Nu? What's New? Vol. 20 No. 45

Underlined words are links to sites with additional information.

Avotaynu Joins Black Friday Madness– 40–74% Discount on Selected Books

Avotaynu is joining the Black Friday season madness by offering certain of our books at deep discounts. The sale will be available from today, November 24, to Tuesday, December 3. For lack of a better term, we are calling it a Black Friday sale.

In the early days of our publishing history, before the advent of Print-on-Demand technology, Avotaynu had to guess how many books had to be printed for the anticipated life of the book. It was better to estimated high than low, because if we ran out of stock, it was very expensive to have a second printing. The consequence is that we are overstocked on selected books, and we would like to get them out of the warehouse and into the hands of people who will find these books valuable. All the books are reference works; therefore, they are as valid today as when they were first printed.

Order NOW! We are in short supply of some books, and when a book goes out of print, it will not be reprinted. Go to http://www.avotaynu.com/BlackFriday.html and purchase books shown on that page only. Important note: If you order from any other page, you will pay full price. The page includes a link to more detailed information about a specific book.

Subscribe to AVOTAYNU (Six issues for the price of four)
If you do not subscribe to our journal AVOTAYNU, subscribe now and receive the Fall and Winter 2018 issues and all four 2019 issues for the price of a one year’s subscription. Six issues for the price of four. Subscribe now at http://avotaynu.com/journalspecialoffer.html.

Books on Black Friday sale:
Avotaynu Guide to Jewish Genealogy. Written by more than 60 authors, each an expert in his/her own field. It has more than 100 chapters on virtually every aspect of Jewish family history research. A must for any serious genealogist. $85.00 Now only $49.00, a 43% discount.

Every Family Has a Story. Human interest stories published in AVOTAYNU in the past 20 years—72 in all—about how genealogy affected people's lives. $37.00 Now only $22.00, a 40% discount.

Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names. This magnum opus describes origin and evolution of 15,000 given names. The 100-page introduction was Dr. Alexander Beider’s doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne. $85.00 Now only $49.00, a 43% discount.

Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Galicia. Identifies 35,000 surnames from Galicia. The introductory section describes how Jews from the region acquired hereditary surnames and dispels many myths including derogatory surnames. $85.00 Now only $49.00, a 43% discount.

A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. Comprehensive collection of Jewish surnames from Czarist Russia—74,000 in total. Its 200-page introductory discusses the origin and evolution of Jewish surnames in Eastern Europe. Two vols. $118.00 Now only $59.00, a 50% discount.

Jewish Personal Names. Roots of more than 1,200 Jewish given names showing Yiddish/Hebrew variants with English transliteration. $15.00 Now only $9.00, a 40% discount.

A Dictionary of German-Jewish Surnames. More than 13,000 surnames from pre-World War I Germany. $89.00 Now only $49.00, a 45% discount. Russian-Jewish Given Names: Their Origins and Variants. Comprehensive collection of Jewish given names from czarist Russia. $35.00 Now only 19.00, a 46% discount.

Where Once We Walked: Revised Edition. Award-winning gazetteer of Central and Eastern Europe. Mostly replaced by JewishGen’s Communities Database, but still has value in providing Jewish population before the Holocaust and cites as many as 50 books that reference the town. Also advantages of a book vs. computer screen. $85.00 Now only $35.00, a 59% discount.

Biographical Dictionary of Canadian Jewry: 1909–1914. Births, bar mitzvahs, marriages, deaths and other records of Canadian Jewry. $35.00. Now only $15.00, a $58% discount.

Library Resources for German-Jewish Genealogy. Concise directory of library sources in Germany and the Internet. $20.00 Now only $9.00, a 55% discount. Jewish Vital Records, Revision Lists in the Lithuanian Archives. Inventory of Jewish records in the Lithuanian State Archives. $35.00 Now only 9.00, a 74% discount.

Eliyahu's Branches. More than 20,000 descendants of the Vilna Gaon with analysis of the early descendants of this great scholar. $69.50 Now only $35.00, a 49% discount.

Arolsen Archives Adds Another 10M Names to Its Online Collection

Arolsen Archives has extracted and placed online 10M names from 850,000 documents on victims of Nazi persecution which were created in the American Zone of Germany after World War II. Once a name is located, the original document can be revealed.

The project was executed with the help of Ancestry. This year Ancestry began helping to process large collections, making the data available to the Arolsen Archives as well as publishing the documents in its own online collection. Since May 2019, Arolsen Archives have been using collaborative projects like this one to make interesting holdings available to a global audience through the internet. With the help of its partners, the institution wants to continuously improve the indexing of its documents to make it possible to search them for as many keywords as possible.

After publication of the documents from the American Zone of Occupation, the Arolsen Archives will soon be putting further lists online. The next to follow will be the lists from the British Zone.

Arolsen Archives can be searched at https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/en/search/. The announcement can be found at https://tinyurl.com/ArolsenAmericanZone.

JewishGen United Kingdom SIG Adds Rabbinic Profiles to Site

The JewishGen United Kingdom Special Interest Group has added rabbinical profiles to its website. The biographies cover ministers of all non-orthodox congregations (Masorti, Reform and Liberal) throughout the United Kingdom. In addition, the pages of each of these congregations are presented in a revised format with the data updated and significantly expanded. It now includes lists of ministers with (where relevant) links to such minister's profile, lists of lay officers (to the 1950s) as well as other new data.

The rabbinic profiles can be found at https://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/Rabbinic_Profiles.htm.

The website includes an All-UK Database, which contains more than 390,000 records relating to Jews in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Gibraltar. In addition, there are a number of UK cemetery databases at the site.

FamilySearch Adds “How You Are Related to Other Users” Feature

Persons who have submitted their family trees to FamilySearch can now enjoy a feature that informs them how they are related to a person on another FamilySearch family tree. Unfortunately, I do not have my tree on family Search, so it was not possible to evaluate the feature.

The announcement can be found at https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/view-relationship- other-users/.

Ancestry Uses Artificial Intelligence to Extract Obituaries from Newspapers

Ancestry is using artificial intelligence to extract obituaries from its 500M pages of newspapers available at its subsidiary, Newspapers.com. Ancestry’s 24-person data-science workforce educated machine-learning algorithms to acknowledge obituary content material. It then educated one other set of algorithms to detect and index key information from the obituaries, resembling names of the deceased’s partner and youngsters, start dates, birthplaces and others.

The complete report can be found at https://tinyurl.com/AncestryAI. Reported by Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter.

JewishGen Announces Courses for 2020

JewishGen Education is looking toward the new year and has announced eight courses planned for 2020. They include:
• Three-week mentored classes with personal instruction based on helping a student progress with research projects.
• Home study classes which are delivered electronically.
• Workbook courses which are at no charge. Tuition is waived for Value-Added members of JewishGen who have donated $100 to the General Fund in the last 12 months.

The three-week classes are taught in a unique FORUM, a personal mentoring experience, where students have the opportunity to share their story and work one step at a time with the instructor. Students are encouraged to post one branch, set goals for their research and work interactively. Instructors are familiar with a wide range of resources and offer text lessons to accompany the research process.

Home Study consists of PDF lessons. The beginning course focuses on organization and basic research skills (census, vital records, manifests), then moves on to the complex U.S. course which covers naturalization, military, governmental records, and local archival research.

Workbook Basic Courses are self-paced text-based PDFs with exercises covering genealogical tools to enhance research skills. Tuition is waived for Value Added members of JewishGen who have donated $100 to the General Fund in the last 12 months.

Additional information can be found at http://www.jewishgen.org/education. Course registration opens two weeks before the course start date. Information about the planned eight courses can be found at https://www.jewishgen.org/education/edu-courses.asp.

Final Notice: We Want Human Interest Stories for Winter Issue of AVOTAYNU

The Fall issue of AVOTAYNU is in the mail. Now we are looking ahead to the Winter issue which is special in two ways. For the past 33 years, AVOTAYNU has devoted a portion of each Winter issue to genealogy human interest stories. Stories are typically about how genealogy affected people’s lives, whether it be the researcher or the people they are researching. Deadline for submission this year is December 1, 2019. If you would like to share such a story with AVOTAYNU subscribers, submit it by e-mail to sallyann.sack1@verizon.net. When possible, illustrations should accompany the article.

New Family Histories in Print. Also in the Winter issue, AVOTAYNU lists Jewish genealogical family histories that have been published in the preceding 12 months. Books published earlier are also eligible for inclusion if they have not been previously reported. Please present information about the book in a specific format: author; title of book; years covered; brief description, including family names researched; libraries in which book has been deposited; price and ordering information. Submit the information by e-mail to sallyann.sack1@verizon.net. The deadline date is also December 1.

FamilySearch Adds More Than 4.5M Records This Week

A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, more than 4.5M index records and images, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FamilySearch111819. This site provides direct links to the individual collections. They include records from Benin, Brazil, England, France, Ireland, The Netherlands, Puerto Rico, South Africa and the United States including 2M North Carolina birth, marriage, and death records (1800–2000).

Note that at the website, announced collections may not be complete for the dates specified and will be added at some later date. Also note that counts shown in the announcement are the number added, not the total number available in the collection, which can be greater.

MyHeritage Additions for First Half of November

In the first half of November, MyHeritage added 18.8M records from 10 new collections:
• Chile Electoral Rolls 2013
• 1801 Norway Census
• 1865 Norway Census
• United Kingdom War Memorials 1914–1949
• Estonia Gravestones 1812–2019
• North Carolina Mecklenburg County Birth Index (1913–2019)
• North Carolina Mecklenburg County Marriage Index (1884–2019)
• North Carolina Mecklenburg County Death Index (1916–2019)
• Pennsylvania, Lawrence County Index of Obituaries (1871–2016)
• Pennsylvania, Lawrence County Index of Marriage Announcements (1858–2006).

Mecklenburg County includes the city of Charlotte. Lawrence County is north of Pittsburgh.

Additional information, including links to the individual collections can be found at https://blog.myheritage.com/2019/11/new-historical-records-added-in-november-2019/.

Ancestry Adds Norway Censuses to Collection

Ancestry has added records for the 1801 and 1865 censuses of Norway to its site. Links to individual collections can be found at https://www.ancestry.com/cs/recent-collections. Announced collections may not be complete for the dates specified and will be added at some later date.

Is Your Family in The Unbroken Chain - Third Edition?

Author Neil Rosenstein has devoted the past 27 years to updating and improving his landmark work The Unbroken Chain and now is in the process of publishing its Third Edition. The new edition is a major improvement to the previous edition both in number of persons and quality of the work.

The volumes identify more than 42,000 people with a full name index. There are 300 illustrations, thousands of footnotes and up to 22 generations.

Addtional informaton, including the a complete list of names can be found at http://www.avotaynu.com/books/UnbrokenChain-1.html. Check to see if your family is included.