The indefatigable Alex Krakovsky posted of an interesting record set that included--among other things--many family lists of both Jews and Christians in Chernigov Guberniya. So of course I went Lefand hunting--and I had success (although it does have their name here as "Lefan").
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| Lefand Family List Entry, 1822 |
Our friends at Reclaim the Records have done it again. The latest record set that they've helped to make accessible to us is the Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS) database, which includes people who served in the US military and received veterans' benefits in the twentieth century. They've set up a user-friendly way for you to generate and send a fax (yes, a fax--but you don't need a fax machine) request for C-File (different than naturalization-related C-Files) records referenced in BIRLS. I was a beta tester and have already received responses to many of my requests, so here are some of the things I learned about the system and about some relatives--as well as how you can do the same!
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| Application for my grandfather's first cousin to become a WAVE |
My Supkoff and Tolchin(sky) ancestors attended Keser Torah Congregation in Pittsburgh's Hill District for several decades. I recently got copies of fragmentary minutes for the congregation from the University of Pittsburgh, which included minutes from various groups associated with Keser Torah from 1927-1939. The records were written in Yiddish, and they were expertly translated by Géraldine Trom.
If you have ancestors who also attended Keser Torah--or if you just want some insight into the workings of an American synagogue in the 1920s and 1930s, the full translation is below. Enjoy!
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| Excerpt from the Keser Torah Congregation Minutes |
Many people, especially women, who came to America in the first half of the twentieth century, never naturalized, for a variety of reasons. If they were still alive and non-citizens in 1940 (or if they weren't sure if they were citizens), the Alien Registration Act of 1940 compelled them to register their status by filling out a form called the AR-2. These forms have recently transferred custody from USCIS to NARA, which means you can get these without the ridiculously long wait associated with the USCIS Genealogy Program. I recently ordered several and had a wonderfully pleasant experience (USCIS had set a very low bar) and found information--and people who had registered--that I hadn't expected.
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| Bessie Tolchin's AR-2 |
I've discussed J-Roots several times in the past, as it's a wonderful resource for those who are researching in the former Russian Empire (and somewhat in all of the former USSR). This Ukraine-based service was set to read-only shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. A group of volunteers has been bringing it back up, starting with its forum feature. So what are J-Roots' Forums and how can you use them?
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| Screenshot from J-Roots Forum Page |
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| Front Row L-R: Yosef Wollich, Mendel Chechman, Devorah Chechman; Back Row L-R: Sara Fine Wollich, Moshe Wollich, Chaike Chechman. All were murdered in the Holocaust |
JewishGen has added hundreds of thousands of indexed records to its database in the past year, with much of that increase attributable to records from Ukraine being indexed. And that's great. (It also means you should be doing searches regularly, because of the scope and frequency of records being indexed and added to JewishGen.) But don't just stop with the information from the index index--and I'll demonstrate why.
The Zubkis family seems to have been unusually mobile compared to other branches of my family. So while I've been able to find records for Zubkis (and Zubkov and the like) relatives by manually reading through record books in towns where I know they lived, it also means that sometimes they surprise me by popping up in indexed records where I hadn't looked. I regularly search for an exact match to z*bk* on JewishGen and then take a close look at the results. Here's one such result:
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| Index to Zlata Zubko's 1841 Birth; JewishGen's Ukraine Database |
