Finding names and dates are great and are the foundation of genealogical research. But I love finding documents that tell the stories and show that my family actually interacted with those documents. So how excited do you think I was to find my 5th great grandfather's signature?
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| Meir Lefand's Signature |
I started writing this just this past Thursday, based on a trail I latched onto the previous day. When I started, I expected to write about a huge mystery behind how a branch of my solidly Russian Empire family ended up in Hungary. Just a few days later, I've likely figured out why they emigrated to Budapest--and I've discovered that I'm distant cousins with a Grammy Award-winning cellist and a performer who was on New Year's Rocking Eve (but of course I only found that connection the next morning when it was too late to watch it, but I did watch on YouTube). I have not discovered why that musical talent did not make it into my DNA.
This is another tale of why you need to use multiple sources to fully flesh out a family. Keep track of how many different resources I use in figuring out these connections.
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| A Marriage Record With A Mistake - Keep Reading to Find Out More! |
People often want to know which genealogy company's database they should subscribe to in order to best research their family. There's no one right answer; while some records are common across multiple platforms, some are only on one. And sometimes the answers can be scattered across different platforms. Here's a puzzle I solved this long weekend, and the resources used.
Women often disappear into the genealogical ether upon their marriage. Name changes wreak havoc on building back families. But sometimes records can help reconnect them and their descendants to their families. And there are some great online resources that might be able to help with that. No one resource is necessarily the best--sometimes you get a tip-off from one but need to use lots of different sites to find all of the pieces.
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| Chana Lefand, 1850 Revision List, Nezhin |
My Lefand great-great grandmother came to America in the early twentieth century. But she left many cousins behind in what was then the Russian Empire (and currently Ukraine). And while my branch of the family fought for the United States during World War II, other branches fought for another one of the Allies--the Soviet Union. And some of them left a paper trail--and sometimes photos as well!
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| Volf Lefand, Order of the Red Star |
One document I got as a byproduct of my j-roots searching ended up being was a 103-page document that is titled, "On the application of Nezhin town council about adoption on their positions of the members of governance of the Jewish religious schools of the town of Nezhin. 1884-1885." There are lots and lots of names listed in these documents--683 total, although some appear more than once--many of which are original signatures. And we have an index to all of those names.
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| Title Page for Document |
One of the cases I found reference to on j-roots was a 1903 list of those who voted for board members for the Jewish school of Losinovka. Although my Tolchinsky family wasn't referenced in the title, since Losinovka was a village, I figured anything about its Jewish community had a pretty good chance of including something about my family. I was not disappointed.
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| My Great-Great Grandfather's Signature |
A few weeks ago, I posted a copy of the 1850 revision list (Russian Empire Census) for my Lefand family, with the head of household my born-in-1776 6th great grandfather. Since the revision listed his patronymic (father's name), I likely hae my family back to the 1750s or earlier, which for Russian Empire Jews is huge.
This revision supposedly no longer exists for Nezhin. So how did I find it?
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| j-roots Search Results |
