genealogy fall 04 newsletter |
Presented by The Jewish Genealogy Society of Georgia
For more information about the Jewish Genealogical Society, visit www.jgsg.org or contact Gary Palgon at 404.822.6280 or jgsg@thebreman.org.
Early American Jewish History in New Amsterdam
"First American Jewish Families" Online
For Ex-New Yorkers: Tax Photographs
Early American Jewish History in New Amsterdam
Jacob BARSONSON was the 1st Jewish settler in New Amsterdam . He landed on the ship Pear Tree, on July 8 1654 . He was followed by twenty three others who took passage on the bark St. Catarina from Brazil , fugitives from Portuguese persecution. Some of them were unable to pay for their passage, and when the captain of the vessel brought proceedings against them, they were imprisoned. Governor Stuyvesant wrote the directors of the Dutch West India Company asking for authority to expel the Jews. Under date of April 26, 1655 , the directors replied that his attitude was "unreasonable and unfair, especially because of the considerable loss sustained by the Jews in the taking of Brazil and also because of the large amount of capital which they have invested in the shares of the company." Powerful Jews were among the directors and stockholders. They further informed Stuyvesant that the Jews "shall have permission to sail to and trade in the New Netherlands and to live and remain there." Stuyvesant continued hostile and determined to drive the Jews from the colony. His next instructions were dated April 26,1655.They permitted the Jews to hold real estate and trade. This was the first recognition of the right to citizenship they had received as a compact race since their expulsion from the Holy Land . The conditions were severe. They were required to support their own poor. This act, after two hundred and seventy years of residence in America , they stand among the greatest givers to charity in the world.
Stuyvesant's harsh terms are still recalled by Jews in every part of the United States as the reason why they must maintain their own charities, schools, hospitals, and look after their own poor. Private religious worship was permitted; but the right to erect a synagogue was withheld for several years.
In 1656, the Jews were permitted to establish a cemetery on the New Bowery near Oliver Street.
IAJGS Future Conferences
The 2005 conference will be at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas from July 10-15.
The 2006 conference will be at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City from August 13-18.
Participants from Australia at his year's conference were seen wearing buttons that said " Sydney in 2007."
Excerpted from the web site: http://www.bklyn-genealogy-info.com/Worship/Jew.History.html The “ Brooklyn Site” is really a misnomer since it seems to cover much of New York and Long Island in some of their data bases.
“From Hariette Gershon”
Forwarded message:
There is a good online resource for obituaries that has occurred within the last ten years or so, available free through local library systems, including the one in Prince George's County, Maryland at their website
http://www.prge.lib.md.us/Databases/Databases.html
The database is the second listed, America 's Obituaries and Death Notices, run by Newsbank.
Elias Savada mailto:esavada@mac.com
PS (from hariette gershon) : Dekalb County 's Library system has access to Newsbank, but you must use the computers in the library.
From Gary Palgon:
Stern's List
In search online for Jewish ancestors (and gentiles who married Jews)Researchers now ca whose names are recorded in Rabbi Malcolm H. Stern's First American Jewish Families.
Last published in 1991 and now out of print, Stern's book contains family trees of Jewish families that arrived in the United States between 1654 and 1838. The American Jewish Archives has posted the entire text online at; http://www.americanjewisharchives.org/aja/FAJF/intro.html
and added an index you can browse or search by last name and optional first name. Click on a name in the search results to see a digital image of the page on which the person appears. (Images are in PDF format; to view them, you'll need the free Adobe Reader, available from; http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.)
You'll find birth, marriage and death information, dates of arrival in the United States and other data.
Your ancestor could appear in her own family tree, a spouse's, the Addenda et Corrigenda pages or the Update section—read the How to Use This Resource page to make your searching simpler and more accurate.
Reprinted with permission from Family Tree Magazine Email Update, copyright 2004 F+W Publications Inc. To subscribe to this free weekly e-mail newsletter, go to http://www.familytreemagazine.com/newsletter.asp. For a free sample copy of the print Family Tree Magazine , America 's #1 family history magazine, go to
http://www.familytreemagazine.com/specialoffers.asp?FAMfreeissue
Belarus update
Subject: Current Belarus Census - 28,000 Jews
From: "David M. Fox" <davefox73@earthlink.net>
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 23:45:46 -0400
In a message just received from the Belarus Embassy in Washington DC , the current population census of Belarus indicates that 28,000 Jews live there out of a total population of 8.15 million people.
David Fox
Mail to: davefox73@earthlink.net
Belarus SIG Coordinator
Arnold , MD USA
http://www.jewishgen.org/belarus
http://www.isragen.org.il/ROS/CD/2004ConfCDlecture.pdf where there is a downloadable order form.
IAJGS Conference Lectures Available on CD-ROM Even if you couldn’t make it to the conference in Jerusalem this year, you can still hear the lectures:All lectures at the recently completed 24th International Conference of Jewish Genealogy are available on CD for $40 (200 NIS including VAT) including shipping and handling. The CD is recorded using MP3 technology. A few lectures were not duplicated because the sound was too distorted on the original master. Orders can be placed at http://www.isragen.org.il/ROS/CD/2004ConfCDlecture.pdf where there is a downloadable order form.
A MESSAGE BOARD POSTING ON THE BELARUS SIG
Subject: Steve Morse's Ship-Lists Project Completed
From: "Diane Jacobs" <kingart@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 10:12:31 -0400
X-Message-Number: 1
Subject: Steve Morse's Ship-Lists Project
Several months ago I posted a message stating that Steve had a list of every ship arrival into Ellis Island , and for most of them he even had links back to the manifest pages. It was part of an ongoing project.
Now I learned that Steve has just completed this project after working on it for two years. His team of over 50 volunteers went through every one of the 3700 rolls of Ellis Island microfilms from 1892 to 1924. For each arrival they found, they recorded the roll, volume, frame, date, ship-name, and ports.
Now that it is complete, there exists for the first time a searchable list of every ship arrival along with links to the associated manifest pages. The list consists of a total of 84,000 ship arrivals.
The searchable list can be accessed by clicking on the "Ship-Lists" link in the Ellis Island section of Steve's website at http://stevemorse.org/. If you have any questions, please direct them to Steve and not to me -- his e-mail address is at the top of his website.
- Diane Jacobs
New York
The following is a review of the FTM 2005 upgrade by Richard Eastman (a newsletter I subscribe to). I am using version 11 of FTM but this upgrade appears to be worth the price of admission. Eastman allows this portion of his newsletter to be distributed to others.
Howard Margol HOMARGOL@aol.com
Family Tree Maker reportedly is the best-selling genealogy program in the world and for very good reasons: it is easy to use and is well marketed. Even though it has been higher-priced than most of its competitors, millions of people use Family Tree Maker to record the results of their genealogy searches. A new update to the program has just been released, and I had a chance to use it for a bit. I would have expected this to be called "Version 12," but the new owners apparently wish to start a new naming convention. This one is referred to by date. Like the automobile manufacturers, new versions are introduced in late summer before the actual model year.
Family Tree Maker has a long and convoluted "ancestry." This program has been owned by more companies than I can remember. In the early summer of 2004, it was acquired by MyFamily.com, the owners of Ancestry.com. A new version of the program was released a few months later, but I know that version was already in the works before the acquisition. It was created by the same programming group that had created earlier versions. This year's release of Family Tree Maker 2005 is the first to be completely designed by the new owners and with many new programmers on the project. Ancestry.com has long had a reputation for being more serious about genealogy research methodologies than the previous owners. I was interested to see what the new features would be, especially if they are features demanded by serious genealogists.
Installation was simple: insert the Family Tree Maker CD-ROM into the computer, and then answer a number of questions that appear on the screen. About two minutes later, the installation is complete.
During installation, the user is asked whether or not to copy the "ClickArt," maps, and user manuals to the hard drive. A minimal installation without those three items will require more than 27 megabytes of disk space for the program. Including ClickArt, maps, and user manuals will increase the disk space requirement to about 54 megabytes. This is a big program! Those numbers are for the program alone and do not include the space required for your database, stored reports, or generated Web pages.
The first time the program is launched, the user is asked to choose from three different options: create a new database, open an existing database, or take an online tour. I elected to take the tour.
After completing the tour, I created a new database. The next screen that appeared is called the Family View. Data always revolves around a couple; one man and one woman, labeled as Husband and Wife. Apparently, the developers assume that all couples who have biological children are married. However, the program also allows additional parental relationships: adopted, foster, step, family member, private, or unknown.
In Family View, you can see three generations within the same page - a primary couple, the couple's parents, and the couple's children - and edit two of those generations from the same page (the primary couple and the children). Integrated navigation controls also let you quickly move up or down the family tree by clicking on one of the navigation arrows or using your keyboard arrow keys.
I was immediately struck by the fact that the main Family View screen is all new; it does not even resemble the earlier versions of Family Tree Maker with their "tabbed interface." This is a good thing, in my mind. I never liked the "dummied down" user interface of earlier versions of this program. The earlier screens seemed to waste a lot of space, a major factor when using 800-by-600 pixel screen displays. The new look packs a lot more information into one screen and yet does not look crowded. However, I also must concede that the earlier interface was very easy to use, and this probably contributed to the program's popularity among newcomers. It should be interesting to see if the new interface still attracts newcomers. I suspect that experienced genealogists will prefer the Family Tree Maker 2005 interface, but I am not so sure about the newbies.
The original announcement of Family Tree Maker 2005 stated, "Add your immediate family members and up to eight children." This would insinuate that only eight children could be shown in one family. Luckily, this is not the case. Family Tree Maker has always allowed for much larger families, but past versions would only display the first four children in the Family View screen. With the new and improved interface, the 2005 edition will show a maximum of eight children in the same space. Still, it would be nice to be able to show all of my grandparents' sixteen children at once.
I entered data about a few individuals into the database and found that data entry was simple. Best of all, beside every entry field for name, birth place, and death place, there is an icon for a source citation. Click on that icon, and a pop-up window appears for entering the title of the source, the citation page, and text, author, publication facts, call number, source quality, researcher's comments about this source, and even a capability for inserting an image of the source citation. Do you have a scanned image of a marriage record or a census entry? If so, you can enter that image as part of the source citation. That is an excellent method of citing one's sources!
Family Tree Maker 2005 also seems to have a true sources database. That is, if you use the same source citation in the records of 75 people, you do not need to enter the source citations 75 times. Even better, if you ever want to change or add more information about a particular source, you do not need to do that 75 times. Instead, you find the single source citation and edit that one item. All 75 entries that point to that single citation will then reflect the updated information.
I have complained many times over the years about Family Tree Maker's weak source citation capabilities. The program was one of the last in the marketplace to even add the capability of recording source citations. Even then, it had a very anemic method of recording citations that was little more than free-form notes attached to each record. Successive releases occasionally added improvements to source citations, but the program has never equaled the source citation capabilities of its lower-priced competitors. I am pleased to see the 2005 version has a very good source citation capability.
One of the first tests of any genealogy program is its ease of recording conflicting data. For instance, I have found three different dates and four different locations for the birth of one of my great-great-grandfathers. He even gave conflicting information to the census takers in different years. I have multiple source citations from various census records, town records, and other documents; I do not know which "fact" is correct. Conflicting data is very common in genealogy. Anyone who has been researching the family tree for a while will find similar conflicts.
Family Tree Maker 2005 allows for "alternate facts" or "alternate events," as well as "preferred facts" that should take care of this problem. This capability allows for recording of all the data for my great-great-grandfather. To add an alternate fact or event, you do the following:
1. Open the Edit Individual dialog box for the individual.
2. Just as you would add a new fact, choose the Add Fact button and enter the alternate fact. Family Tree Maker will allow you to add conflicting facts.
3. If the Make Preferred button is grayed out (so that you cannot click on it) this means that the displayed fact is the current preferred fact for the individual. If you would like another fact to be the preferred fact, click on that fact and click the Make Preferred button. The previous Make Preferred fact will be grayed out.
I was disappointed that the program requires one of the facts to be the "preferred fact." It defaults to the first fact that is entered although that can later be changed. In the case of my great-great-grandfather, I have no clue as to which fact is more likely to be correct. Which one do I select as "preferred?"
The preferred fact is also the only one that shows up on the screens and reports. Most other modern genealogy programs allow the user to enter multiple dates and locations and do not require any guess as to which is the more likely correct fact.
Family Tree Maker 2005 offers the capability to include extensive notes about each individual, as well as height, weight, cause of death, and medical information.
Family Tree Maker 2005 also requires the person's entire name to be entered into one field. Other genealogy programs typically have a single data entry field for first and middle names and a second field for the surname. That usually allows for easier editing, sorting, and searching of surnames.
Family Tree Maker 2005 assumes that the last single word entered into its single name field is the surname. This is often not true, such Peter Van Der Voort or Pierre Bourbeau dit Lacourse or John Smith Jr. In such instances, it is necessary to identify the surname for Family Tree Maker. This is done by surrounding the surname with backward slashes (\), such as:
Peter \Van Der Voort\
Pierre \Bourbeau dit Lacourse\
John \Smith\ Jr.
Another instance in which you might need to use backward slashes is when entering someone who does not have a last name, such as a person of Native American descent. For instance, your ancestor might have been known as Running Bear. This name would be entered in Family Tree Maker as Running Bear\\. The same would be true when the surname of an ancestor is not known, a common occurrence when trying to identify female ancestors. You will need to enter Mary's name as Mary \\.
In addition to the Family View, a Pedigree View is available that shows from three to seven generations at a time. The Pedigree View is fully interactive; you can click on a field and edit it directly. Navigating around the Pedigree View seemed easier than with most other genealogy programs of today.
Of course, there are capabilities to search for individuals within the database. All searches seemed to be simple and intuitive.
One of Family Tree Maker's strongest capabilities over the years has been its multimedia scrapbook. The 2005 edition is no exception; it continues the tradition and even improves on it. Each individual and each marriage in your Family File has a Scrapbook where you can store virtually any type of information about your family, including Kodak Photo CD Pictures, sound files, video files, text files, picture files, and more. You can then use these images to enhance reports and family books, play slide shows, and more.
Family Tree Maker 2005 offers a new Web Search tool to help you find information about your ancestors. Web Search is always running in the background while you are using Family Tree Maker (unless you have turned this option off or unless you are not connected to the Internet). It will search Ancestry.com for more information about the people in your tree. When it finds a match that meets your designated criteria (i.e. 4 stars and higher, 3 stars and higher, etc.), the Web Search button changes to a new button that shows you have possible additional information available. To view the Web Search results on any individual, click on the Web Search button next to his/her information. You will be brought to the first page of results.
The Web Search report is divided into three sections:
1. The top half of the report lists the Web search results found for the person in your tree. The Source column tells you the name of the Ancestry.com collection in which Family Tree Maker found the information.
2. When you select a result, the bottom left box displays the information found in that Ancestry.com record. Of course, if you do not have a subscription to Ancestry.com, you will see only header information for any information within their subscription databases.
3. The bottom right box shows you the information you already have in your file about this person. This makes iteasier for you to compare your information with the information found online.
Keep in mind that many of the records on Ancestry.com require a paid subscription before you can view them.
Family Tree Maker 2005 has an excellent system of merging individuals. This is useful when you obtain a database from a distant cousin and want to add it to yours. You and your cousin may have the same individuals listed in each database; so, you need to merge them together to avoid duplicates. The program also has a Web Merge feature that can merge records found online on Ancestry.com into your existing database. With both the database merge and the Web merge, you can merge either one person at a time or as a one-time effort to allow the program to automatically merge all the duplicates.
WARNING: Never, ever merge anyone's database into your own until you are completely sure that you want to. The other database may contain data errors or other problems. Also, make sure you make a complete backup of all your data before merging new information into your database so that you can backtrack if you later discover a problem. I frequently receive sad e-mails from people who did not do that!
Family Tree Maker 2005 includes a wide variety of printed reports, such as:
Family Group Sheet: A detailed report about a single nuclear family (parents and their children).
Outline Descendant: List shows where everyone fits in the family, starting with a distant relative and moving to the present.
Genealogy Report: Detailed listing of family information, presented in a narrative, book-like format.
Kinship Report: Lists the relationship of every individual to a selected primary individual.
Alternate Facts: Lists all alternate facts you have entered for each individual, such as two potential birth dates for the same individual.
Address: Lists all the addresses you have entered into your Family File for each individual.
Medical Information: Lists a family's health history.
Birthdays of Living Individuals: Lists all birthdays of living individuals.
Marriage: Lists all marriages with marriage dates and the status of the relationship.
Parentage: Lists the parents of each individual and their relationship to the child (natural, adopted, etc.)
Bibliography: Creates a bibliography based on source information you have entered.
Data Errors: Lists all potential errors, for example, all fields that have been left blanked and discrepancies with ages.
Documented Events: Lists all events in your file for which you have source information.
Maps - Family maps can help you trace your family's journey across the country or across the seas.
Labels/Cards - You can create address labels or name tags for the next family reunion.
Timeline - View your family's important events against the backdrop of history.
Calendar - Create a calendar with birthdays, anniversaries, and other important events.
You can also create a Family History book that includes trees, reports, pictures, and more. With Family Tree Maker, you can create your own personal family home page, even if you have no previous experience creating a Web page.
You can share trees, books, and reports with friends and relatives who don't have Family Tree Maker by either publishing your information to your homepage or by using the Export feature. Depending on what you are exporting, you will have the option to save your document as a PDF file, plain text file (TXT), rich text file (RTF), or as a spreadsheet (CSV). It is worth noting that CSV files can easily be imported into Excel or other spreadsheets or database programs for further data manipulation and analysis.
Once you have exported the tree, book, or report, you can then save it to a CD-ROM, or you can e-mail it if the file is not too large. A PDF file can be viewed or printed by anyone with the Adobe Acrobat Reader program (available free at http://www.adobe.com).
Family Tree Maker will allow the user to automatically create a genealogy Web site containing data about individuals within the database. However, it is limited to a maximum of 2,000 individuals. The Web pages may even include pictures from the multimedia scrapbook. As you might expect, you can delete dates and locations of birth and other facts for living individuals. However, I did not see any option to delete the individuals' names.
I should note that this capability to create Web pages only works for pages stored on one of Ancestry.com's services. If you have your genealogy pages hosted elsewhere, there is no method of directly creating Web pages from Family Tree Maker 2005. This seems to be a serious omission, as almost all of the competitive programs do allow for the creation of "generic" Web pages that can be uploaded to almost any Web hosting service, including the free services. If you want to export data from Family Tree Maker 2005's database to Web pages of your own choosing, you will need to export your data as a GEDCOM file and then use a competitive program or one of the third-party GEDCOM-to-HTML utilities to convert the data to HTML format.
Earlier versions of Family Tree Maker had problems with certain tags when exporting data in GEDCOM format. Specifically, it would swap the occupation and place tags in the GEDCOM file. The 2005 edition seems to have corrected this problem. Here is an excerpt from a GEDCOM file that I created:
1 OCCU
2 DATE ABT 1960
2 PLAC Electrician, Dexter, Penobscot, Maine, USA
2 SOUR @S02853@
1 OCCU
2 DATE 1934
2 PLAC Milkman, Sanford, York, Maine
2 SOUR @S02853@
In the above case, two different occupations are correctly listed for one individual.
Previous releases of Family Tree Maker usually were bundled with collections of data CD-ROM disks. Prices have varied from about $30.00 without any bundled disks up to as much as $100 when 20 or more disks were in the box. Admittedly, the cheaper $30 version without disks often was difficult to find; all I ever saw on the shelf at the local software stores were those versions with multiple disks. Those "in the know" figured out how to purchase the program alone at the lower price directly from the Family Tree Maker Web site or from select mail order dealers. In looking at the promotional literature for Family Tree Maker 2005, both printed and online at the program's Web site, I see no mention of bundled deals. Everything I have seen so far only mentions the basic program being sold for $29.95 ( U.S. funds).
Family Tree Maker 2005 should operate well on any Windows PC purchased within the past two or three years. System requirements include:
• Windows 98, ME, or XP (while not mentioned, I suspect it will also operate well on Windows 2000.)
• For Windows 98/ME; a 300 MHz Pentium, or compatible, processor and 32 MB of memory (RAM)
• For Windows XP; a 333 MHz Pentium, or compatible processor, and 128 MB of memory (RAM)
• Super VGA (800 x 600) video adapter (1024x768 recommended) with 16-bit or better color quality
• A CD-ROM drive (for installation only; to use the CD back up features, a CDR/CDRW is required.)
• 150 MB disk space
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later. (A full install package for IE 6 is provided if your system does not already have it.)
• To take advantage of the online features, a 56 Kbps modem and an Internet connection.
• Printer Support: Works with most popular printers (monochrome and color) supported by windows
Keep in mind that the above are minimums; the program may operate slowly on a 300-MHz processor and 32 megabytes of memory. As with all Windows programs, higher processor speeds and especially more memory will greatly increase system performance.
This article should give you an overview of Family Tree Maker 2005. However, I have not described all the features and capabilities of this program. Such an article would fill several newsletters! For further information, look at the program's Web site at http://www.familytreemaker.com. I would especially encourage you to take the Product Tour at http://www.familytreemaker.com/help/tutorials/tour/ (a broadband connection is encouraged) as well as the online tutorial (which works well on dial-up access) at http://www.familytreemaker.com/help/tutorials/
gettingstarted/getting_started_tutorial.htm.
"First American Jewish Families" Online
Rabbi Malcolm H. Stern's with a searchable index, "First American Jewish Families" is now online thanks to the American Jewish Archives. It provides birth, marriage, and death information, plus dates of arrival in U.S. and other data for Jewish families that arrived in America ca 1654-1838 and traces many families to the present. The database is searchable by name or you can browse surnames by their initial letter.
When it first appeared in 1960, Malcolm Stern's Americans of Jewish Descent marked a milestone in the study of American Jewish genealogy. The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives is proud to make the latest edition of this classic text available online.
Researchers now have access to the complete text of Rabbi Stern's monumental volume that was published in 1991 as the updated and revised 3rd edition entitled: First American Jewish Families: 600 Genealogies, 1654-1988. This publication is an historical document in it's own right, and it is not our intention to alter it in any way. Students of American Jewish genealogy are encouraged to use this text as a basis for their research.
http://www.americanjewisharchives.org/aja/FAJF/intro.html
For Ex-New Yorkers: TAX PHOTOGRAPHS
Between 1939 and 1941, the city photographed every house and building in the five Boroughs. Copies of these unique images are now available for purchase.
HISTORY OF THIS COLLECTION:
During the 1930's, local governments began to use photography as a tool for appraising real property for taxation purposes. New York City was the largest municipality to adopt this technology. The result was 720,000 35mm black and white images of every property in the five Boroughs. The Municipal Archives acquired the original negatives (20,000 strips of film stored in cans) in the early 1980s. The original film stock was nitrate and some negatives had begun to deteriorate and exhibit signs of "redox" blemishes (which look like giant snow flakes). With grant funds from federal, state, and private sources, the Archives duplicated the original negatives so that new prints can be produced and copied them to microfilm so that patrons can easily and safely view the entire collection.
HOW TO VIEW THE PHOTOS:
The tax photographs are on microfilm for researcher convenience. They are not currently available “on-line.” In order to view the tax photograph of a particular house or building it is necessary to determine the official block and lot number of the property. If you do not know these numbers you can research them at the Archives using our historical map collection. Once the block and lot number has been determined, it is necessary to consult an index to find the film roll number; with this number the appropriate microfilm roll can be selected and placed on the microfilm reader machine to view the picture. It is possible to make paper print-outs of the photographs from the microfilm, although the quality is often very poor.
HOW TO ORDER A COPY FROM THE COLLECTION:
It is not necessary to visit the Municipal Archives to order a copy of the tax photograph of your house or building. You can order a copy by mail using the form below. If the official block and lot number of the property is not known, the Municipal Archives will research it for an additional $5.00 fee. If the Municipal Archives does not find a tax photograph of the property, or for some other reason cannot produce a print, your payment will be returned.
ORDER BY MAIL - (Adobe Acrobat Requred)
GENERAL INFORMATION:
Allow 3 to 4 weeks for completion of order.
The building block and lot number will appear in the photograph.
The quality of the "Tax" photographs varies considerably; every effort will be made to provide an acceptable print.
Photographic prints are provided for personal use only and may not be transferred to another individual or institution without permission (home decoration and prints as gifts are permissible). If you wish to publish or re-duplicate a photograph in any way, or use it for any commercial purpose, you must obtain permission and pay the appropriate license fee.
PRINT PRICES:
$25 - 8"x10" print; $35 - 11"x14" print; $3 shipping and handling (up to 6 prints). ADD $5 PER ADDRESS IF BLOCK & LOT NUMBER IS NOT INCLUDED. If photograph is not found, payment will be refunded.
SHARE AND SHARE ALIKE: Genealogy Databases
The two main genealogy-database companies serving libraries apparently called a truce and decided to split the family history market. MyFamily.com (http://www.myfamily.com) and former rival ProQuest (http://www.proquest.com) have forged a business alliance that lets MyFamily.com maintain its steady grip on the individual-consumer market while ProQuest rules the library audience.
At the end of June, MyFamily.com granted ProQuest exclusive rights to sell Ancestry Library Edition, a version of MyFamily.com's popular Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com) databases, to libraries for their patrons' research. Ancestry Library Edition replaces AncestryPlus, which MyFamily.com previously offered through educational database giant Thomson Gale. AncestryPlus will be available to currently subscribing libraries until their subscriptions expire.
Beginning Aug. 30, ProQuest will sell Ancestry Library Edition in addition to its own HeritageQuest Online database collection. Ancestry Library Edition will feature some databases familiar to AncestryPlus users, add some new content and drop other resources from its repertoire.
Ancestry Library Edition will include:
* US Data Collection of vital records, WWI draft registrations and the Social Security Death Index
* US Census Collection of census indexes (listing every name, rather than just the head-of-household) from 1790 to 1930, with links to images of the census records.
* UK and Ireland Collection of census images and indexes, civil registration indexes from 1837 to the present, parish and probate records from the 1500s through 1837
* US Immigration Collection (which wasn't part of AncestryPlus) of New York and San Francisco passenger lists, plus New York naturalization petitions
Ancestry Library Edition won't include these AncestryPlus databases:
* City Directories of the United States (from a Thomson Gale collection)
* Passenger and Immigration Lists Index
* Biography and Genealogy Master Index
HeritageQuest Online features US census head-of-household indexes with links to document images, the Periodical Source Index (PERSI) and the Genealogical and Local History Collection (GLHC) of more than 25,000 digitized books. (A prior agreement allows MyFamily.com to sell GLHC to at-home users through Ancestry.com.) ProQuest will add Freedmen's Bank Records and Revolutionary War Pension Records later this year.
Libraries can purchase remote Internet access to HeritageQuest Online, so patrons can use the databases on their home computers. ProQuest won't offer remote access to Ancestry Library Edition. (If you don't remember the flak last November after Thomson Gale sold a Michigan library remote access to AncestryPlus and MyFamily.com quickly yanked it, read about it at
Reprinted with permission from Family Tree Magazine Email Update, copyright 2003 F+W Publications Inc. To subscribe to this free weekly e-mail newsletter, go to
http://www.familytreemagazine.com/newsletter.asp.
For a free sample copy of the print Family Tree Magazine, America 's #1 family history magazine, go to http://www.familytreemagazine.com/specialoffers.asp?FAMfreeissue
PORTS of ENTRY and THEIR RECORDS
About this Guide:
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) kept a variety of records at numerous ports at different times. To locate an immigrant arrival record, it is important to know not only the immigrant's specific Port of Entry, or POE, but also where that POE's records were filed. Some records were filed only at the actual POE, others were filed far from the POE, and still others were duplicated and filed in more than one location.
During the 1940's and 1950's, the INS microfilmed all its immigrant arrival records at all POE's, then gave copies of the microfilm to the National Archives (NARA). In this process the INS created an inventory of what records existed for what ports, and for what years. This document is a compilation of those inventories and transfer documents, and remains SUBJECT TO REVISION AND CORRECTION.
Published vs. Unpublished Microfilm:
After receiving microfilm copies of INS immigrant arrival records, the National Archives published the records for the largest and most important POE's. Whenever possible, the National Archives microfilm publication number is included for each set of published records. If a record set has no NARA microfilm publication number, that entry is either not yet published or it's publication status was undetermined. Some NARA microfilm publication numbers include question marks, indicating some question as to whether or not the record set appears in that publication.
As a result of INS' duplication of records, an immigrant's arrival may be found in the published records of another port. For example, arrivals at Buffalo , New York , were recorded in the published St. Albans lists (M1461) from 1902 to 1927. Buffalo arrivals after 1927 were not duplicated, and so remain unpublished.
The National Archives continues to publish previously unpublished INS microfilmed arrival records. For authoritative information on immigrant arrival records published by NARA , consult their National Archives' Immigrant and Passenger Arrivals: Select Catalog of NARA Microfilm Publications
POE's by State or District:
YIZKOR BOOKS ONLINE
The New York Public Library (NYPL) has put digitized images of nine Jewish yizkor books on its Web site at http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/jws/yizkorbooks_intro.cfm , and announced plans to do the same with the rest of the 700-plus books in its collection.
Many of the books contain photos and necrologies, or lists of Holocaust victims. NYPL's initial posting of yizkor books covers 12 towns.
About Holocaust Memorial Books
A phenomenon for the most part of the late 1950s, the 1960s, and the early 1970s, the yizkor books evoked by the Holocaust were edited, privately printed, and distributed (often free of charge) by committees of survivors of many hundreds of the former Jewish population centers of eastern Europe, and generally they culminate in lists of community members who did not survive the war. Over the centuries, however, traditional yizkor books (or Memorbücher, as they were called in the original Ashkenazi lands of Central Europe ) had expanded beyond commemorating only the victims of persecution to record also the outstanding personages who had adorned the community in good times as well as bad.
True to this spirit, the activists in the post-war yizkor book revival sought both to commemorate the dead and to recollect and celebrate, as well, the quality of life of the communities of which they had been a part. Where yizkor books contain lists of names, therefore, these are prefaced by personal memoirs and biographical sketches, and much emphasis is placed, too, on essays that describe local Jewish society in all the diversity represented by its organizations: political, intellectual, artistic, professional, and recreational, as well as philanthropic and spiritual.
Typically, these books were published in Israel or New York , or, occasionally, in Buenos Aires . The essays in these volumes may be all in Hebrew, or all in Yiddish, or some in one language and some in the other. Not infrequently, a brief English-language summary appears at the end; in a few cases, there may be substantial content in English, Hungarian, or other languages. Holocaust memorial books tend to be long, frequently running to 600-900 pages, and they are unindexed. Many of the volumes are extensively illustrated with photographs, although the images, themselves survivors of the Holocaust, have sometimes suffered damage and the quality of reproduction is not always particularly high, in line with the book production values of the time.
The alphabetical index of communities on this website lists all the towns in eastern Europe for which there are yizkor books in the New York Public Library Dorot Jewish Division. Each name links to the corresponding bibliographic record in CATNYP, the on-line catalog of The New York Public Library. Towns are listed according to the form authorized by the Library of Congress. Where a different form is preferred by Zachary M. Baker's Bibliography of Eastern European Memorial (Yizkor) Books, that spelling has been listed as well. Baker's bibliography appears in From a Ruined Garden: the Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, an anthology of literary passages from some sixty yizkor books, edited and translated by Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin (second edition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
An ambitious volunteer effort is under way to expand the proportion of this corpus available in English. The resulting data-rich selections in translation are posted on the JewishGen website together with much other pertinent information.
Yizkor books were published in very small quantities and at a time when permanent paper was little used. As a result, these volumes, which were meant to perpetuate the memory of a "vanished world," are often hard to find, and, in some cases, are themselves in danger of vanishing. The yizkor book holdings of the Dorot Jewish Division of The New York Public Library are the most extensive in the United States , with upwards of 90% of the titles listed in Baker's bibliography. In order to preserve and to provide universal access to these extremely important books, the Library, in partnership with the National Yiddish Book Center, has undertaken to digitize the entire collection. In time, digital images of the full text of all of the yizkor books in the collection should be freely available on the Library's website, and copies of these out-of-print titles will also be obtainable as "reprints on demand" from the National Yiddish Book Center. Gaps in the Library's holdings will, it is hoped, be filled with digital images made from copies lent by other libraries or individuals.
For more information on yizkor books and how to find them, visit JewishGen's Yizkor Book Project Web site at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor . The volunteer-run site contains a database of the 1,200 or so books known to exist, translations from dozens of them and a list of libraries and archives that have yizkor books. The site also has a Necrology Index from the books that have been published.
Jewish Genealogical Society of Georgia
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