Call to Meeting – February 27

Scheduled just in time for those arriving early to RootsTech, we will have Daniel Horowitz, the Genealogy Expert of MyHeritage, speaking to us about Why is my Grandmother’s Record Private? on February 27th at 6pm in the Main Floor Classroom B at the FamilySearch Library (formerly known as the Family History Library). We will also be broadcasting via Zoom for those who can not be there in person.

About the presentation: Searching for family records can be frustrating, especially when you discover that the records that may hold the answers to all your questions are in an archive that won’t grant you access. Why are some records kept in the dark while others are freely available? In this lecture, Daniel will share his extensive personal experience tracking down restricted records and his knowledge of the various privacy regulations around the world. He’ll show you some strategies for accessing hard-to-get records… and why you may need to wait another 100 years to get your hands on the ones you are missing.

About Daniel: Dedicated to Genealogy since 1986, he was the teacher and the study guide editor of the family history project “Searching for My Roots” in Venezuela for 15 years. Daniel is involved in several crowdsource digitization and transcription projects and holds a board level position at the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA). Since 2006, Daniel has been working at MyHeritage liaising with genealogy societies, bloggers, and media, as well as lecturing, and attending conferences around the world.

Please note the earlier start time at 6pm, as the FSL hours are not late enough for our usual meeting time. If you’re in Utah, whether a local, a society member, or just visiting for RootsTech, we’d love for you to join us in person. Masks are requested.

Or you can register here to attend via Zoom. We will not be able to test the technology on location before the meeting, so we apologize in advance for any technical difficulties.

Genealogy Education Around the Internet

You probably already know this, but there are genealogy events happening online all the time, especially since 2020. Today we’re sharing a few that sounded quite interesting, but there are so many more. All of the events listed here are free. We have listed the advertised time and the Mountain time, just in case we got any of those wrong.

And some that are on YouTube; we’re not aware if any of these have a limited time to view them.

  • Forgotten Holocaust: A Journey to Transnistria, English subtitles, from Institute for Germany Culture and History of Southeastern Europe at Ludwig-maximilians-Universitat Munchen, a film from 2019 about a girl from Czernowitz who survived (35 minutes) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGZaSXLzIjk

Don’t forget that RootsTech is right around the corner. Those in Utah can attend in person, but the virtual tickets are free – https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/

And finally, UJGS’s next meeting will take place just before RootsTech, in person (and virtual), at the FamilySearch Library, formerly known as the Family History Library, on Monday, 27 February. Our speaker will be Daniel Horowitz, Genealogy Expert at MyHeritage. We’ll probably be starting at 6pm, instead of our usual 7pm. More details to come.

Call to Meeting

On 16 January 2023 at 7 pm (Mountain Time), our own Todd Knowles will speak to us on Jews of the Caribbean.

W. Todd Knowles is a deputy chief genealogical officer at FamilySearch, where he has worked for 22 years. His own journey in family history began by searching for his great-grandfather, a Polish Jew. From those early beginnings, the Knowles Collection was created. This collection now houses the genealogical records of 1.5 million Jews.

Zoom link to follow.

IAJGS booth at RootsTech

IAJGS is planning to participate at Rootstech in 2023 as a Society sponsor with both a virtual and in-person booth. Most of the IAJGS board members will be attending RootsTech.

We are hoping that some of your JGS members would be willing to volunteer to help staff the booth. There will be space for Utah JGS to exhibit some material you would like to share with potential members.

Please let me know if you have any questions and if your group can help.

Emily Garber

Board member, IAJGS

Phoenix, AZ

I told Emily that I would pass this along to our membership. Great opportunity to talk about genealogy!

the #LastSeen Project notice from IAJGS

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 notice from IAJGS

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.

IAJGS on French Genealogy

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