Maybe You'll Find it, the Odesa Connection....

Many Jews moved to Odesa in the nineteenth century--including Jews from quite a distance away from Odesa itself.  Jews came to Odesa not only from all over the Russian Empire, but also from Austria-Hungary (including many from Galicia), Romania and the Ottoman Empire.  That means that even if you have no known ancestry from Odesa, it's quite possible that you have other branches of your family that moved there.  And these days it's easier than ever to find these branches.

Birth of Yosef Sanshuck, Odesa, 1916--his father was registered in Krasne, now Krasnoye, Ukraine

Indexed Records--Don't Stop, There's More!

(Note: While this post discusses documents from JewishGen's Ukraine RD, it applies to indexed documents from pretty much any platform.)

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:

Index to Zlata Zubko's 1841 Birth; JewishGen's Ukraine Database

Tips to Find Relatives on JewishGen

JewishGen is an incredible collection of resources, especially the databases containing millions of indexed records--which has thousands of new records being added each month.  But both because of how JewishGen's search engine works as well as how records are being indexed from (mostly) Eastern European languages to English, you may not be finding indexed records that are there and you would want to find.  This post will discuss some different techniques that could help you find these records.  And if you have additional techniques, please add them in the comments to help other readers!

JewishGen's Search Interface

JewishGen's Newly-Indexed Ukraine Records--Strategies to Increase Found Family

JewishGen's Ukraine Research Division just announced the spectacular news that they have added over 200,000 newly-indexed records to JewishGen's databases, with a promise of more to come.  For those of us with Ukrainian ancestry, this is huge!  The newly-indexed records are wonderful and will make these records more accessible to researchers--but there are some quirks I've seen that could inhibit searchers from finding records that have been indexed.  I'm going to talk about some of these and give you  strategies to find records impacted by these quirks--assuming they've been indexed, of course!

JewishGen's JGFF / A Family Story Matching Documentation & Cousin Connection

Fuchs is one of those frustrating surnames when doing genealogical research; it's extremely common across Central and Eastern Europe, with most Fuchs families not related to one another.  My Fuchs family lived in what is now Novoselytysa, Zakarpattya Oblast, Ukraine, just across the border with Romania; it was formerly Taracujfalu and Felso-Neresznicze, Hungary and Novoselice, Czechoslovakia as well.  I have all of the Jewish and civil records of the town, and I have been able to connect all of the Fuchs individuals from that town to my 4th great grandparents, Gershon & Toba-Rivka.  (I've also indexed them, and they're searchable on Jewishgen.)  I was pretty sure that implied that Gershon was the first Fuchs in the town (or at least the only brother who had children in the town), but I had no concrete documentation one way or the other.  But now I may have a hint of what happened, thanks to JewishGen's awesome Jewish Genealogy Family Finder (JGFF).

My Entry in JGFF

Rutners Down Under, 17 Years in the Making

I've searched through JewishGen's SIG Discussion Group Archives before.  But every so often I search again and try to use spelling variations for surnames.  This time, I searched for Ruttner, with two Ts (rather than "Rutner" with one T).  And I got a "new" hit from 1999.

Archived Query on JewishGen

Finding Eastern European Records, Part 3 (Yizkor Books and KehilaLinks)

I've often been asked how I find so many documents from various parts of Eastern Europe--many of which have appeared in blog posts.  This is the third in a series of posts describing how to find Eastern European records for your own ancestors.  While these posts will generally concentrate on how to find Jewish records in Eastern Europe, many of the strategies will also be applicable to records for other religions.  (Note that in the Russian Empire, most record sets were recorded separately by religion.)  The entire series can be seen here.

Yizkor Books

After the Holocaust destroyed their hometowns, survivors wrote their memories of their towns and those who were killed--their neighbors and families.  Most of these books were published in the 1950s and 1960s, and most are in Yiddish with some Hebrew and English.  While each town's book covers different material, in general they cover the town's history (potentially mentioning family members back generations), often list names of those who were murdered, and sometimes have names of those who survived.

From Sefer Maramaros, a page about the town of Kolodne, giving the history of the town's Jews to the 1700s

Finding Eastern European Records, Part 2 (JewishGen)

I've often been asked how I find so many documents from various parts of Eastern Europe--many of which have appeared in blog posts.  This is the second in a series of posts describing how to find Eastern European records for your own ancestors.  While these posts will generally concentrate on how to find Jewish records in Eastern Europe, many of the strategies will also be applicable to records for other religions.  (Note that in the Russian Empire, most record sets were recorded separately by religion.)  The entire series can be seen here.

This post will discuss some of what's available on JewishGen; other components will be incorporated into future posts.

Town Locators

A critical component to finding family records in Eastern Europe is having identified a particular town of origin.  JewishGen's Communities Database allows searching using the misspelled or phonetically written versions of a town name which are often passed down orally or found in documentation and discovering the current spelling of that town name.  The results will also show the political situation of that town (noting the country, province and district) during various time periods, reflecting changing governments under which many towns found themselves.

JewishGen's Community Database is easily searchable from its homepage

Starting in Genealogy--for Free

Genealogy has changed significantly since I started researching in the 1990s.  Instead of having to travel to an archives branch to try to find boat records and census records on microfilm, you can find many of those documents sitting at home.  The internet has made a lot of basic genealogy doable from home, which is wonderful.  Many people have heard of Ancestry.com because of their advertising campaign, but Ancestry costs money (unless you cancel before completing an initial 14-day free trial), and until you have the basics down on your family, it could be overwhelming.  Ancestry is great (and I do have a subscription), but wait on it until you exhaust some of the other free sites.

A better starting place is FamilySearch.  This site is entirely free (although they do ask that you set up a free account to see some of the original documents).  They have a lot of records, and they add more all the time.  You can search for family members in census records, boat records, and more.  Many states (Ohio is one I've used a lot) have all of their vital records (birth, marriage, death certificates) on FamilySearch; these are great resources for finding parents' names and helping to move back another generation.  You can also search their catalog for additional (not online) documents that they have on microfilm and can be delivered to a local Family History Center for you to peruse.