Nu? What's New? Vol. 21 No. 7

Underlined words are links to sites with additional information.

Registration Is Now Open for the IAJGS 2020 San Diego Conference

You can now register for the 40th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy which will be held at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina from August 9–14. It is also possible to make hotel reservations.

This is the “Early Bird” registration period where the conference cost is $520 and $420 for spouse/partner. Starting May 17, the prices are $570/$470 respectively. The price includes the gala banquet, which this year will be held on the Monday of the conference. At previous conferences, the banquet was an extra-charge item. At the registration site, it is possible to include the optional “Start the Day with an Expert” events, luncheons and computer workshops.

Important! Make your hotel reservation early. Quite often in the past, the conference hotel has sold out and late registrants had to stay at a nearby hotel.

The conference site is at http://iajgs2020.org. It includes links to conference and hotel registration. The program will follow in a few weeks.

I hope to see many of you at the San Diego conference. This will be the 37th annual conference I have attended!!

MyHeritage Offers Colorizing of Photos at No Charge

Based on postings to various Facebook groups, the announcement that MyHeritage is providing a photo colorizing service is causing great excitement within the genealogical community. You don’t have to be a paid member of MyHeritage, but you must register.

As one would expect, the quality of the colorizing varied with the quality of original photograph. A photo of my grandparents in 1951 colorized magnificently. A photo of them in 1910 with their first three children colorized poorly. View the samples at https://avotaynu.com/nu/Grandparents.html.

Additional information, including a link to the colorizing process, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/MHColorizing.

Newspapers.com Offering Free Access Through Monday

The Ancestry subsidiary, Newsppaers.com, is offering free access to its collection through Monday, February 17. The site has more than a half billion pages online. As an example, the rare name “Mokotoff” had 1,642 matches.

The newspapers are primarily from the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Australia and Ireland.

Access the site at http://newspapers.com.

MyHeritage Offers Free Access to Marriage Records Through February 18

In honor of Valentine’s Day, MyHeritage is offering access to its marriage records through February 18 at no charge. The marriage collection encompasses 148 collections with a total of 446,036,567 records from all across the globe: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, England, Finland, France, Germany, Guatemala, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States and others.

Search the marriage records at http://www.myheritage.com/marriage-records.

Holland-America Line Passenger Lists (1900–1920) Now Online

The passenger lists of the Holland-America Line (1900-1920) have been digitized by City Archives Rotterdam and are now searchable online. The index contains 524,408 names.

From 1873 until well into the twentieth century, the Holland-America Line (HAL) transported businessmen, tourists and emigrants to America. Between 1880 and 1920, about 1M Eastern Europeans traveled to America via Rotterdam.

The collection can be searched at https://www.openarch.nl/indexen/27/ passagierslijsten-holland-amerika-lijn.

Bronx and Queens Naturalizations to Be Online By 2022

Jan Meisels Allen, Chairperson of the IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee, reports that the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration has given a three-year grant of $872,000 to pay for the Bronx and Queens (New York City) County Clerk’s offices to place online naturalization records starting in 2022. They will be accessible at no charge.

An article about the topic can be found at https://tinyurl.com/BxQuNaturalizations.

Personal Histories of Dutch Victims of Nazi Persecution Online

A new Dutch portal provides information about 300,000 war victims of Nazi persecution during World War II who were living in Holland at that time. It is located at http://warlives.org. Information provided is a timeline of events from birth to death, a map showing deportation route to concentration or extermination camps and biographical information, if known. In some cases, there is a photograph of the person.

An example is Anne Frank, documented at https://www.oorlogslevens.nl/tijdlijn/ Annelies-Marie-Frank/01/95523?lang=en.

David Rencher Receives Certificate of Appreciation from the American Society of Genealogists

David Rencher, Chief Genealogical Officer of FamilySearch and Director of the Family History Library, has received the prestigious Certificate of Appreciation from the American Society of Genealogists (ASG). The award has been given only 19 times in the past 60 years.

If there is any person in the U.S. to be awarded the title of “Mr. Genealogy,” it is Rencher. I worked with him for 15 years when I was on the Board of Directors of the Federation of Genealogical Societies. Rencher is a visionary—a person of unusually keen foresight. When he previously was Library director from 1999–2002, he recognized the growing importance of the internet and instituted a program to add more computer terminals at the Library. During his tenure as Library director, FamilySearch started digitizing their microfilm collection. He implemented the idea of presenting conference lectures on the internet, the LIVE! option.

An extensive description of Rencher’s accomplishments can be found at https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/david-rencher-receives-prestigious-genealogy-award/.

American Society of Genealogists is an honorary society of the leading published scholars in the field of American genealogy. The ASG is limited to fifty lifetime members designated as Fellows, identified within the genealogical community by the post-nominal initials FASG. Their website is at https://fasg.org/.

FamilySearch Adds More Than 13M Records This Week

A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, more than 13M index records, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FamilySearch021020. This site provides direct links to the individual collections. They include records from numerous African countries, American Samoa, Chile, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Peru, Bolivia, Gibraltar, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Nova Scotia, United Kingdom and the United States.

Largest collections are for France, Morbihan, Parish and Civil Registration (1536–1894); France, Saône–et–Loire, Parish and Civil Registration (1530–1892); Ireland Deaths (1864–1870); California Deaths and Burials (1776–2000); Illinois Deaths and Burials (1749–1999); Pennsylvania Deaths and Burials (1720–1999).

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.

FindMyPast Now Has 200M U.S. Marriage Records

FindMyPast has added 18M marriage records from Texas to their collection bringing their total U.S. marriages to 200M records. They claim it is the largest online collection of U.S. marriage records.

The records can be searched at https://tinyurl.com/FMPUSMarriages. A description of the FindMyPast marriage record holdings for other countries can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FMPMarriagesAll.

Avotaynu Business

Winter Issue of AVOTAYNU at Printer

The Winter issue of AVOTAYNU is at the printer. The lead article describes improvements in the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names at Yad Vashem with a new interface that shows multiple names. It is written by the director and deputy director of the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem: Alexander Avram and Zvi Bernhardt. The next article is an overview of the 40th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, written by its conference chair, Robinn Magid. The third article describes “Unexpected Genealogical Sources at the Central Archives For the History of the Jewish People,” written by its former head archivist, Hadassah Assouline.

The Winter issue is our “Human Interest” issue where genealogists describe how their research affected peoples’ lives, including their own. My favorite story is by a woman whose biological birth parents were her mother and an anonymous sperm donor. She not only was able to determine who was her biological father through DNA testing, but also located other persons who had the same biological father.

All told, there are 16 articles in the issue plus the usual columns: From Our Contributing Editors, U.S. Update, Ask Dr. Beider, Book Reviews and From Our Mailbox. The complete Table of Contents is at http://avotaynu.com/2019WinterPage01.pdf.

Special AVOTAYNU Subscription Offer

Special offer. Five issues for the price of four. If you do not subscribe to AVOTAYNU, we are offering a five-issue subscription to our journal AVOTAYNU for the price of four issues. The cost of a five-issue subscription is only $38.00—the cost of a four-issue subscription—instead of $45.00, a $7 saving. Non-U.S./Canada subscribers can subscribe for only $46 instead of $56, a $10 saving.

You will receive the Winter issue when it is in print, and all four issues of 2020 as they are published. The offer expires next Sunday. Go to http://www.avotaynu.com/journal5for4.html to place your order.

New Book by Dr. Alexander Beider:
A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France and “Portuguese” Communities

A few years ago, I asked Dr. Alexander Beider whether he was going to tackle creating a dictionary of Sephardic surnames. At that time, he said “No,” because it would require that he learn medieval Arabic. It appears he has surmounted this obstacle.

Avotaynu has just published Dr. Beider’s second book on surnames of the Mediterranean region: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France and “Portuguese” Communities. His first book of the Mediterranean region is A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Maghreb, Malta and Gibraltar, published by Avotaynu in 2017.

Why “Mediterranean region” rather than “Sephardic.” Because Dr. Beider has the preciseness of a person who got his first doctorate in Applied Mathematics. He notes that the surnames of the region include names based on Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Berber, Hebrew, Aramaic, Spanish, Judeo-Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French. There are also Ashkenazic surnames in the region.

The book identifies nearly 2,000 independent root surnames from which more than 10,000 variant surnames are derived. A typical entry contains four sections: References, Group, Etymology, and Variants. • The References section identifies the surname and spelling variants (in both Latin and Hebrew characters), where in the region it was used, earliest references, and bibliographic source of the information. There are more than 560 sources from which Dr. Beider draws his conclusions.
• The Group section includes an identification of the Jewish group to which the first bearers of the name belonged: from the continental Italy, Sicilian, Southern or Northern French, Jews who lived in the Iberian Peninsula before the expulsions of 1490s, “Portuguese” (Catholic-born people who started to profess Judaism, the religion of their ancestors, after their migrations from the Iberian Peninsula during the 16th-18th centuries to countries where the Jewish religion was tolerated), Ashkenazic, North African.
• The Etymology section explains the linguistic origin of the name. • Finally, the Variant section shows the main variants of the name that exist in the region.

The book is 882 pages, hardcover. Cost is $89.00 plus shipping. It can be ordered at https://www.avotaynu.com/books/Italy.html. The website also includes a complete list of names, a sample entry from the dictionary (the surname Modigliano) and the Table of Contents.

Ordering Getting Started in Jewish Genealogy - 2020 Edition Through Amazon

We are having difficulty adding to the Amazon website Getting Started in Jewish Genealogy - 2020 Edition. It should be resolved in the next few weeks. If you want to order the book through Amazon, order the 2018 edition and you will receive the 2020 edition. Alternately, order the 2020 edition directly from us at https://www.avotaynu.com/books/GettingStarted.htm.

Getting Started in Jewish Genealogy: 2020 Edition

More a getting started guide than a beginner’s guide, it is meant to convince the reader that tracing one’s Jewish ancestry can be done. The resources described are primarily Internet resources. The Internet has revolutionized family history research. What used to take days or weeks now takes minutes or hours because of the wealth of resources on the Internet. It describes in detail such resources as JewishGen, Morse One-Step site, FamilySearch, Ancestry.com, MyHeritage and many more sites. It alerts the readers to what types of documents of their ancestors will aid in their research—such records as birth, marriage, death, Immigration, census and naturalization records.

Cost is only $16.50 plus shippng. Addtional informaton, including the Table of Contents, can be found at http://www.avotaynu.com/books/GettingStarted.htm.