Check and Check Again / Town Searches

It's important to keep up-to-date on record sets that are newly digitized &/or newly indexed that might give clues about your family.  It's why I consistently re-do searches on JewishGen, Ancestry, FamilySearch, and more.  Just recently, a new batch of records was added to JewishGen which helped me to find out more about some branches of my family, and I found it re-doing a search I'd done many times before.  And while I did then search in that record set for some of my family surnames, searching for ancestral towns found even more branches than I would have discovered otherwise.

1930 Czechoslovakian Census; Fried Family; Kosice, Slovakia

Eastern European Archives' Webpages / Finding more Diments

Eastern European archives historically did not have much of a web presence, and those that had webpages generally didn't have digitized records.  Well, that has changed over the last decade!  The Polish State Archives and the Latvian State Historical Archives are at the forefront of making records accessible by digitization.  But other countries are catching up--including Ukraine.  Despite the current war (and perhaps as a consequence, with archives realizing that physical records are in danger), Ukrainian archives continue to digitize records.  I keep a close eye on branches that would hold records for my ancestral towns, following their Facebook pages, and looking at their webpages to watch for newly-added digitized records. Most of those records aren't for towns I'm researching (but perhaps they cover areas of interest to you).  But some are.

Chaim-Lejb Diment & Family; 1920 Lutsk Census (page 1)

Ashkenazic Shared DNA Survey - August 2022 Update

Thank you to everyone who has contributed data about shared DNA in people with Ashkenazic ancestry!  I have 6455 data points to analyze, and that should help the entire genetic genealogy community  (I'm still collecting data--you can find out more about the project and how to contribute here).

This iteration looks at how shared DNA will differ depending on how much (documented) Ashkenazi DNA each individual has.

Probable Relatives Becoming Definite Relatives - Keep Track of Those Stray Branches!

I'll often find a family with the surname that I'm researching, in a place nearby where my family lived, but where I don't know for sure how (or even if!) they are actually related to me.  I keep track of these families and often can connect them into my larger trees later; other times I'm able to prove that they're actually not related to the family I've been researching.  I'm always glad later that I've kept track of these stray branches, because the information is often helpful.

Birth of Yerachmiel Diment; Torchin; 1926

Chernigov Guberniya Jewish Community Records, 1839-1842

(ADDITION:  Please do not contact me asking me to search for your specific ancestral surname.  A link to the records are below, so you can search for as many names as you want.  And yes, I had to add this because of the number of personal requests I've received--there are over 1000 pages here!)

Two days before the Russians invaded Ukraine, I had sent money to Chernihiv Archives to get records that I thought would contain metrical (vital) records for the Nizhyn/Nezhin Jewish community.  Once the invasion happened, I (understandably!) didn't receive the records.  So I was very surprised to get a recent email letting me know that my records were ready to be downloaded.  And I was also surprised to see what was actually in this (huge) file.

A page of family lists

Full Siblings Different Surnames - Important Austria-Hungarian Surname Impacts

I've mentioned before that many couples in Austria-Hungary never civilly registered their marriages, or only registered them years after the fact.  These couples had religious weddings, and their communities considered them fully married, but the government considered their children to be illegitimate, and therefore they were given their mothers' surnames.  Multiple successive generations of religious-only marriages could have a major impact on surnames used by children--and sometimes full siblings within the same family would use different surnames.  Without accounting for this, you could miss records and full branches of your family.  Here's how this phenomenon manifested itself in one family.

Judesz Stober/Kaufman Birth; 1892

Giving Them Names - Finding Names of Holocaust Victims

My grandmother was able to tell me about her mother's first cousin, Chaim Fine.  Chaim was killed in the Holocaust--as were his wife and their daughters.  But my grandmother couldn't remember the names of Chaim's wife and girls.  And after watching the Shoah Foundation video of one of her other cousins, he also just mentioned "Uncle Chaim and his children."  For more than three decades, Chaim's wife and daughters have been listed on my family tree as "Wife of Chaim Fine" and "Daughter1 of Chaim Fine," etc.  I've been able to identify and memorialize more distant relatives who were killed in the Holocaust, but these Fine cousins' names were just a huge gap.  But now I am able to give them names.

Fajn Family, 1932