousin; she acquired the letters in 1999. For seven years, Slier and co-annotator Ian Shine tracked down details and annotated the letters. The book contains 86 letters and postcards, maps, documents, and 300 photographs (most taken by Flip).

Slier's father and Flip's father were Amsterdam-born brothers; Slier's father emigrated to South Africa in 1922. Before the war broke out, 56 relatives lived in Amsterdam and other European countries (in addition to Slier's branch). At the end of the war, her family received a letter saying that the Slier brothers, sister and mother had died in camps.

The Germans invaded in May 1940 when Flip was 17. By 1942, Jews were prohibited from nearly all work. Once unemployed, they were sent to some 50 work camps in the Netherlands. Flip was sent to Molengoot camp in spring 1942; one of 7,000 Jews sent to a work camp.

The young man was working as an apprentice typesetter at the daily paper Algemeen Handelsblad. The book's bio says

...he was just about 5 feet, 8 inches tall, weighed 156 pounds, had black hair and gray eyes. "He was a good-natured, gregarious young man who was described by his friend Karel van der Schaarf as brutaal -- that is, audacious."

In April 1943, the Jewish Council ordered him to the Molengoot camp, where he continued to send upbeat letters to his family. He later escapes, knowing that family members had died in Auschwitz. In Amsterdam, he was hidden, obtained false papers, and even saw friends and family occasionally. Arrrested at Amsterdam Central Station, he was sent to another Dutch camp - Vught - and then to Sobibor in Poland, where he was killed.

Writes Leiter:

Flip's extraordinary spirit and the irrepressible nature of his personality come directly through his 86 pieces of correspondence. When you read them, you touch -- and are touched by -- an astonishing individual.

Read the complete review here.

UK: Manchester conference, May 17

The Seventh Northern Conference of the Manchester Regional Group of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain will take place on May 17.

Speakers:

Bill Williams:
Jewish Charities in Manchester: The Jewish Ladies' Visiting Association and how it helped the immigrant community.

Jenny Thomas:
The Making of the BBC Series "Who Do You Think You Are?"

Ian Hartas:
BMDs on the Internet

Ben Forman:
Investigating Your Polish roots: A Personal Journey

Kevin Bolton:
The Manchester Jewish Community Archives at Manchester Central Library

A smaller venue was selected this year, with the capacity for only 50 attendees. If you'd like to attend or want more details about the event, contact Lorna Kay as soon as possible.

Poland: Visiting relatives before the Holocaust

Suchastow and Skalat were the hometowns of the Fink family, my mother's father's family. Once in Austro-Hungary, these Galician towns were then in Poland are today in Ukraine.

The Suchastower Benevolent Society in New York City was very active and my maternal grandfather and his family were active members. As was the case with many of these landsmanshaftn (immigrant societies), the young men who came first and established themselves, welcomed newcomers from home, gave them jobs and got them started in the new world.

One can see the close relationships as the "boys" were often witnesses for each other on their naturalization documents. My grandfather and his brothers were in the building maintenance field and many of the young men began there as window washers before striking out on their own.

About 15 years ago, a short film was found, made by one of the Suchastow boys on his 1930s trip home. The film was discovered, converted to CD. Many Suchastower descendants were fortunate to receive copies. I have one, another copy is at Beth Hatefutsoth in Tel Aviv, and the original - I believe - is in the archives at the Museum of Living Jewish Heritage in New York (the filmmaker's family donated it).

I'm the second generation born in America, so I didn't recognize any of the smiling faces on the Suchastow section of the film. But I recognized the central square of the shtetl and the homes (right, c1930) were strangely reminiscent of the bungalows Grampa built at his Kauneonga Lake bungalow colony in the Catskills (see below, mid-1950s). that looked like shtetl homes.

The colony in Kauneonga also had a central space that looked like Suchastow's, ringed by the now-familiar bungalows. In Kauneonga, however, our central space also contained a playground minus the flocks of geese and goats.


The film also shows the town of Zbarazh, and the filmmaker's sea voyage to Europe and back.
I knew that the Suchastow man had tried to convince others to leave on his trip. They didn't. This short film is the only pre-Holocaust record of their faces, those families, that shtetl.

Today I learned of another documentary - compiled from other amateur home movies - detailed in this Boston Globe story.

Poland—Poland's Jews were nearly wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust, then the communists who ruled the country for decades after World War II waged anti-Semitic campaigns and made Jewish history a taboo topic.

But a new documentary draws on a patchwork of amateur camera footage shot mostly by American Jews visiting relatives in the 1930s in Polish towns and provides a window into what once was.

It makes its debut in Canada, Germany and Ukraine in Polish next month, and an English version will be ready for the U.S. market later this year, Polish producer Miroslaw Bork said Friday.

"Po-Lin, Slivers of Memory" was conceived by Polish camerawoman Jolanta Dylewska, who was inspired to make the 80-minute film after coming across one of the home movies in Jerusalem archives in 1996 while working on an earlier project.

I don't know if our Suchastow footage is included, but I'm trying to find out. There is a short trailer (Polish narration) for Po-Lin here.

The filmmaker said that the movie had enormous emotional value for her, and that people filmed reacted with great warmth because they knew the person filming them.

For those who may not be familiar with the phrase Po-Lin: in Hebrew, it means "you will rest here," or "a place of refuge," but it has become the word for Poland. In the Middle Ages, Jews expelled from other European countries settled there and remained for a thousand years. The pre-Holocaust Jewish population was 3.5 million; only a few hundred thousand survived.

Remembering that short film on Suchastow, I realized - as did Dylewska, that those people had only about a decade to live before the Holocaust began.

The Polish-German product cost some $380,000 and opened in November, playing in Polish cinemas.

After finding the initial home movie, Dylewska found more footage in Israeli and American archives, and added commentary -- based on Jewish history books -- in Polish with English subtitles.

At the same time, she said she took great care to preserve the original atmosphere of the black-and-white films in hope "the viewers will carry these people in their memories."

She also filmed the places from the home movies as they are today, and found witnesses to talk about their former Jewish neighbors and friends.

If the film comes to your city, do see it.