All posts by Banai Lynn Feldstein

Banai is the Treasurer, Webmaster, and Past President of UJGS. She is a professional genealogist living in Salt Lake City, Utah specializing in Jewish and European research.
Call To Meeting

Call to Meeting – September 13

Shana Tova! Happy New Year! It’s now the year 5782 and we’ve got our first meeting of the year coming up in between major holidays, which is why we’re meeting this coming Monday, September 13, at 6:30pm, via Zoom.

Paul Graham will be teaching us about Genealogical Source Citations.

Citations are important for everyone to use, no matter what level of genealogist you are, amateur to advanced. If you don’t know where the information came from, you can’t know how reliable it is, especially if you find something later that contradicts it.

Registration is required, as always.

We’ll see you there.

Call To Meeting

Call to Meeting – July 19

Our next meeting of UJGS will be on the 19th of July, 6:30pm Mountain Time.

Our speakers are Schelly Talalay Dardashti and Maria Apodaca presenting about Conversos and Crypto Jews.

Schelly, founder of “Tracing the Tribe,” will discuss ethnicity, history, migration and DNA of Converso Jews. Maria will speak about her family’s personal journey. Both are leaders of Centro Sefarad New Mexico, the Sephardic Heritage program of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico.

Beginning this month, we are moving from GoToWebinar to Zoom, so be patient with us as we figure out the new software.

Registration is required.

We’ll see you there.

Call To Meeting

Call to Meeting – June 21

June 21st is the next UJGS meeting, 6:30pm online.

Our speaker is Chuck Weinstein, the Towns/Districts Director for the Ukraine Special Interest Group, 2019 JewishGen Volunteer of the Year, and co-chair of the 2016 IAJGS Conference. His topic is: The Three Great Myths of Jewish Genealogy.

Register to join us via GoToWebinar.

And welcome to a bunch of new mailing list members. You signed up to be added to our mailing list at RootsTech 2020 but unfortunately those lists went missing until recently. We’re still happy for you to join us.

Call To Meeting

Call to Meeting – May 10

Yes, you read that right. Our next meeting is on Monday, May 10th, at 6:30pm.

Our speaker will be Angie Bush, an internationally recognized genetic genealogist working at Ancestry ProGenealogists. Her presentation will be “Endogamy and Your DNA Matches”.

We’re expecting a shorter presentation, so bring your DNA and endogamy questions for Angie.

Sorry for the late notice of the unusual meeting date. We’ll see you Monday night.

Press Release

Marelynn Zipser, 1937-2021

UJGS is sad to report the death of Marelynn Zipser on February 19th.

Marelynn was a founding member of our society, serving as Membership Chair for many years, continuing as an active member until about 2017. She had a regular column in our newsletter, “Zip Tip”, with advice for research, often about the Family History Library. She was featured in the “Member Spotlight” in issue 14 in 2006.

Marelynn was a huge contributor to Jewish genealogy for over 15 years, indexing Hungarian records for the Hungary-SIG of JewishGen after researching her husband’s Austro-Hungarian family. The 1869 Hungarian census indexing project began with her work and she was often the only indexer for entire towns of records in the census or vital records, including indexing all of the Bratislava Jewish vital records in 2011, over 28,000 names.

In 2016, Marelynn received the IAJGS Volunteer of the Year award (nominated by her friends at UJGS), for her contributions to the Hungary-SIG database for so many years.

Her obituary can be found online, detailing her family and some of her life’s adventures.

UJGS sends it condolences to her family and friends.

Press Release

RootsTech Begins Tonight

For anyone who hasn’t already noticed yet, RootsTech begins tonight. This year, RootsTech is all online and completely free. How can you go wrong?

If you’re not already signed up, you should check it out. There are sessions about all kinds of topics, including a strong list of specifically Jewish sessions. For the adventurous, they also have sessions in other languages, providing captions. Want to see what Poles or Ukrainians are saying about genealogy? They have some interesting sounding topics.

Most RootsTech sessions will be 20 minutes or less (working off the same theory as TED Talks), therefore some sessions have multiple parts.

Streaming begins at 9pm tonight, so go sign up. Many sessions will be available immediately while others will stream live and then can be watched on demand later. The conference will be available on demand for about a year, just before next year’s RootsTech, so you’ll have plenty of time to see everything.

So if you’re not yet signed up, head over to http://rootstech.org/ and see what you might learn.

Press Release

RootsTech 2021 Is Virtual

FamilySearch recently announced that RootsTech 2021 will be all virtual — and all free.

Dates have been moved to February 25-27 (which coincides with Purim).

You can read more about their plans in a blog post about the virtual experience.

You can register for the free conference to receive any updates direct to your email, and then attend when the time comes.

While you’re on the site, you can check out the video archive to watch sessions from past years that you may have missed or forgotten.