This is a reminder of our upcoming meeting, Tuesday May 8th, 7pm at the Family History Library.
Todd Knowles is presenting The Hidden Treasures of FamilySearch.org.
To register to attend via webinar for this session, please visit this link.
We’d also like to remind everyone who attends the meeting to pay their dues for 2012. The web site is almost ready to accept payments online and the announcement for that should be made at the meeting.
The next meeting of UJGS will be Tuesday, May 8th, from 7-9pm MDT, at the Family History Library. We will meet in the main floor classroom.
Our speaker will be our very own Todd Knowles, presenting The Hidden Treasures of FamilySearch.
Many times, the search for our ancestors leads us to records we either can’t access or are unavailable. This presentation will help open up the hidden treasures of FamilySearch.org and hopefully bring to light collections where the records of our ancestors can be found.
After a successful test run at our last meeting, this one will be our first live broadcast webinar. Anyone may attend. Register at this link. The session will be recorded and made available to members at a later date.
If you have never attended a webinar, or specifically a gotowebinar session, you may view an introductory video online.
See you there!
The Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Washington (JGSGW), in partnership with the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington (JHSGW), is raising funds to design, print, and distribute a new brochure about Jewish history in Arlington National Cemetery (ANC). It will include information about prominent Jews buried in the cemetery and discuss Jewish burial rites in relation to the cemetery with touches of the history of Jews in the military. Special monuments like for those for Space Shuttle astronauts, Confederate soldiers, and the new Jewish Chaplains Memorial will be included.
In 2008, JGSGW embarked on a project to index the Jews at rest in Arlington National Cemetery. The team of volunteers walked the grounds of the cemetery and photographed all markers bearing a Magen Dovid (a Jewish star). A database was created and is searchable at http://anc.jgsgw.org/index.htm. The data and photos were also donated to JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR). They currently have entries for 5,219 Jews buried in ANC.
In March 2012, JGSGW donated $3,000 to the effort to create a new brochure about the highlights of the tour the JHSGW has hosted for years of the Jewish sites and history at ANC. They are asking for donations to reach the goal of $10,000.
Donations may be sent to: ANC Fund, c/o JGSGW, PO Box 1614, Rockville, MD 20849.
This message was sent to us last month from JGSGW, with a photo of the new Jewish Chaplains Memorial. That picture can also be seen on their web site here.
Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness is back!
Begun in 1999, RAOGK was online for just over a decade, providing genealogists a list of volunteers in the US and internationally who could help with things like quick look-ups and cemetery photos. The site grew to have 4300 volunteers all over the world, helping genealogists reach local records that they otherwise could not obtain. Volunteers did the work for free, only asking for reimbursement for actual costs involved, such as photocopies or postage.
RAOGK’s creator, Bridgette Schneider, passed away in November 2011. Shortly before her death, the site experienced some problems and was taken offline. Facebook groups quickly emerged to try to take the place of this powerful resource.
But now it’s back, in the form of a wiki. (A wiki is a user-generated site; anyone can contribute to the content of a wiki, like Wikipedia.) The information from the web site was able to be saved and set up on the new wiki. Unfortunately, all the contact information for the volunteers was not publicly available and therefore is not on the new site.
Those who used the site in the past, or anyone who wants to be a new volunteer, is welcome to sign up for an account and become a RAOGK volunteer.
April 19th is Yom HaShoah. As with most Jewish holidays, it begins at sundown the evening before.
Yom HaShoah is a new holiday, designated by the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) in 1953, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. The full name is Yom HaShoah veHagevurah, the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and the Heroism. It occurs each year on the 27th of Nisan, except when adjacent to Shabbat, when it moves one day.
In Israel, a ceremony is held at Yad Vashem at sundown. Flags are flown at half mast. The entire day is very solemn. In the morning, sirens are sounded throughout Israel for two minutes when the entire country stops to pay silent tribute. Even on highways, drivers stop their cars and wait in silence. Public entertainment venues are closed by law.
Many Orthodox do not commemorate this date, instead using the 10th of Tevet or Tisha b’Av for remembrance.
Outside of Israel, commemorations range from synagogue services to community vigils and educational programs. Rituals are still being created and vary widely but usually include the lighting of a Yahrzeit (memorial) candle and recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish.
In 1980, the US Congress designated an eight day period of The Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust (DRVH), beginning the Sunday before Yom HaShoah and continuing until the following Sunday. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum designates a theme for each year’s programs. For 2012, the theme is Choosing to Act: Stories of Rescue, and DRVH is from April 15-22.
In 2005, the United Nations also designated an International Holocaust Remembrance Day for the 27th of January.
Most of this information and more can be found at some of the following web sites: Wikipedia, Jewish Virtual Library, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
This summer, the 32nd IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy will take place in Paris, France, 15-18 July.
Early bird registration has been extended until April 10th, so if you are planning to go, you’ve got just a few days left to get the lower rate.
Details about the conference, including the schedule, hotel, and tour information, are available on the web site.
Friday night begins the holiday of Passover, or Pesach in Hebrew. Passover lasts for eight days, but like most Jewish holidays, it begin at sundown. No work is permitted on the first two days and the last two days of the holiday.
Passover commemorates the Exodus of Jews from Egypt. The first two nights involve the Seder, a family meal filled with rituals and the reading of the Haggadah. The Haggadah tells the story of the Exodus from Egypt and explains some of the practices and symbols of the holiday.
As with some other holidays, the observances in Israel differ from the rest of the world. In Israel, Passover only lasts for seven days, the Seder is only on the first night, and work is not permitted on the first and last days.
A significant observance of Passover involves avoiding Chametz, which is any leavened food, commemorating when the Jews left Egypt in a hurry and did not have time to let their bread rise. Chametz includes anything made from the five major grains of wheat, rye, barley, oat, and spelt. Ashkenazi Jews will also avoid rice, corn, peanuts, and legumes. Not only can Chametz not be eaten, it must not be owned or even fed to pets or other animals. Before Passover, Jews will dispose of their Chametz by cleaning the entire house of it. A formal search for Chametz will occur before the first Seder where any remaining Chametz is burned. One such tradition is to place pieces of bread to be found, which are then swept up with a feather, to ceremoniously finish cleaning the house.
Depending on their level of observance, some Jews will cover all kitchen surfaces and kasher all of their kitchen items, or have an entirely separate set of dishes, utensils, pots, and pans just for the holiday.
Since bread is not allowed, Jews will each Matzah, unleavened bread, made simply from flour and water and cooked very quickly.
Some of the information in this article was found at Judaism 101, where more details about the holiday can be found. For those interested, About.com has a list of Haggadahs (Haggadot in Hebrew) that are online and can be downloaded free.
If you’ve been trying to access the census at http://1940census.archives.gov/ and you’re still having trouble, so you’ve been waiting for another site to have the images you need, your wait is over.
This morning, MyHeritage announced that they have images for the entire 1940 US Census online now and are continuing to index. As of this article, it appears that Bristol County, Rhode Island is still the only index available, but the day is young.
Fold3, formerly known a Footnote, is offering all of their World War II content free for the month of April. You can search from their World War II page.
I did a search on just the surname Feldstein. The first page of results were all draft registration cards from the fourth registration, known as the “Old Man’s Draft”, because it targeted men who were aged 45-64 at the time. The second page produced many draft registrations and a few other things, including one for Mathausen Death Books.
The draft registrations may help in the search for 1940 census records, providing addresses from April 1942 of men born between 28 April 1877 and 16 February 1897.
MyHeritage has just announced that they have two million 1940 US Census images online, and the first searchable index.
From their press release:
MyHeritage, the most popular family network on the web today, announced the availability of the first indexed records from the 1940 US Census, searchable for free by names, facts, and other criteria, on http://www.myheritage.com/1940census. In addition, MyHeritage has published two million images of the 1940 US Federal Census out of the total 3.8 million, with complete availability of all images expected in less than 24 hours.
The highly anticipated searchable indexed records and images are amongst the very first to appear on the Internet as millions of people rush to satisfy their curiosity and access one of the most significant and meaningful sets of historical records ever to be released. The first indexed records come from Bristol County in Rhode Island, with a deluge of additional records to be added by MyHeritage each day. The images currently available … cover all of New York, California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, Rhode Island, Missouri, Wyoming, and Nevada. Images for additional states are added every hour.
MyHeritage is the only provider to make the 1940 US census searchable in 38 languages. … The census images are also currently available on the additional historical content sites owned by MyHeritage on http://worldvitalrecords.com/1940census/ and http://familylink.com/1940census/ – with initial searchable indexes expected to be live soon on these web sites, and to grow throughout 2012.
While genealogists around the world are searching for their relatives by using addresses to look up enumeration districts, then scanning through pages of records, previous US censuses have been indexed by several genealogy sites, including MyHeritage and WorldVitalRecords. MyHeritage is the first site to provide an online searchable name index of any 1940 US census records.
What this particular press release didn’t mention is the search technology available at MyHeritage. As records are indexed, they will automatically match up the names to the people found in users’ trees on their web site, alerting users to the census listings even before they may know the location has been indexed. The first states that MyHeritage made available for browsing on April 2nd were New York and Rhode Island.