Yom Hashoah 2023

Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) starts this evening.  For the past six years, I have listed the names of the family members I've found who were murdered in the Holocaust.  In 2020, I listed 454 relatives.  In 2021, I listed 515.  In 2022, I listed 642.  And this year I list 916.

Every year, this list grows as I find new branches of my family--and then find that multiple members of those branches were killed between 1941 & 1945.  This year I found 274 more people--and many other relatives whose fates are as yet unclear.

Publishing this yearly list is my one small way to make sure they are all remembered--all 916 of those currently on this list.

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

Amazing Subcarpathian Records, Available Online

If you have family from what is now Zakarpattya Oblast, Ukraine, or from the areas immediately bordering (including towns in Romania, Slovakia and Hungary), there is an incredible newly-online resource available.  There are records for both Jews and non-Jews in this collection.  The predominant languages in the records are Hungarian and Slovakian, but there are also documents in Ukrainian, Yiddish, German, Romanian, and possibly more.  I'll talk about where these are from, the types of documents I've found so far, how to best navigate these records to find your family members' documents, as well as how to deal with records in foreign (to you) languages below.

Statement for Mendel Rutner (my 1C3R), as an industrialist, 1939 (page 2).  This second page asks for the paternal and maternal grandparents for both himself and his spouse. It also asks for their children's dates of birth

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

Records, Not Revenue: We Need Your Help

The USCIS Genealogy Program holds many historical records, including US immigrant A-Files and C-Files.  These can be a treasure trove of information for genealogists, sometimes including original birth certificates, photos, and more.  (To get an idea of the types of information you can get, you can see what I received for my grandfather here and here, as well as my grandmother here and here.)

The program has always been slow to respond (it took 16 months to get my grandmother's A-File, and that was with me sending regular pings) and not inexpensive.  Back in 2020, USCIS tried to raise the already high rates by an exorbitant amount, and thankfully that request was denied.  But they are trying again.  And we need your help to stop this 269% (yes, 269%!!) fee hike from happening.

(And besides, many of these records should already be publicly and readily available at the National Archives, without having to deal with the bottleneck and transparency-free entity that is the USCIS Genealogy Program.) 

 

Hungarian Holocaust Survivors (And Other Yad Vashem Additions)

Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial, has been digitizing and indexing many Holocaust-related records and making them searchable by the public.  Their Pages of Testimony, where people memorialized relatives who were murdered during the war, have been searchable for a while and are an invaluable resource.  But even if you've looked at Yad Vashem's database of records in the past, it's definitely worth re-looking every so often because of the scope of record sets they've added.

One of their recent additions has been information about Hungarian Holocaust Survivors--including many that were from what is now Subcarpathian Ukraine (where my mother's mother's family originated)--which can help you identify relatives who survived the war.

Survivor Card for my 2nd cousin twice removed Samuel Ruttner/Fuchs

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!

Ancestry's Concentration Camp Collection - Town Searches

Ancestry has a collection of records from concentration camps.  These records can help you learn the fate of relatives, or at least where they were for a period of time during WWII.  Some also have significant genealogical information--parents' names, spouses names (with maiden names for the mother and spouse, when applicable), and at times there are photos.  Not everyone who was in a concentration camp has records included in this collection (especially those who were murdered upon arrival), but many are.

While searching just for surnames can help you locate relatives, I've found that searching for town names--with some caveats--can often be even more powerful.

Concentration Camp Intake Form; David Ruttner (my 4th cousin twice removed)