Philly 2009: Where are Schwinglasse and Schnatte?

"Where are Schwinglasse and Schnatte?" asked Bernard Purin of the Munich Jewish Museum, at the Philadelphia conference's German SIG luncheon. Over the course of his talk, I learned Uspork wasn't a new brand of Spam.

Readers may ask, "Nu? She never talks about German ancestors, so why did she go?"

While my ancestry has little German connection (as far as I currently know) – with the exception of my interest in the Sephardic communities and immigrant ancestors traveling through Hamburg's port – I signed up for the luncheon for the title alone, which was published as "Where the hell are Schwinglasse and Schnatte?" There are few program titles at genealogy conferences that utilize four-letter words, even those as inocuous as "hell."

Purin’s topic was fascinating, as he illustrated the impact of Hebrew, Yiddish and local dialects on names of people and places.

He's been director since 2003 of the Jewish Museum in Munich, was director of the Jewish Museum of Franconia Fuerth & Schnaittach (1996-2002); and curator of the Jewish Museum in Vienna and the Jewish Museum Hohenems. Until 2007, he was secretary of the Association of European Jewish Museums. Purin teaches museum studies and Jewish studies at the universities of Tuebingen and Munich.

Until the mid-19th century, Yiddish (Judeo-German) was the common language of Central European Jews, but there was no standard Yiddish in use. Local German dialects influenced the Yiddish. His talk focused on how dialects influenced pronounciation and spelling of Jewish names of people and places and how basic knowledge of German dialect can help decode terms.

In one ketuba (Jewish marriage contract) from the Jewish Theological Seminary library, Purin found mention of the town of Schwinglas, written in Hebrew, of course.

Pointing up the use of technology in genealogy and recognizing the value of Google, he did some research and discovered the town was called Schwinglas-he.

“He” (pronounced “hay”) was short for hej or heim (home). And, in the Alsatian dialect, the town of Schwindratzheim was called Schwindglas-hei. Problem solved.

Uppe led to Uppheim in Alsace, and Purin stressed that dialect knowledge is valuable. He learned that it was also called Dupig-je (he) or Duppinheim. Other towns mentioned in documents (and the real town name),were Kulps-he/Kolbsheim, Rus-he/Rosheim, and Witn-he/Wittenheim.

Figure out the suffixes, said Purin, and the pieces of the puzzle may make more sense.

In Alsace, he used the example of Bischwill (French) or Bischweiler (German). Weiler is a small village or part of a village; in dialect, It will be willer or will.

Papersah, Papersha or Fafersha, in Hebrew, was a bit more of a search as P and F in Hebrew are represented by the same letter. In Israel, as an example, the name FINK may be written or pronounced PINK and vice versa.

Purin demonstrated that Papersha or Papersch-heim was Pferschheim, Pfersche or Pferse and that the town was, in reality, Pfersee (near Augsburg).

As mentioned above, I learned that Uspork wasn't a new brand of Spam. Instead, Purin unraveled its etymology demonstrating that Uspork -> Ashpurg -> Aschpurg -> Aschburg -> Aschaffenburg. In dialect, it is pronounced Aschaburg.

Instead of contractions, sometimes the entire name was changed. He used the Franconian example of Wassertrudingen, with a Christian connotation (although I didn't catch Purin's explanation). The Jewish community called it Wasserdrillingen or Wsserdruningen to avoid the other connotation.

Onolschbach or Onolzbach in another ketubah was also a puzzle, although investigation proved it was Anschpach -> Ansbach near Nuremberg.

Sometimes the names were shortened, such as in the example of Arlingen which came from KleinErdlingen. The family name ERLANGER originates there.

Gmund was the nickname for Georgensgmund, also with a Christian connotation. The Jews didn’t want to use the Christian part of the name, and only kept the last part.

Hebrew abbreviations were another common puzzle and Purin presented some interesting examples. Sometimes, he reported, the full original name is rarely found today. In ancient times, everyone knew what the full name was, but not today.

B”k, Bk”s,BK"Sch -> BurgKunStadt, hard to find in full reference.
H”B -> HagenBach
B”D -> BaiersDorf
MM’D -> MemmelsDorf
Erlingen -> Kleinerdlingen (with family names ERLINGER/ERLANGER)
N”Sch -> Nikolsburg or Nikolof while N”Sh -> NikolSHburg, Nesch or Nasch, or Nikols(CH)burg

One abbreviation the audience seemed to know immediately was F"F" or P"P" for Frankfurt. The family name POPPER was fairly shouted out by the audience when Purin asked what family name came to mind.

The family name ASCH came from A"Sch -> Eisenstadt.

According to Purin, there are resources for such names, such as a Yad Vashem-published book, only in Hebrew, about these Jewish communities.

Another book, with 30 volumes published from 1951-2008, is a major source and other encyclopedias of place names for areas in Austria and Germany are available. He suggested searching for such titles as Ortsnamenbuch or Ortnamenlexikon.

Amazing what we can learn at lunch!

Eliyahu's Branches: Database update

Chaim Freedman writes that he's now updating the descendants' database for the Vilna Gaon and his siblings. He last published this in his 1997 book, "Eliyahu's Branches - the Descendants of the Vilna Gaon and His Family" (Avotaynu).

He writes:

In the light of material received from many families and with resource to archival records which were not available when my book was published, I have much to re-assess.

I invite those whose families appear in my book to send updates of children born since its publication twelve years ago, and corrections. I would also like to hear from all families who hold a tradition of a relationship with the Gaon.

Please send family trees in a gedcom file if possible.

Contact Chaim for more information.

Southern California: JGSCV's 4th anniversary, Aug. 30

The Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley and Ventura Couny will celebrate its fourth anniversary at its meeting on Sunday, August 30.

It begins at 2pm at Temple Adat Elohim, Thousand Oaks.

Warren Blatt, JewishGen managing director and editor-in-chief, will give his very popular introduction to Jewish given names, focusing on practical issues for genealogical research. Learn why Mordechai Yehuda is also Mortka Leib, and is also Max.

I've heard Warren give this several times and learned something relevant each time. Regardless of whether you are a complete beginner or have advanced skills, you will find this fascinating.

Our ancestors had many different given names and nicknames, in various languages and alphabets. This can make Jewish genealogical research difficult. Learn about the history and patterns of Jewish first names, and how to recognize ancestors' names in genealogical sources.

The meeting is open to all; there is no charge. The Klutzmer Band will perform. For more information including directions or future meetings, visit the JGSCV website.

Film Festival: Ordering a film

At the conference, several people asked me how to order a film they had seen at the Philly 2009 Film Festival, and I referred them to festival coordinator Pam Weisberger, who has provided the following information.

When contacting a distributor, make sure to tell them where you are located (US or elsewhere). Some films are not available in NTSC (US format). If they are in PAL (used elsewhere), they must be viewed on a computer or special multi-region DVD player.

NOTE: Pam asks readers to remember that if they want to hold a public screening for any kind of group or genealogical society - no matter how small the audience and informal the setting or despite the fact that no admission will be charged - they must get permission from the filmmaker or the distributor. In many cases, an often-negotiable fee must be paid, but some filmmakers may agree to allow screening for free. Owning a copy of a DVD does not give anyone the right to screen it for an audience in a public setting.

Some films are now available through Netflix or Amazon; others can be obtained only through the filmmakers or distributors.

- Abraham and Eugenia: Stories from Jewish Cuba www.bonnieburt.com/

- Against the Tide www.moriahfilms.com/ Ashley Green

- Bashert Richard Kollins

- Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh www.blessedisthematch.com

- Captain László Ocskay, The Forgotten Hero Dan Danieli

- Defiance - Purchase on Amazon, or Netflix. To screen for a group: Swank Motion Pictures www.swank.com/

- Echoes of a Ghost Minyan www.nationalfilmnetwork.com/

- From Philadelphia to the Front www.brandeis.edu/jewishfilm Juliet Burch -

- Genealogy Goes to the Movies Jordan Auslander

- His Wife's Lover www.brandeis.edu/jewishfilm Juliet Burch

- Holocaust Era Jewish Mass Graves in Poland: Discovery & Protection www.Jemglo.org - Ellen Friedland

- Horodok - A Shtetl's Story 1920-1945 Brian Berman

- House of Life - The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague Amazon or www.houseoflifefilm.com or houseoflifefilm@gmail.com

- In Our Hands: A Personal Story of the Bielski Partisans - Sharon Rennert - www.bielskidocumentary.com/Bielski_Defiance_Documentary_Home.html

- In Search of Bene Israel Sadia Shepard www.sadiashepard.com/films.html

- Lest We Forget: South African Jews and Reconciliation Robyn Aronstam

- My Mexican Shiva www.emergingpictures.com/my_mexican_shiva.htm or Netflix

- No.4 House of Our Lady Judy Maltz - www.streetofourlady.org/

- Obcy VI (Alien VI) Ms. Kasia Wilk

- On Moral Grounds not available for purchase. Information: lawsternla@aol.com

- Passages Gabriela Böhm - www.bohmproductions.com

- Philly Hoops Jim Rosin

- Saved by Deportation Robert Podgursky - www.logtv.com/films/deportation/credits.htm

- Tak for Alt- Survival of a Human Spirit www.takforalt.net or laura@sirenafilms.com

- Terpe Kind Mains, Terpe - Persevere, My Child, Persevere: The Journey of Composer Jeff Hamburg Ilja Roomans

- The Believers: Stories from Jewish Havana www.bonnieburt.com/

- The Holocaust Tourist www.brandeis.edu/jewishfilm Juliet Burch

- The Last Jews of Libya www.brandeis.edu/jewishfilm Juliet Burch

- The Longing - The Lost Jews of South America Gabriela Böhm - www.bohmproductions.com/

- The Partisans of Vilna - www.brandeis.edu/jewishfilm Juliet Burch

- The Rise & Fall of the Borscht Belt - Peter Davis

- The Sleeping Book - www.abc.net.au/compass/s2390931.htm

- The Tree of Life www.ruthfilms.org - Ruth Diskin

- Toyland - Georg Gruber

- Vienna's Lost Daughters - www.viennaslostdaughters.at/

- We Were Exodus - Amélie Garin-Davet

- Who Do You Think You Are: Esther Rantzen and Zoe Wanamaker (not yet for sale) Berenice Robinson

For all other questions or suggestions for 2010's edition, contact Pam.

Back home again

I'm back!!!

What a trip this summer was - in many ways.

From the excellent Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree to Philadelphia to the superb 29th IAJGS International Conference of Jewish Genealogy, the summer was studded with visits to and from relatives and good friends. Last week was spent in New York City with our daughter.

Tracing the Tribe is already planning for the Los Angeles conference in 2010 (July 11-16). I had breakfast - along with our daughter - with conference-co-chair Pam Weisberger on Sunday. She herself was getting home after a month in such fascinating places as Prague and Moscow and the Philly conference.

The hectic summer pace meant there were many Google alerts that I didn't get to, so better late than never, there will be a bunch of things coming through. The past few weeks were also interesting in that instead of me interviewing individuals for stories I was working, several reporters interviewed me for stories that appeared in the New York Times and on JTA. That was interesting.

I returned to a very hot Tel Aviv yesterday evening. Supposedly, according to my taxi driver (whose car mercifully had excellent air conditioning), it was the highest traffic day of the year with some 60,000 passengers either flying in or out.

By 6am this morning, I was on the computer with the a/c on full blast. My goal is to get as much accomplished as possible before jet lag sets in and I fall asleep at the keyboard.

There are several more Philly 2009 conference postings that will appear over the next few days.

My new washing machine was installed early this morning - the old one had a fatal mishap last week and things always seem to go wrong with appliances when I'm not here. Not only are the clothes spinning happily, but my husband went down to the supermarket to re-stock the bare fridge. I guess that means I have to start cooking again instead of eating out!

Things are returning to normal.

New Blog: NARAtions appears

NARAtions is a new blog by the US National Archives and Records Administration. It will address online public access to NARA-held records and aims to improve researcher experience.

We hope to hear from NARA researchers and anyone interested in the Archives on topics related to online access and historical research in general. The plan is to post questions periodically and encourage you to share your opinions, ideas, and stories with us. We will also post news items about descriptions or digitized archival materials available online.

The most recent NARAtions post concerns Nara's redesign of ARC and tagging.

Our current online catalog, the Archival Research Catalog (ARC), does not allow for tagging. Staff archivists can add subject terms from our authority list of approved subject headings (based on the Library of Congress Subject Authority Headings), but in many cases there is not enough time to index the descriptions. People using the catalog would be able to add whatever tags or keywords to the catalog descriptions.

What do you think?

From the "about" section of the new blog:

NARA has custody of more than 9 billion pages of records. How do we provide online access to it all? It’s a big challenge. Everyone would love to see all of the records available online as high-resolution scans with full-text searchability and a variety of ways to tag, search, browse, and discover the documents, photographs, maps, and films. And how about we get this completed by yesterday?

We think numerous strategies will have to come together as a multifaceted solution to providing better online access to NARA’s treasures and the vast array of federal records. NARA already has started to implement some approaches (like making descriptions and digital copies available in our online catalog, forming digitization partnerships, and developing an Electronic Records Archives), but we are still looking to the future and would like your input on how things are now and how you would love for them to be.

If you have suggestions for questions we should ask our researchers and the public, please send them to us at socialmedia@nara.gov.

Let the discussion begin!

NARAtions bloggers are Jill and Kristen.

Jill joined NARA in 2004, and coordinates outreach and training for the online Archival Research Catalog (ARC). Her degees are MLS (Archival Administration and an MA (US History), University of Maryland; BA (English, French Studies), University of Delaware.

Kristen joined the ARC staff in 2007, and works on digital outreach projects like topical research galleries and Web 2.0 efforts. She holds an MLS (Archival Administration) , University of Maryland and a BA (Historic Preservation), Mary Washington College.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Jill and Kristen. Readers may suscribe to the RSS feed (see bottom of the blog's home page). I wish one could subscribe via email alerts as well.

DNA: Zayde wasn't crazy!

"That was our name when we left Spain" was a Talalay family refrain. No one believed it, as I've often written. We were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim from Mogilev, Belarus - how could we be Sephardim?

When I began researching Mogilev, I found quite a few families with Sephardic surnames and heard from others who had a Sephardic oral history, after writing about it on the JewishGen discussion groups years ago. Eventually, documents and index mentions for our Talalay (spelled Talalaya in documents) were discovered in archives in Spain, most in Catalunya. And I continued to write about the discoveries, possibilities and related issues in articles for the Jerusalem Post, The Forward and, of course, here at Tracing the Tribe.

My good friend Judy Simon, who has a similar story in her Lithuanian family, and I joined forces in 2007 to find others and this year we co-presented a program at the Philadelphia conference on our IberianAshkenazi project at FamilyTreeDNA.com.

Suzanne Kurtz, a freelance writer, attended the session at the Philly 2009 conference, interviewed me, Judy, Harold Rhode and Bennett Greenspan. Read her JTA story here.

Despite leaving behind a Yiddish-speaking home in Latvia when he came to America in 1909, Sam Gold always told his children and grandchildren that they were Sephardic Jews.

Many decades later his granddaughter Judy Simon, 60, would finally confirm her grandfather was not meshuganah.

In 2004, after genetic testing became widely available for genealogists, Simon took a cheek swab from a male cousin and had his Y chromosome DNA tested.

DNA geneticists explain that Y-DNA (male DNA) is passed on unchanged from father to son back through time. Matt Kaplan of the University of Arizona Human Origins Genotyping Laboratory can look at a Y chromosome and trace paternal lines back to Africa, some 100,000 years ago, although that isn't exactly useful for genealogy. However, Y-DNA markers can prove a common male ancestor and approximate a time frame for that ancestor.

The results for Simon’s cousin came back matching many Ashkenazi males from villages near their grandfather’s region in Rezekne, Latvia -- but also matching two males from Texas and Mexico.

With Spanish surnames and a known converso ancestry, the two men were equally surprised to find they matched with Ashkenazim. Conversos were Iberian Jews, from Spain or Portugal, forced to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition of the 14th to 16th centuries. Many fled Iberia for the New World, eventually settling in what is now Mexico and the southwestern region of the United States.

“The DNA results confirmed what my grandfather had been saying all those years: We were Ashkenazi Jews with Sephardic roots,” says Simon, a social worker from Stony Brook, N.Y. Most likely, she says, her ancestors fled Spain in the 15th century for the Ottoman Empire before making their way to Latvia in the late 18th century.

In March 2007, Judy and I launched our project. The criteria for joining our IberianAshkenaz project are an oral Sephardic history, Iberian surname, Sephardic family traditions or carrying a Mediterranean genetic disease. The goal was to demonstrate the Y-DNA haplogroups and haplotype signatures of Ashkenazic males with Iberian surnames or an oral Sephardic history, and compare them with known Sephardic Jews and converso descendants.

Today, there are 140 members (although I've been traveling for a few days and we may have more participants now!). Judy, who is the science part of our team, reports that many have confirmed matches with Sephardim or conversos. Amazingly, some 39% have Most Recent Common Ancestor (MCRA) matches who likely lived in Iberia from the 1300s-1500s, with another 47% whose MRCA was more distant, before the 14th century.

In 1391, following massive pogroms across Spain, many Jewish communities were decimated, many were murdered, many others converted and a percentage decided it was simply time to leave Iberia. Of course, the next major incident was the Expulsion in 1492, which sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to many countries.

Judy and I knew what we were going to find, but it was exciting to see it proven and not just something we believed in our minds. It's not for nothing that our people are called the "wandering Jews" - we went everywhere in the known world and to the barely-known frontiers of the New World.

We also know that people who believe they are and have always been Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim may be shocked to see Sephardic evidence, such as another friend, Harold Rhode of Maryland.

Harold was surprised that he was not a "pure Litvak" or from a Lithuanian shtetl.

Rhode’s DNA results indicated that he shared ancestry with Jews with a known ancestor from Sicily. Now he says, “I’m a pure Litvak of Sicilian origin.”

When and how Rhode’s ancestor migrated to Sicily or from Sicily to Lithuania is unknown, though he says it most likely sometime in the 14th or 15th century.

As far as Jewish migration goes, In 1492, many Jews left Iberia for Sicily, so many in fact that in 1493, Sicily was considered the largest Jewish community. They thought they would be safe there, but were again expelled in 1493. Many simply went across the Straits of Messina into Calabria, southern Italy, but others went farther afield. Once time travel becomes the next best tool for genealogical research, Harold (and all of us) will be able to research our Sephardic roots more thoroughly. We keep hoping!

According to Bennet Greenspan of FamilyTreeDNA.com, the results of our little project indicate, “an important discovery within a subset of the Jewish world of an extended Jewish lineage. And it happens to be a substantial Jewish lineage numerically.”

The project requires more samples and data are needed, and all of us encourage Ashkenazi males with indicators of Sephardi ancestry to have Y-DNA tests with the project to see if they match with known Sephardim or conversos.

But, Greenspan says, “even though we may label ourselves Mizrahi, Sephardi or Ashkenazi, we all come from the original gene pool that was in the Land of Israel. We came from Judea; we’re all Judeans.”

I always tell people that they have to be prepared for what they will find. Be prepared for the unusual as your ancestry may not be exactly what you think.

The results of this small project have far-ranging implications, including genetic testing. The majority of participants in US genetic studies for Jewish conditions are self-identified Ashkenazi Jews (or so they think) as Ashkenazim are the majority Jewish group and identified Sephardim are a tiny minority. If the results of this project can be demonstrated with even larger numbers, it may indicate that many Ashkenazim are really Sephardim.

Thus, studies that indicate a possible Ashkenazi gene for this or that condition are misnomers, such as the "Ashkenazi" breast cancer gene (which is also found in Hispanic communities descended from Conversos), and the "Ashkenazi" Parkinson's gene (announced in 2006 after a Yeshiva University study, and which was later discovered to be merely Jewish after Sephardic communities were tested).

To join the IberianAshkenaz project, contact Judy Simon.

Genealogy as a basic human instinct?

How do you spell genealogy? Try D-o-p-a-m-i-n-e.

That's what makes us lose all sense of time and forces us to come back for more. According to the author of a Slate magazine article, "nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore."

Sounds like genealogy to me.

The Slate article has implications for genealogists who become addictively focused on the search for information. I'm sure we can add genealogy to the basic human instinct (food, sex and sleep) lineup of activities that are pleasurable.

A few years ago, when speaking to an Ancestry.com staffer, I called the site "cocaine for genealogists." They laughed, but felt that it really wasn't an appropriate advertising slogan!

According to some scientists, experiments have shown that people will neglect almost everything to keep getting that buzz.

How often have you stayed up til 2am or later when a new database was released, in the hope that you might find something related to your families of interest? Just five minutes more, just 10 minutes more you think, and when you come up for air, those few minutes have stretched to hours.

Steve Morse's now-famous tool for searching Ellis Island came from his marathon session when that database was released. And, of course, it was just that extra five minutes that enabled me to find my great-grandfather's Canadian border crossing record! That five-minute search ended at 4am!

According to Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp in the article:

It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, "Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems." It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. It's why, as animal scientist Temple Grandin writes in Animals Make Us Human, experiments show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than to have it delivered to them.

For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.

The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits "promote states of eagerness and directed purpose," Panksepp writes. It's a state humans love to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances, that keep this system aroused—cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it.

Read the complete article at the link above.