I sat with nearly forty people around a wooden conference table in a suite at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. We had come from all over the world for an annual meeting of the Ostrow Mazowiecka (Poland) Research Family. All of us had ancestors from this town in Poland. I wondered as I sat there. One hundred years prior, our ancestors had all known each other. Now here we were, reunited as a Jewish community.
When I first began researching my Jewish roots, in the days before the Internet, members of this genealogical community provided substantial help. I began with the typical steps: interviewing my relatives and gathering vital record documentation. I only knew my mother’s family came from Lomza Gubernia–the province of Russia-Poland called Lomza. Only when I located my great-grandmother’s 1914 ship manifest record did I discover the name of the town she and her family were from: Ostrow Mazowiecka. That knowledge opened doors for me as I joined the research family that was forming. Fellow researchers guided me to vital records and surrounding towns.
Many people believe that exploring Jewish roots is futile because of various reasons: the records were lost in the Holocaust; no single country serves as a place of origin since Jews lived all over the world; lack of surnames in eastern Europe prohibit extensive genealogies unless your family had roots in other places or descended from a rabbinic dynasty; changing borders complicate archival systems and the languages they used; and antisemitism forced migrations. There are challenges, to be sure, but there are many research options available.
Getting Started
After you’ve interviewed your relatives and gathered whatever documentation exists in the family, take stock of what you have. Keep in mind that in Jewish genealogy, spelling does not count. In fact, Jewish genealogists Randy Daitch and Gary Mokotoff developed a special coding system, appropriately called the Daitch-Mokotoff system, for names and places to account for spelling variations.
Your next step? Visit the JewishGen website at <www.jewishgen.org>. At this site, you’ll find hundreds of databases that can jump-start your research. Here are some examples:
• JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF). Enter the towns and surnames you’re researching so other family historians can find you. A search of more than 300,000 names and towns may help you find others with similar interests. Using a paper-based version years ago, I found genealogists with interest in Ostrow Mazowiecka. Successful networking often results from using this database.
• Family Tree of the Jewish People (FTJP). Enter surnames and discover whether anyone else has uploaded family trees into this database. A cooperative project between JewishGen, the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, and the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora (Beit Hatefusoth), the database contains more than two million names from nearly 2,000 contributors.
• Jewish Records Indexing—Poland Project (JRI-PL). If your family came from Poland (including areas now part of Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus), enter names into this database and retrieve indexes to records. This database takes the guesswork out of finding vital records and can save you many hours. The database now indexes more than 1.7 million vital records for more than 280 towns. New entries are added each month.
• Online Discussion Groups. JewishGen offers a variety of discussion groups, including the general JewishGen group, and many specialized mailing lists for localities such as Belarus, Bohemia-Moravia, Denmark, Galicia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, South Africa, and Ukraine.
• Specialized Databases. From the special interest group home pages, you can search mega-databases for your names. For example, the "All Lithuania" database offers access to more than 300,000 records from revision, tax, and voter lists as well as from vital and cemetery records. The "All Belarus" database contains some 180,000 vital records, voter lists, business directories, and ghetto records.
Using these databases will help you find others with similar interests and can help pinpoint geographic locations where your family lived.
Finding Your Place of Origin
I had grown up with the understanding that my paternal grandfather came from Minsk, a ruble’s throw from Pinsk. Only when I discovered his naturalization papers did I find that he came from Borisov, the name of a district and a town within Minsk Gubernia. A researcher I had hired in 1992 found the Krasner family enumerated in the 1874—1875 Russian revision lists in the town of Logoisk in Borisov district (the revision lists have since been microfilmed through the Family History Library). This means that often the place names we’re given through our family’s oral traditions may not be the actual places, but they may provide clues to the more probable homes in the smaller towns and villages. This is especially true in eastern Europe as Jews were restricted to live in the area known as the Pale of Settlement, Russia’s acquisition of twenty-five provinces from the partitioning of Poland.
You have many sources at your disposal to determine your place of origin, such as family memorabilia, marriage certificates, passports and applications, letters and correspondence, photographs, vital records, naturalization papers, ship passenger records, census records, military records, obituaries, city directories, social security applications, and alien registration cards.
In the case of the last two sources, Alexander Beider’s dictionaries of surnames from Poland and Russia (see sidebar of books for Jewish research above) may provide clues to where certain surnames existed geographically. Often, a Jewish immigrant joined a landsmanshaft, or town-based society, to ease his assimilation. My paternal grandfather, for instance, born in Zaromb, Russian Poland, belonged to the Zaromber Progressive Young Men’s Society and is buried in one of the society’s plots in the Old Montefiore Cemetery in New York.
Keep in mind that constant border and government changes may mean you’ll find documents written in a variety of languages and that the ancestral town may have changed districts or may have a new name. A gazetteer like Avotaynu’s revised edition of Where Once We Walked is an excellent source to keep those changes straight. It provides alternate names and spellings, and lists sources of information. It’s also a good idea to get a detailed map for the area you are researching, since family may have existed in the surrounding towns. Our Jewish ancestors were more mobile than we may have thought, catalyzed by economic or marital opportunity.
Naming Patterns
If your family has Ashkenazic origins, tradition dictates that a newborn child be named in honor of a deceased member of the family. Therefore, several people in a generation may bear the same Hebrew or Yiddish name in honor of a mutual ancestor. This naming pattern can guide you to some hypotheses about ancestral names. For instance, in my mother’s Entel family, her sister and several of her first cousins are called Bella. They were named for their great-grandmother Bejla Szumowicz Entel.
In Sephardic tradition, naming follows a different pattern. Children are named for the living. Typically, the first-born son is named after the paternal grandfather and the second is named for the maternal grandfather. Similarly, the first-born daughter is named after the paternal grandmother and the second is named for the maternal grandmother. As you interview your relatives, be sure to ask who each member of the family was named for.
Surnames in parts of eastern Europe were not required among Jews until a 1787 Hapsburg decree and an 1845 Russian edict. Surnames fall into a number of categories. Place, matronymic, or patronymic names can guide you to certain geographic locations where such surnames were used. According to Alexander Beider’s Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire, the name Krasner suggests a geographic origin and may stem from the village of Krasnaya, Krasna, or Krasnoe. Matronymic names, such as Dvorkin (from Dvora), were common in Belarus. Artificial names, such as my paternal grandmother’s maiden name of Zuckerkandel (rock candy), were used by more than half of Poland’s Jews, beginning with those in eastern Galicia.
Cemetery Research
A Jewish tombstone often offers more information than we realize. Symbols on the stone can tell us whether the decedent was a Kohen (member of the priestly caste) or Levite (descended from the Levi tribe, assistants to the priests) or if the decedent died young. If you see a pair of hands joined at the thumbs with fingers spread like a fan, you will likely find "Hacohen" in the Hebrew name inscription. An image of a pitcher on the stone signifies the decedent was a Levite; the Hebrew name inscription will likely include "Halevi." A broken branch denotes that the decedent died young. An information file on the JewishGen website provides a tutorial on how to read a Hebrew tombstone.
From the Hebrew patronymic system, you can determine the deceased’s father’s name. My paternal great-grandfather’s stone states "Mordechai bar Yitzhak" or son of Isaac. Sometimes, the Hebrew names provide significant clues because American names bear no resemblance to the pattern of repeated given names. When my mother was growing up, she never knew that her cousin Philip was actually named Isaac after their great-grandfather.
Sephardic Research
Sephardic, or Spanish, Jews represented about 90 percent of the world’s Jewish population in the 1300s and about 50 percent by 1700. Now, Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews comprise about one-quarter of the Jewish population and about 60 percent of the state of Israel. In 1654, twenty-three Jews from Recife, Brazil, arrived in Manhattan, the first Jews to immigrate to America. Specialized resources, including websites, journals, and an online discussion group exist for those pursuing their Sephardic roots (see sidebar of websites).
Holocaust Research
As a result of the Holocaust, many records were destroyed, but records still exist. Further, organizations can help you find information on family members. Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, for example, allows you to query names of your relatives electronically. Yad Vashem began collecting some 2 million Pages of Testimony in 1955 and has computerized them along with lists from other sources into a mega-database of nearly 3 million names. Although the database is not yet accessible online, it is open to the public at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Or you can request fee-based searches for victims and survivors of the Holocaust by sending an e-mail including known information to <names.research@yadvashem.org.il>.
Through the Hall of Names, I received information on ninety members of my Zuckerkandel family and several members of my Dvorkin, Entel, and Pryzant families. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, can provide background information on the Holocaust in your ancestral communities, and the American Red Cross Holocaust and War Victims Tracing and Information Center in Maryland can help you determine the fate of your family.
Civil Registration Records
If your family came from Poland, chances are you can jump-start a successful records search by using the Jewish Records Indexing—Poland database. If the name you are researching is found, you’ll be able to go to the exact record in the civil registration microfilms held by the Family History Library or to write to the Polish State Archives or Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw to request your records for a reasonable fee.
Vital records from the former Soviet Union may be harder to come by. Archives in former republics vary in the depth of their holdings and their degree of responsiveness. Consult the FamilySearch catalog at <www.family search.org> to determine if records for your town have been filmed. Civil registration of Jewish births, marriages, and deaths began during the Napoleonic era and take two forms: narrative and columnar. You’ll find the narrative form used in Poland and the columnar used in Russia and Galicia. In Belarus records, it’s helpful to consult the columns written in Hebrew to corroborate the information found in Russian.
Information files and special interest group sites on JewishGen can guide you to records resources for other geographic areas such as Germany, France, Hungary, Romania, and England.
Jewish Community Records
In addition to the civil records, Jewish kahal or community records can be extraordinarily helpful, but you will need to be able to read Hebrew and Yiddish to fully take advantage of their content. Such records exist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. Some community records are available through individual shtetl pages on JewishGen.
Language Barriers
Depending on where your family emanated, you may be faced with reading Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, German, French, Spanish, or other languages. Fortunately, several translation guides are available to help abstract important record types, such as birth, marriage, and death records.
For many towns annihilated as a result of the Holocaust, survivors wrote memorial or Yizkor books. You can consult the Yizkor book pages on JewishGen to determine whether translations and necrologies of these may have been completed for your town. Translation assistance is also available through ViewMate on Jewish Gen.
Making Jewish Genealogy Work
Volunteerism. The generosity of the Jewish genealogical community’s time, skill, and funding has helped to bring archival records to the masses through the Internet. The Jewish Records Indexing—Poland Project, for instance, would not have come about without the visionary, diplomatic, and technical skills of its founders. Funding efforts also help to preserve important, deteriorating documents on microfilm while also helping archivists satisfy genealogical information requests through the development of databases.
Specialized resources. Publishers such as Avotaynu, the resources of Jewish genealogical societies around the world, and the research programs of individual special interest groups provide tremendous help to the Jewish genealogist in terms of how-to guides, published inventories, histories, dictionaries, online discussion groups, journals, and more.
Jewish genealogy has blossomed within the past ten years, thanks to the efforts of countless volunteers and the Internet. It is a worldwide effort and a virtual community that connects us all.
Your Jewish Research Library
Krasner-Khait, Barbara, Discovering Your Jewish Ancestors (Heritage Quest, 2001).
Mokotoff, Gary and Warren Blatt, Getting Started in Jewish Genealogy (Teaneck, N.J.: Avotaynu, Inc., 1999).
Mokotoff, Gary, Sallyann Sack and Alexander Sharon, Where Once We Walked: A Guide to the Jewish Communities Destroyed in the Holocaust, Revised Edition (Teaneck, N.J.: Avotaynu, Inc. 2002).
Mokotoff, Gary, How to Document Victims and Locate Survivors of the Holocaust. (Teaneck, N.J.: Avotaynu, Inc., 1995).
Beider, Alexander, Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Kingdom of Poland (Teaneck, N.J.: Avotaynu, Inc., 1996).
Beider, Alexander, Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (Teaneck, N.J.: Avotaynu, Inc. 1993).
Weiner, Miriam, Jewish Roots in Poland: Pages from the Past and Archival Inventories (Secaucus, N.J. and New York: Miriam Weiner Routes to Roots Foundation, Inc. and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1997).
Weiner, Miriam, Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova: Pages from the Past and Archival Inventories (Secaucus, N.J. and New York: Miriam Weiner Routes to Roots Foundation, Inc. and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1999).
Basic History of Judaism
1007 B.C.E. David rules over the tribe of Judah
Destruction of the First Temple and Babylonian exile
539 B.C.E. Persians conquers Babylonia
516 B.C.E. Second Temple
332 B.C.E. Hellenistic Conquest
301 B.C.E. First Jews in Alexandria
200 B.C.E. Antiochus III becomes ruler of Judea
167 B.C.E. Antiochus IV's edict forces Jews to abandon practice of Judaism
63 B.C.E. Roman Conquest
6 C.E. Judea becomes a Roman province
70 Destruction of the Second Temple
1264 Statute of Kalisz
1290 Expulsion from England
1306 Expulsion from France
1388 Privileges for Lithuanian Jews
1492 Expulsion of Jews from Spain
1495 Expulsion of Jews from Lithuania
1496 Expulsion of Jews from Portugal
1505 Return of Jews to Lithuania
1569 Poland’s unification with Lithuania
1648 Chmielnicki uprising; Ukraine area, formerly Polish, is now Russian
1654 First Jewish immigrants arrive in New Amsterdam
1772-1795 The Partitioning of Poland
1791 Catherine the Great of Russia defines the Pale of Settlement
1791 Emancipation in France
1796 Emancipation in the Netherlands
1812 Emancipation in Prussia
1867 Emancipation in Austria
1881 Assassination of Russian Czar; Alexander III brings on pogroms and spurs mass emigration
1881-1924 Mass Immigration to the United States
1918 Poland Gains Independence
1939 Hitler Invades Poland
1938-1945 Holocaust
1948 Formation of Israel
Jewish Research Online
JewishGen
Jewish Records Indexing—Poland Project
Yizkor Books
Sephardim.com
Sephardic Genealogy Sources
Avotaynu, Inc.
Yad Vashem
Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People
Center for Jewish History
Barbara Krasner-Khait has been researching her Jewish roots since 1989. She is the author of Discovering Your Jewish Ancestors (Heritage Quest, 2001). She serves on the board of directors for the Jewish Records Indexing—Poland Project and on the Steering Committee for the Galician Special Interest Group.
Return to the Ancestry magazine March/April 2003 table of contents.
Ancestry Magazine
