Nu? What's New? Vol. 11 No. 20

Happy Halloween!

Last Day to Take Advantage of Guide, WOWW and CDROM at Significant Discounts

Sunday, October 31, is the last day to take advantage of a major pre-Chanukah sale Avotaynu is having of three of its most popular products at significant discounts. Until then, you can purchase any of the following items for only $55.00:
• Avotaynu Guide to Jewish Genealogy, normally $85.00
• Where Once We Walked, normally $85.00
• AVOTAYNU on CD-ROM, normally $99.95
Furthermore, purchase any two of the above for only $99, or all three for $145.00. That’s a saving of at least 35% on individual items, 42% on two items and 47% on all three.
• 1 item – $55.00
• 2 items – $99.00
• 3 items – $145.00

Ordering information is at http://www.avotaynu.com/October2010Offer.htm

Two More New York Cemeteries Online
Steve Lasky of the online Museum of Family History, reports that two more Jewish cemeteries have made burial information available on the Internet. They are Montefiore Cemetery (Queens County) and New Montefiore Cemetery (Suffolk County). The evidence is that the database is a work in progress. Returning to the site after a number of days identified additional people. Either cemetery can be linked to at http://www.montefiores.com.

Other cemeteries in the New York City area with online burial information are:
Mount Ararat Cemetery
Mount Carmel Cemetery
Mount Hebron Cemetery
Mount Judah
Mount Lebanon
Mount Moriah Cemetery, Fairview, New Jersey
Mount Zion Cemetery
Riverside Cemetery, Saddle Brook, New Jersey

The power of the Internet continues to amaze me. Buried in Montefiore Cemetery is a woman named Yetta Mokotow, a member of the Mokotow clan unknown to me. Placing her name in Google, I discovered that some person who is a member of Sherith Israel Congregation in Nashville, Tennessee, celebrates her yahrzeit (anniversary of death). I am in the process of trying to locate that person.

News from Jewishdata.com
Jewishdata.com, a fee-for-service site, now has 100,000 Jewish tombstone images from Chicago, mostly from the Waldheim Cemetery. It has also posted the pages from a number of old, out-of-copyright books. The names appearing in the books are part of the central index. These books include:

Portraits Etched in Stone, Early Jewish Settlers 1682–1831, by David De Sola Pool. There is a major focus on the Manhattan Chatham Square Cemetery of Shearith Israel, which is the first Jewish cemetery in the United States. De Sola Pool copied the inscriptions on all the legible stones in his time, and traced the history of each individual interred there. Many of those monuments are no longer there, and what remains of the cemetery is now open for only a few days a year.

A Pictorial History of Maryland Jewry, by A.D. Glushakow, is about the early families who settled mainly in Baltimore.

Anshei Shem, authored by Rabbis Shmuel Zarski and Moshe Dovid Schiff, lists more than 100 famous rabbis around the world who were alive in 1940. Many of the rabbis are listed as living in European cities and not surviving the Holocaust. The book is in Hebrew.

Ancestry.com Subscribership Rapidly Growing
When Ancestry.com announced plans to issue stock to the public, they indicated they had one million subscribers. Now, juts a year later, they have disclosed there are now 1.38 million subscribers. Ancestry.com has been advertising heavily on television and sponsored the American version of the TV program, “Who Do You Think You Are?” It is having an affect on the American public. In the past, when I stated I was involved in genealogy, I often received a quizzical look. Now I am getting responses such as, “Is it true you can trace your family on Ancestry.com?”

The complete report, including financial information, is at http://ir.ancestry.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=524467.

News from the Hungarian SIG Discussion Group
The JewishGen Hungarian Database now has approximately 900,000 records since the recent addition of 80,000 new vital records, bringing the total number of vital records online to more than 360,000. The new records include those from Stomfa, Szilsarkany, Papa, Petroha, Kapolcs, Bokony, Sopron, Duna-Szerdahely, Kiraly-Helmecz, Ujfeherto, Fehergyarmat, Galszecs, Sztropko, Mezokasony, Pozsony and Budapest, including the Pest Orthodox records. The database is located at http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Hungary.

The Hungarian Holocaust Memorials Database now has 23,000 names. The Introductory webpage for the database is located at: http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Hungary/HolocaustMemorials.htm.
The database is searchable using either of the following search interfaces: JewishGen Hungarian Database at http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Hungary, or JewishGen's Holocaust Database at http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Holocaust.

Burgenland-bunch.org has published, under the title “Destroyed Jewish Communities,” articles about Jewish communities in Burgenland, specifically Lackenbach, Kittsee, Gattendorf and Frauenkirchen. There is also an article about the History of the Jews in Burgenland (which is now in Austria). It is located at http://www.burgenland-bunch.org/JH/JH.htm

Online Register of the Second Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902
FindMyPast.co.uk has published online the Register of the Second Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902, recording individual servicemen, nurses and civilians who served with the British Imperial Forces during the Second Anglo-Boer War. There are more than 50 persons named Levy and 100 named Cohen in the database.

This register includes very rare and out of print documents, creating a single record for each participant in the war. The database has 260,000 entries, including the casualty roll with details of over 59,000 individuals.

Boer War research can be confusing as there were two Boer Wars. The First Boer War was fought from 1880 to 1881, whereas the Second Boer War lasted longer, from 1899 to 1902. The Register focuses on the second Boer War and brings together information from over 330 sources.

The database can be found at http://www.findmypast.co.uk/boer-war-register-search-start.action?product=BW.

To submit a Page of Testimony, go to http://www.yadvashem.org/lwp/workplace/IY_HON_Welcome. Click the words “Submit Additional Names.”

Join the ranks of Yad Vashem’s worldwide network of volunteers working in one-on-one outreach efforts with Holocaust survivors and members of their generation to recover the names of Shoah victims before they are lost forever. For ideas and resources on how to launch a names recovery campaign in your area, visit Yad Vashem’s Community Outreach Guide for updated program information on the project in Israel and in Russian speaking Jewish communities around the world.

Yad Vashem has provided a 10-minute Pages of Testimony tutorial video at the site to learn how to help survivors and others from their generation to fill out Pages of Testimony. To volunteer for the project or for more information contact names.outreach@yadvashem.org.il