USC Dornsife history Professor Wolf Gruner has helped launch an effort — the #LastSeen Project — to recover photos of the Nazis’ mass deportations, identify victims and tell their stories.

The project is called #LastSeen Project-Pictures of Nazi Deportations-it aims to locate photographs, identify victim of forced deportations and tell their stories.

Between 1938 and 1945, the Nazis deported hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children from the German Reich to ghettos and camps. Yet, so far a relatively small number of photos of deportations are known. The 550 existing photographs of deportations from the German Reich are often the last known images of the victims of persecution before they were murdered. The pictures show the crimes in a local context. The deportations took place on public squares, in front of buildings and on streets that are often still part of towns today.

Photos of Nazi mass deportations have never before been brought together, made available as a collection, and analyzed collectively in any systematic way. Nor has there been a concerted effort to search for more photos. The #LastSeen project aims to gather, analyze, and digitally publish pictures of Nazi mass deportations of Jews, Romani people and people with disabilities from the German Reich between 1938 and 1945.

The #LastSeen project is a cooperation of the Arolsen Archives, the City Archives of Munich, the Center for the Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin, the House of the Wannsee Conference memorial site, and the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

To read more on how you canbe involved see: https://dornsife.usc.edu/cagr-news/news/2022/04/33261-center-searches-photographs-nazi-mass-deportations-part-lastseen-project

Project Soul to Soul is a project to restore children’s shoes from Auschwitz by finding out more about the children and tell their stories. See short video at: https://www.dw.com/en/preserving-the-memories-of-children-killed-in-auschwitz/av-63355119

More information is available at: https://www.auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/touching-discoveries-in-childrens-shoes,1435.html

The International March of the Living (MOTL) has partnered with Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation and Auschwitz Memorial to preserve 8,000 displayed shoes belonging to children in a global ‘SOUL to SOUL campaign. “The murder of over 200,000 children at Auschwitz is impossible to comprehend. The contrast between the cruelty and callousness of the adult world is perhaps most vividly illustrated in Auschwitz precisely in the juxtaposition with the trusting, curious, innocent and defense- less children who were thrown into a world they could not understand. And this world is preserved in every single shoe. Only these shoes remained after so many children… Among 1.3 million people deported to Auschwitz were 232,000 children up to the age of 18. The largest numbers of children arrived at the camp in the second half of 1942. When Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz in 1945, only about 500 children under 15 years of age were left in the camp, all suffering from diseases and malnutrition.”

Immediate conservation is necessary as the shoes are in danger of disappearing as a historic documentation of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. In so many cases, the tiny shoes left at Auschwitz are all that is left of young Jewish children murdered by the Nazis.

The conservation project will continue for two years. International MOTL said there was a moral obligation to preserve the shoes.

For those researching older French history The French Genealogy Blog has an interesting article about ancient France and Jews and where they lived prior to their expulsion in 1394. The article has maps of how France looked at the time. It states, “that if working only with a modern map of France you will have the impression that the three main areas of Jewish communities, the Southwest, Alsace-Lorraine and Papal States and Provence survived the expulsion within France but they were not within France at the time and areas not within France at the time of the expulsion as areas were controlled by other powers:

• By the English in the far northwest and the southwest region of Aquitaine
• A tiny bit in the south belonged to the Kingdom of Navarre
• The Holy Roman Empire held the northeast
• Free Burgundy, Savoy and the Papal States owned all the rest of what is now eastern France

Paris was a special as – while Jews were not supposed to living there, most likely they were.”

Anne Mordell wrote the article and she is a professional  genealogist living in France.

She also reminds us of the language differences and that in all locations Jewish documents may also be in Hebrew.

Mordell also states the best research for each of the different regions may be done at Departmental and Municipal archives with their names, but not their websites.

To read the posting go to:

https://french-genealogy.typepad.com/genealogie/2022/09/french-jewish-genealogy-ancien-r%C3%A9gime-geography-is-important.html

RootsTech the largest family history conference worldwide, has announced their 2023 dates and that it will be both virtual and in person in Salt Lake City.  The dates are 2-4 March, 2023. It is sponsored by FamilySearch.  Go to: https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/  to subscribe for updates.

You will be asked to subscribe for future updates.

The same aforementioned link gets you to the 2022 sessions…about 1,000 workshops and sessions to explore.  https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/search

To get to the keynotes all you have to do is scroll down once you are on the site. Below is a list of 2022 sponsors including IAJGS.

October 3 is Unity Day in Germany and October 6 is German-American Day. To celebrate, Geneanet is celebrating “Ahnenfest” – Ancestor Festival – with free access to their Premium German records from Oct. 1-6 inclusive!  You need to register if you are not already a subscriber to Geneanet: https://en.geneanet.org/  Credit card information is not required.

October 3 is Tag der Deutschen Einheit (Germany Unity Day), a national holiday since 1990, which celebrates the reunification of Germany at the end of the Cold War. And October 6 is German-American Day, when 40 million Americans celebrate their German heritage. At Geneanet, they have decided to celebrate these two holidays with Ahnenfest — Ancestor Festival –, a week of free access to their Premium German records and collections!

In the past few months, millions of European data points have been added to Geneanet. Indexes of over 55 million German birth, marriage, and death register entries are now available, and more are coming.

From October 1-6, 2022 inclusive, take advantage of their rich collections with advanced search options such as search by couple, by occupation, by parents, by events, as well as spelling variants, geographic area and wildcards. And search their Genealogy Library with millions of books and newspapers. To guide you in these options, a help page (https://en.geneanet.org/help/search-engine-features-and-options)  is available. Tap into thousands of archival records, books and newspapers and grow your tree easily.

“Geneanet is a subscription service community of more than 4 million members who share their genealogical information for free: more than 7 billion individuals in the family trees, some digitized archival records, some family pictures, some indexes, all available through a powerful search engine, and a blog.”  Its website is available in multiple languages. If you go to https://en.geneanet.org/ you will find information  at the bottom of the page on  the green strip, the left click on the arrow under language and you can access the information in 10 supported languages.

Geneanet’s community is more than 4 million memberswho share their genealogical information for free: more than 7 billion individuals in the family trees, some digitized archival records, some family pictures, some indexes, all available through a powerful search engine, and a blog.  

Here’s the Zoom registration link for the UJGS meeting next week.

https://ancestry.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMld-ypqDMjH9yn68bzVd979Lazr1A7pVbC

The British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/),

in partnership with the British Library, has made a further one million historical newspaper pages available completely free to the public, reaching a new total of two million free pages.

Together, the British Newspaper Archive and the British Library are committed to releasing a total of five million free pages over five years, which can be accessed online on the British Newspaper Archive website and on Findmypast.

The British Newspaper Archive was created in 2011 when Findmypast set out to digitize the British Library’s entire newspaper collection and open it up to the public as the British Newspaper Archive. Today, it contains over 56 million pages. Exploring more of the British Newspaper Archive will result in requiring a paid subscription.

The free pages cover the years 1699-1900 across 244 titles in the UK.

Jewish Heritage Europe has an article on two significant new Holocaust Memorials: Names in Nowy Sącz and Returned (Cobble)stones in Prague.

NOWY SĄCZ, POLAND

A new memorial lists the names of 12,000 Jews from Nowy Sącz and its surroundings  deported by the Germans to their deaths  during the Holocaust. The dedication ceremony took place on the 80th anniversary of the last deportation of Jews to the death camp at Bełżec and was the culmination of a week of memorial events.  During the memorial service the names of the 12,000 victims were read aloud—Jews who were enclosed in the WW2 Nowy Sacz ghetto and who came from Nowy Sącz, as well as from Stary Sącz, Łabowa, Piwniczna Zdrój, Krynica Zdrój, Grybów, Limanowa, Łącko, Tarnów, Krakow Łódź, Leipzig (Germany), Sieradz and other places.

There is a video- audio is in Polish –that may be seen/heard on the website:

The memorial is a sunken area on whose walls the names are inscribed in long columns. The memorial is a project of People not numbers, a project headed by the Polish Olympic athlete Dariusz Popiela that seeks to restore Jewish cemeteries and to create memorials that list by one  the names of victims of the Holocaust.

PRAGUE: RETURNED (COBBLE)STONES MEMORIAL, September  7

The memorial constructed from hundreds of cobblestones that were cut from uprooted Jewish gravestones and used for paving in downtown Prague has been dedicated at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague’s Žižkov district. (Not the famous Old Jewish Cemetery in the former ghetto area.)

 Return of the Stones monument, designed  the sculptor Jaroslav Róna and his wife Lucie, is centered on a low, circular mound made of 200 of the cobblestones showing remnants of Hebrew and Czech inscriptions, highlighted in gold. Low walls of unequal height, also made from the cobbles, branch out from this “like rays of the sun.”  the cobbles had been used to construct the pedestrian promenade along Na Příkopě street, at one end of Wenceslas Square, in the 1980s.  The fact that matzevot were used for the cobblestones became known after the fall of the communist regime in 1989.

A memorandum  signed between the city and the Jewish community mandated that the cobbles be removed and taken to the Zizkov cemetery.

Photos may be seen at: https://prazsky.denik.cz/zpravy_region/nahrobky-ktere-skoncily-v-dlazbe-se-promenily-v-pamatnik-20220907.html

September 19 – Tina LaFreniere, Connecting Faces Through Time – How to Use Related Faces for Identifying Unknown People in Photos

Tina is a graduate of The University of Houston where she earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Finance. She is a former Assistant Vice President and Production Manager for a mortgage brokerage firm in Dallas, Texas. Tina chose to leave her career to raise her children, but soon found herself as a Montessori School teacher and later substitute teaching in her local public schools. Tina is passionate about educating and creating opportunities for children. She has volunteered for FIRST™ Robotics for over 13 years and served on the West Florida Regional Planning Board for many years.

Family has always been of utmost importance to Tina, and she has a great love of puzzles and history, so taking up genealogy as a hobby over 15 years ago seemed a natural fit. It is this passion for preserving not only her own family history, but everyone’s family history that led her to develop the idea for Related Faces. After inheriting thousands of photos, with hundreds being unmarked, she knew that other people must be in the same position as she was. She was determined to discover the identities of as many people in her photos as she could, and being the wife of a technology executive, she was certain she could apply technology in a positive way to help people discover the unknown people in their photos.

She began development of Related Faces in 2018, filed for the associated patents in 2020 and launched Related Faces in February of 2022. It is her ardent wish that Related Faces helps people discover as many unknown faces in their photos as possible.

Tina is a graduate of The University of Houston where she earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Finance. She is a former Assistant Vice President and Production Manager for a mortgage brokerage firm in Dallas, Texas. Tina chose to leave her career to raise her children, but soon found herself as a Montessori School teacher and later substitute teaching in her local public schools. Tina is passionate about educating and creating opportunities for children. She has volunteered for FIRST™ Robotics for over 13 years and served on the West Florida Regional Planning Board for many years.

Family has always been of utmost importance to Tina, and she has a great love of puzzles and history, so taking up genealogy as a hobby over 15 years ago seemed a natural fit. It is this passion for preserving not only her own family history, but everyone’s family history that led her to develop the idea for Related Faces. After inheriting thousands of photos, with hundreds being unmarked, she knew that other people must be in the same position as she was. She was determined to discover the identities of as many people in her photos as she could, and being the wife of a technology executive, she was certain she could apply technology in a positive way to help people discover the unknown people in their photos.

She began development of Related Faces in 2018, filed for the associated patents in 2020 and launched Related Faces in February of 2022. It is her ardent wish that Related Faces helps people discover as many unknown faces in their photos as possible.

Handout in separate email.

The U.S. and the Holocaust will premiere on PBS September 18, 2022. Check with your local cable provider for the station. The U.S. and The Holocaust, a new three-part , six-hour documentary directed and produced by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, explores America’s response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history. Americans consider themselves a “nation of immigrants,” but as the catastrophe of the Holocaust unfolded in Europe, the United States proved unwilling to open its doors to more than a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people seeking refuge. Through riveting firsthand testimony of witnesses and survivors who as children endured persecution, violence and flight as their families tried to escape Hitler, this series delves deeply into the tragic human consequences of public indifference, bureaucratic red tape and restrictive quota laws in America. The series will air September 18, 19 and 20, at 8:00-10:00 p.m. eastern/pacific 7:00-9:00 PM Central (check local listings) on PBS, https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/