This lecture is dedicated to researchers with Polish roots who would like to expand their searches to less popular archival resources kept in Poland. Answers to some of the most burning family history questions we all have lie hidden in sources accessed by very few. In this lecture Jakub Czupryński will give practical guidelines on how to search for additional family information not covered in the obvious sources, such as vital or census records. He will discuss how we can break through some of the brick walls we all face using such resources as notary and court records and municipal, tax and property documents.

Jakub Czupryński is a researcher and tourist guide specializing in the family history of Polish Jews. For almost 15 years he has been carrying out professional genealogical research and organizing heritage tours in Poland. He collaborates with the Jewish Community Centre (JCC) in Kraków as a volunteer genealogist and administrator of a website dedicated to Jews of Kraków and Western Galicia. (https://www.krakowjewishheritage.org/)

Jakub currently is working on a database of Kraków ghetto residents.

Headstone inscriptions provide one of the most important tools for those researching their Jewish genealogical history, patronymic naming. This presentation will familiarize attendees with the evolution of family surnames and the practice of patronymic naming. Recognizing the components of patronymic naming, participants will learn how to take advantage of these clues to link their family through generations.  Nolan will go through an actual case study using headstone inscriptions and will show participants online resources to help find headstone information worldwide.

The next part of the presentation will show examples of headstones and what one will find if one takes a trip to the cemetery. Nolan will explain the meaning of symbols found on stones. He will explain how to understand the inscriptions, even if one can’t read Hebrew. He will also show many examples of inscription trends, some odd inscriptions, and errors in inscriptions…even well-known ones. With a presentation on cemetery records, you wouldn’t expect to leave laughing, but Nolan guarantees you will.

Nolan Altman was bit by the “genealogy bug” when he was inspired to write his family history in 1996 in memory of his mother. After making use of the valuable information on JewishGen, he volunteered to do data entry on various projects. In time, he was asked to become the Coordinator for JewishGen’s Holocaust Database and, subsequently, the Coordinator for the JOWBR (JewishGen’s Online Worldwide Burial Registry) project. Nolan works with volunteers from around the world helping to grow both databases for the benefit of family members and researchers. Nolan currently holds the position of JewishGen’s Vice President for Data Acquisition and focuses on growing the JOWBR, Holocaust databases and JewishGen’s new Memorial Plaque project.

Nolan has made various presentations and conducted computer workshops at the IAJGS (International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies) annual conferences in Boston, Washington, D.C., Paris, New York City, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. He continues to present his “How to Document and Research Your Family History” seminar to adult and continuing education classes, as well as university Holocaust and European history classes. He has had articles published in Avotaynu, Dorot, Stammbaum, Shemot and the FEEFHS Journal. He is currently on the board of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) and was President of JGSLI (Jewish Genealogical Society of Long Island), where he coordinates its Yearbook, Cemetery, and Memorial Plaque projects. Nolan is also a member of the JGS of New York.

Judith Greenberg had been writing and teaching about trauma, literature, and women’s acts of resistance for years before she discovered that the history of the last days of the Jews of Siedlce, Poland, her family’s ancestral hometown, was recorded by her own relative, Cypora Jablon Zonszajn, her grandfather’s first cousin. In the fall of 1942, having survived an Aktion that killed over 80% of Siedlce’s Jews, Cypora understood that the only chance for her baby daughter, Rachel, lay outside the ghetto. They escaped and Cypora gave Rachel to her Catholic friends from childhood. She returned to the ghetto, wrote her testimony, and, to resist boarding a train to Treblinka, took poison. Cypora’s friends raised Rachel and buried their friend’s written pages, which are now held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Judith grew up knowing Rachel for most of her life; her mother was Rachel’s second cousin and close friend. But it was only in 2002, when Judith read Cypora’s testimony and saw a photo of Cypora holding baby Rachel, that she began to ask questions about her cousin’s history as a hidden child, her mother’s past, and the intergenerational process of transmission of this story. How did these pages and this photo survive? Who were the Catholic women who risked their lives to save Rachel and how had they become so close to Cypora? Judith, who was then a mother of young children, was gripped by Cypora’s descriptions of trying to nurse Rachel during the Aktion, of guilt for failing to save her parents, and of the Jewish police, in which her husband was a part.

Over the next twelve years, Judith traveled to Poland, with her mother, her daughter, and other relatives. She met Cypora’s friends who saved Rachel, discovered a vast archive of prewar and wartime photos of Cypora and Rachel, and forged a friendship with the granddaughter of one of Rachel’s rescuers, a prominent human rights lawyer. Relying on her background analyzing trauma writing, Judith conjoins her research of the history with an analysis of Cypora’s writing and with a contemplation of her postmemories and the many roles of mothers, daughters, and shared parenting in this story.

Judith Greenberg holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University and teaches as a part-time faculty member at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She is the editor of Trauma at Home: After 9/11 (U Nebraska P, 2003) and author of articles on works by Virginia Woolf, Patrick Modiano, and Charlotte Delbo, among others. From 2012-2017 she wrote blogs for the Huffington Post and she recently published “A Situation of Fear: Revisiting Sartre in Trump’s America” in a Special Issue: Trump and the "Jewish Question" of Studies in American Jewish Literature. Judith wrote about a 2019 trip to Siedlce in The Forwardhttps://forward.com/life/440510/researching-intergenerational-transmission-of-trauma-led-me-to-poland-in/ and The Forum for Dialogue made a video about the trip: “Taking on the Story” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smcKUZ3UcYQ. She plans to publish her manuscript Cypora's Echo, which is based on her cousin's story and about intergenerational transmission of trauma.

DNA test results are constantly changing, so trying to organize them can feel like aiming for a moving target. In this webinar, learn to organize your results around clear research objectives in order to isolate, prioritize, analyze and correlate the genetic data most pertinent to your research.

Paul Woodbury is a Research Team Manager at Legacy Tree Genealogists. He graduated from Brigham Young University where he studied Genetics and Family History. He also holds a master’s degree in Instructional Design and Educational Technology.  His article, "Where to Test? Genetic Genealogy Testing Options," appeared in the January-March 2021 issue of the NSG Magazine.

In the course of decades of genealogical research for family, friends, clients, and, occasionally, complete strangers, Renee Steinig has uncovered many a "skeleton in the closet" -- cases of mental illness, illegitimate birth, infidelity, abandonment, and even murder, all hushed up for decades. A Viennese refugee whose baby was born in a New York State psychiatric hospital; a suburban businessman who led two lives; a Romanian immigrant hanged -- or so his family thought -- for "stealing horses;" a Jewish GI's love affair in Belgium during World War II; a young woman who married, had a baby, then vanished.... Renee will talk to us about these family secrets and others, the research tools that uncovered them, and the reunions and reconciliations that followed many of her discoveries.

Renee Steinig began to do genealogical research in the 1970s, inspired by a cousin who made it look easy. Many family trees and some 18 years later, she began to accept client work. Her specialties include New York research, locating lost family, and due diligence for probate cases. She is member of the Association of Professional Genealogists and has testified as an expert witness in several New York City Surrogate's Courts. A past president and longtime trustee of the JGS of Long Island, Renee is also a director of Gesher Galicia and its discussion group moderator and Family Finder editor.

Marian Smith will present an overview of three historical eras (1820-Present) of US immigration and naturalization records, illustrated with documents of Jewish immigrants. Using a timeline tool (included in the handout), she will demonstrate how plotting an immigrant’s life events can identify what records may exist for that particular immigrant and where these records can be found. A question and answer session will follow the presentation.

Marian Smith retired in 2018 after thirty years as an Historian for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), later US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). She now speaks to groups on US immigration and nationality records and leads the I&N Records Fortnightly study group.

In this presentation, Jennie Milne will describe her extraordinary journey to understand her mother’s mysterious background. Elizabeth Lis, Jennie's mother, was born to a Polish woman in London in 1943 and placed in a wartime babies' home in Devon, England. Elizabeth's mother, known only by the name on her daughter’s birth certificate as ‘Ellen Lis,’ did not return to collect her baby after the war ended as she had promised, and Elizabeth was subsequently raised by the matron of the Home and her surname changed.

Elizabeth’s father was a highly decorated Polish Officer under British command. Ellen had also been serving in the Polish army at the time of Elizabeth’s birth, and was reputedly Jewish, although these details were unknown at the time. Despite finding and meeting briefly with her parents, individually, in the mid-1960s, Elizabeth lost contact soon after and was unable to find them later in life.

In March 2014 Jennie began searching in earnest for her grandparents. With the assistance of expert researchers and genealogists at JewishGen, JRI-Poland and Tracing the Tribe, as well as through DNA analysis, Jennie was able to break the silence of years. In this talk Jennie will take us through the extensive research that led to her understanding as well as to her discovery of previously unknown cousins.

Jennie Workman Milne was born in Greenwich, London, and currently lives in North East Scotland. A freelance professional photographer, Jennie holds a Master's degree in Communication Design (Photography) from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. She and her husband, Brian, have nine children and two grandchildren. Jennie's initial desire to trace her grandparents’ past has evolved into a love of history and the Jewish people, and a passion to know all she can of her heritage. She presented her family story at the 2018 IAJGS conference in Warsaw. In February of this year Robert Gordon University mounted an exhibition of Jennie's research project documenting Jewish survivors of terrorism in Israel, along with her photographs that document her search for her family. Currently Jennie is working on a documentary project tracing the descendants of Polish soldiers and refugees who remained in the United Kingdom after World War II.

The daughter of two Holocaust survivors, Deborah Long has been researching her family history and looking for family members for more than 50 years. She has found surviving cousins in Sweden, Hungary, Canada and Israel. Deborah will review the best (as well as some of the more obscure) resources and methods for determining the fate of those caught up in the Holocaust, survivors as well as victims. She will use examples from her own research to present the documents and artifacts she has discovered.

Deborah Long grew up in Skokie, Illinois, and is a professional educator and speaker. She has written more than 20 books, including a memoir about growing up as a child of survivors titled First Hitler, Then Your Father, and Now You. Deborah lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and is the founder and first president of the Triangle Jewish Genealogical Society in Durham/Chapel Hill. 

Most Jewish genealogists know the story of Chiune Sugihara, known as the Japanese Schindler. Sugihara issued over 2,000 Japanese transit visas that enabled many Jews to escape war torn Europe in the summer of 1940. But there is so much more to the story. There were many people – Europeans, Americans, Japanese – who helped to save these people. We will identify some of them and talk about their exploits. We will trace one Polish Jewish woman’s journey from Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Poland to Santa Monica, California using her Sugihara transit visa to ultimately obtain US citizenship. Her journey started in Poland and included stops in Lithuania; Moscow and Vladivostok, Russia; Tsuruga and Kobe Japan; Shanghai, China; Windsor, Canada; and Chicago and Los Angeles over 15 years mostly as a Stateless person. We will document her journey using genealogical methods and records.

Mark Halpern was an International Businessman who lived in Japan. Later, while on business in Poland, he became interested in his roots. Now retired, Mark works with JRI–Poland, JewishGen, IAJGS, and Jewish Genealogical and Archival Society of Greater Philadelphia (JGASGP) helping others research their roots. Mark serves on the Board and Executive Group of JRI-Poland, is the founder of Bialystok Area Jewish Genealogy Group, is an Advisory Board of Gesher Galicia, and is past President of JGASGP. Mark chaired the program committees for the 2009 and 2013 Conferences and served as advance coordinator for the 2018 Warsaw Conference. Mark was honored in 2018 with the IAJGS Lifetime Achievement Award.

Mark’s interest in Sugihara and the refugees goes back to the 2013 IAJGS Conference in Boston, where he met a Japanese gentleman. The following article explains Mark’s interest. https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/197643/from-japan-with-love.

This lecture will discuss how best to weed out false-positive DNA Matches that Jewish test-takers face daily. Alec will outline the data that demonstrates the unique ways in which endogamous populations match each other. Then, by using visualization tools such as DNA Painter, he will illustrate webs of interrelationships of endogamous test-takers and identify genetic pile-up regions (or multiple shared autosomal DNA segments stacked up on top of each other) that may not indicate shared ancestors. Although there is no surefire method as of yet to remove false matches, by having a more thorough understanding of endogamous results, we can better analyze our match data.

Alec Ferretti is a Dual Masters Student at New York University and Long Island University, where he is pursuing degrees in Archival Studies and Library Science. He works as a genealogist with the Wells Fargo Family & Business History Center, specializing in Italian and Jewish research. He is the President of the New York Genealogy & Technology Group, an informal organization which facilitates bi-monthly genealogy lectures and discussions. Alec recently joined the Board of Directors of Reclaim the Records, a nonprofit which seeks to restore public access to genealogical documents. He is presenting at the 2019 IAJGS Conference, as well as the 2019 Professional Management Conference of the Association of Professional Genealogists.