I belong to multiple local Facebook groups for my family's ancestral towns. These aren't genealogy groups; they're groups used for the day-to-day sharing that the current inhabitants do. Much of what is posted isn't of that much interest to me (people selling produce, livestock, and complaining about the state of the roads, etc.). But every so often there's a gem. And recently there was one.
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| A Magical Facebook Post |
When I was in college, my grandmother was interviewed by Steven Spielberg's project (hosted by the USC Shoah Foundation) talking about her life and Holocaust experiences. She got copies of the 11 VHS tapes that her story filled, and I summarized her life based on that testimony here. And now I can easily find her testimony--and others who were related or lived in the same towns, and learn about their experiences via JewishGen.
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| Snippet from JewishGen's Summary of Sonia Diamond's Shoah Foundation Interview |
My family has few old letters. But a few weeks ago, I got an email from my uncle with a scan of a letter, followed soon after with the original. He said that he had it from HIS uncle, my great uncle Izzy Joshowitz.
I could see my great-great grandparents' names (Ruchel and Shmuel Moshe) as well as some other family members who I knew--so there was promise of some great genealogical information, but my Yiddish wasn't good enough to translate.
But after I posted it on the incredible Genealogical Translations group, Géraldine Tsiporah Trom was kind enough to translate.
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| The Letter |
A few weeks ago, I talked about how my great-great grandfather applied for a permit to build an extension to his home in Pittsburgh--but how the various papers gave him a different given name when mentioning his permit application. There was a hearing to discuss if the permit would be granted, and it was denied. And then one newspaper mentioned that he was appealing the denial.
But he didn't seem to appear again. I wondered what happened--and some readers asked on Facebook and Twitter if I knew what happened. Initially I was thinking that I'd need to wait for local Pittsburgh repositories to re-open post-COVID. But I also realized that the OCR technology used to allow old newspapers to be searchable isn't perfect, so perhaps there was another mention of this case where Supkoff wasn't captured? So I searched by the address of the home, narrowing search results to 1925 newspapers in Pennsylvania. And there it was.
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| Joseph Supkoff Building Permit Appeal Decision; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; June 12, 1925 |
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| A letter sent to Simon's siblings (pages 1 and 4) |
My great-great grandfather was Yeshaya Supkoff. He was inconsistent with what name he used once in the United States. But some of it wasn't his fault--it seems that even for one event, the newspapers used different names for him.
On March 1, 1925, three separate Pittsburgh newspapers reported on Yeshaya's application for a building permit. But the three newspapers called him three different things.
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| J. Supkoff Building Permit Application; Pittsburgh Daily Post; March 1, 1925 |
Historically, archive branches in Ukrainian had put few records online. However, that's slowly starting to change, at least for some of the branches. I follow the Volhynia State Archives on Facebook, and last week they announced that they had put newly-digitized records for a Jewish gymnasium (high school) from Lutsk on their website. My father's parents grew up in the Lutsk area, and I knew my grandfather had spent some time in a yeshiva in Lutsk. I knew he wouldn't be in these records (as they are from the 1922-1923 school year when he was an infant), but I figured I could see if any relatives attended this school.
These records are nice for native English speakers because they're in Polish rather than Russian or Ukrainian, so it's really easy to browse through for names of interest; it took me under 20 minutes to review all records, and I did find one of potential interest.
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| Rejzia Dimant's School Report, 1922-1923 School Year |
