Nu? What's New? Vol. 21 No. 35

Underlined words are links to sites with additional information.

Website Has Information on 360M U.S. Court Records

Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter reports a website that has information about 360 m-illion U.S. court records. It is located at https://www.judyrecords.com/. The report states the site has case types that are particularly important for genealogy research like marriage, divorces, probate/estates, name changes, and adoption records. Examination of the site shows it also incudes court cases regarding rape, incest, armed robbery and speeding tickets, yes, speeding tickets.

Editorial comment: I am a person who leans toward the public’s right to know rather than right to privacy, but this website might intrude just a bit too much. Consider its likely goal of identifying every court case in the United States. How many times have you had a driving incident such as a speeding ticket? What about going to small claims court as a plaintiff or defendant. The site currently has more than 7 m-illion eviction cases.

Ancestry Acquires Holocaust-Related Records from Arolsen Archives and Shoah Foundation

Ancestry announced that they have completed their digitized, searchable collection of more than 19 million Holocaust and Nazi persecution-related records received from the Arolsen Archives. In addition, the Shoah Foundation has allowed Ancestry to publish an index to nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies that contain information on more than 600,000 additional relatives and other individuals found in survivor questionnaires.

The company stated all their Holocaust records will be forever available to the public at no charge. This includes additional databases acquired from JewishGen and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Ancestry stated that the company decided in 2008 to make all of its Holocaust collection—which now totals more than 25 million records—free, at a cost to the company of millions of dollars to digitize. But some of those older Holocaust records, such as those from the National Archives, required payment when the company updated its records this spring. A spokesperson stated “the free designation was missed and now that is corrected.”

All Holocaust collections can be searched at https://www.ancestry.com/cs/alwaysremember.

Morse Website Adds Additional Phonetic Matching of Jewish Surnames

It is often necessary to check the existence and spelling of Jewish surnames from various geographic origins. For this purpose, Steven P. Morse created a one-step web tool to search a name among several reference dictionaries of Jewish surnames. Two significant extensions were recently made:
• The search tool for Ashkenazic reference books located at https://stevemorse.org/phonetics/beider.php now includes some 1,100 surnames published in Alexander Beider’s 1994 book, “Jewish Surnames in Prague (15th–18th centuries),” now out of print.
• An entirely new search tool for Sephardic reference books is available at https://stevemorse.org/phonetics/faig.php. It searches surnames from any of the four following dictionaries:
1. Dicionário Sefaradi de Sobrenomes, Guilherme Faiguenboim, Paulo Valadares and Anna Rosa Campagnano (Rio de Janeiro, 2003), about 16,600 surname entries.
2. Judíos de Toledo, 2 vols., Pilar León Tello (Madrid 1979), about 1,000 surname entries.
3. A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Maghreb, Gibraltar, and Malta, Alexander Beider (2017). Approximately 10,840 surname entries.
4. A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France, and "Portuguese" Communities, Alexander Beider (2019), about 9,740 surname entries.

The tools can search the names either Exactly, Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex or Beider Morse Phonetic Matching (BMPM).

Both tools can also be accessed from the Steve Morse root page, https://stevemorse.org, under the Phonetic Matching section.

JewishGen Course on Revamped JewishGen Website

Want to learn to navigate your way through the maze of Jewish data collections on the revamped JewishGen website? JewishGen has aa course that is a series of workbook exercises that will take you on a guided tour of the paths and byways that make up the JewishGen massive website. You will visit the links that connect the composite databases, projects, Research Divisions (SIGs) and open up the wonders of JewishGen.

There is no requirement to receive this series of lessons; everyone is eligible. The price is $25. The fee will be waived if you qualify for JewishGen's Value Added Services (having made a $100 donation to JewishGen's General Fund within the past 12 months). You are then welcome to enroll at no additional charge (the system will recognize you and will not ask for a credit card; if it doesn't, email the instructor).

The course description is at https://tinyurl.com/JGBCourse. Register for the class at https://tinyurl.com/JGCoursesF20.

New Book: “Proceedings of the Symposium on Genealogy and the Sciences”

The “Genealogy and the Sciences” international conference, which took place December 17–18, 2018, at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, was a milestone for the field of genealogy. For the first time lecturers from around the world, all respected scholars in their own fields, from a wide range of disciplines, gathered in a respected academic setting to exchange their thoughts and views about genealogy.

There were representatives from the hard (“exact”) sciences sitting side-by-side with scholars from the social sciences, the arts and the humanities. What a mixed audience it was; mathematicians, biologists, engineers, physicists, chemists, forensic experts and medical doctors on the one hand, anthropologists, geography experts and historians, psychologists, archeologists and onomastics experts on the other.

The book presents 12 of the individual lectures given at the symposium. It can be ordered at https://www.avotaynu.com/books/Symposium.html. Cost is $19.00 plus shipping. The site also lists the title of the lectures. It is the first book Avotaynu has published that uses color in the text.

FamilySearch and Ontario Ancestors Announce Book Scanning Project

Ontario Ancestors—the Ontario Genealogical Society—and FamilySearch announced a new book scanning partnership. Under the agreement, FamilySearch will provide specialized book scanning services and support volunteers in exchange for access to Ontario Ancestors’ extensive library of historical and genealogical books. Digitized documents will be publicly available on both websites. Digitization is scheduled to begin by the end of 2020, depending on pandemic restrictions.

Additional information can be found at https://tinyurl.com/OntAncFamSearch.

Updated Collections at Ancestry.com

Ancestry has updated the following record groups at their site. The list with 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. There is also no indication of how many records were added to the updated collections.

Collections
Pennsylvania, U.S., Births, 1852–1854
Pennsylvania, U.S., Deaths, 1852–1854
New York State, U.S., Death Index, 1957–1969
Stanislav, Ukraine (Poland), List of Residents by Street, 1939–1945 (USHMM)

FamilySearch Adds 940K Records This Week

A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, 940K index records, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FamilySearch082420. This site provides direct links to the individual collections. They include records from Brazil, Canada, England, France, Finland, Norway, Nova Scotia, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Zambia, and the United States.

No significant record collection stands out as a major addition of interest to people researching their Jewish family history. Check each item to determine if it is of value to you.

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.

Every Family Has a Story

72 articles that have appeared in our journal, AVOTAYNU, each story focusing on the human side of genealogy—how genealogists have been personally affected by their research and how the research of genealogists has affected others.

Some stories will make you laugh, others will make you cry. Some will shock you, others will make you feel warm inside.

Addtional informaton, including an annottated Table of Contents plus a sample story, can be found at https://www.avotaynu.com/books/EveryFamily.htm.