What you get, when you ask a professor for help, is a lesson. I don't know how much this will help, but it should get you started.
Since I had a DNA test done a few years ago, I have had several requests from people who were interested in learning more about their family histories. While many of these people are Jewish, quite a few were Gentiles who learned, from their DNA, that they had Jewish ancestry and who wanted to find out more. This material was assembled as a way of giving them tools and encouragement to delve into their pasts.
Here is my advice to those who are researching their Ashkenazi Jewish roots:
Be patient.
It took me a long time to collect all the information I now have about my family and I still have many gaps to fill.
Don't wait another second to ask your relatives for help.
In 1977, everyone was watching the TV series "Roots" and discussing family history. I was moved to ask my parents to write down as much as they could about their families. Both my parents had amazing memories and they drew me a family tree with dozens of names, dates, and places. I copied the names on yellow labels and stuck them to a big sheet of oaktag to create one big family tree. But I was 28 years old and leading a busy life, so I carefully folded up the oaktag, put it away, and pretty much forgot all about it.
In 1995, my wife and I decided to take a trip to Eastern Europe. With the help of a good travel agent (this was a time when people didn't book their own flights or reserve their own hotel rooms), we made plans to fly to Romania and visit Ukraine, Poland, and Latvia. When I looked at the map, I realized that we would be just a few miles from where my father's mother and my mother's father came from, so I asked the travel agent to get us a car with a driver and someone to act as our guide. That trip was a story by itself, but it inspired me to do more research on my family history.
Names and dates are great, but it's the stories that make researching family history interesting. Ask people questions and listen to what they say. Better yet, grab a video camera and record an older person’s memories. These are considered oral historiesand many local and state historical societies will agree to keep a copy in their archives for future researchers.
Try to get your hands on any family photos and documents. I think that, in a lot of families, the immigrants' papers were left to the oldest child, so get contact your aunts and cousins and see what they have stored up in the attic. They will be happy to get rid of them.
Don't be surprised if nobody else in your family gives a damn about family history.
Some people care, some are interested, but my experience has been that most people really don't want to hear about it. I am in my 60s and I have a huge collection of information about my family's history and there is no one in my family to leave it to.
There are advantages and disadvantages to being Jewish.
Jews didn't have family names before Napoleon's time and there are no baptismal or christening records like gentile families have. But, you can trace names back (as I explained), most Jews were literate (boys especially had to read and write Hebrew, which means you may find original documents from way back) and search engines like JRI-Poland and JewishGen
http://www.jewishgen.org often reveal mothers' names and maiden names.
Names can be a problem.
Ashkenazi Jews often had three names. They were given "official" Hebrew names at birth to use when called to the Torah and when signing a marriage contract. They had a Yiddish name that people in their village/shtetl or city called them. And they often had a Yiddish diminutive (Shmuel could be Smulke to his friends). Then, when they traveled, they sometimes used name from the local ethnicity, so a Russian Jew might go by Sacha. And, of course, when they got to the new world, they picked an American name and Leyser became Louis.
The good news is that Ashkenazi Jews tend to pass down given names through the generations. I am named for my paternal grandfather and my maternal great-grandfather. They were, in turn, named for their grandfathers. If the same names keep popping up in a family with the same or a similar name, there’s a good chance you have found some relatives.
Family names sometimes change.
There is absolutely NO truth to the stories about name changes at Ellis Island. All the immigrants came with passports and papers that spelled out their names correctly and the immigration officials all spoke several languages fluently.
Name changes are handled by state courts. If you know where your ancestor lived in the US, you can try finding the name change records in state archives.
Try searching online using[State Name] + name change records.
Name Changes in New York State:
“If you know the year in which a person changed his or her name, you can find name changes by the Legislature and the courts listed in: General Index to the Laws of the State of New York, 1777-1901 (Albany: 1902), vol. 2, pp. 1309-87
or
and in a supplement for period 1902- 1907 (Albany: 1908), pp. 469-567.General index to the laws of the state of New York, 1902-1907, ...New York (State)pp. 469-567.
or
Name Changes in New Jersey:
New Jersey Legal Name Changes, 1847-1947
Translations can be tricky.
Our Ashkenazi ancestors spoke Yiddish as their first language, but they also knew Hebrew/Aramaic for praying and whatever the local language was.
Unless you are fluent in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, etc. you are going to be searching for information in translation or transliteration.
We now have standard spellings for Yiddish
http://www.yivoinstitute.orgwords, but you may find dozens of variations. My grandmother was a Zatulove, daughter of a Zatulovsky, and I found nearly 50 different spellings of those names. Be patient and learn to use truncations and
SoundExhttps://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Soundexto search for names phonetically.
Type words using Hebrew/Yiddish fonts.
You will need a special font to type in Hebrew or Yiddish. Download Yiddish fonts from
https://www.wfonts.com/font/ain-yiddishe-font-traditional. The traditional font will work for things like coping a tombstone inscription or for entering words into Google translate. You will need the cursive only if you want to work on personal letters.
Remember that Yiddish and Hebrew are written from çççright to left, so the return and delete keys will be reversed.
To use a Yiddish or Hebrew font after you’ve installed it:
On a Windowscomputer:
1) Click the 'Start' button and navigate to the 'Control Panel.' Select 'Regional and Language Settings' icon.
2) Click 'Languages' tab in the pop-up window. Check the box 'Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages (including Thai)' then click 'Details.'
3) Click Installed services —> 'Add' and a pop-up window will appear with a drop-down box to select languages. Choose Hebrew.
4) Click 'Key Settings' to confirm the key strokes that will allow you to toggle back and forth between Hebrew and English (the default is left alt+shift). Click 'Apply' when done.
On an Apple computer:
1) Open Keyboard in the System Preferences menu.
2) Add Yiddish or Hebrew in the left-hand panel by clicking on the + plus and selecting the language you want.
3) Check Show Input menu in menu bar. You can then use the Menu Bar to switch from English to Yiddish and back and use the Keyboard Viewer to help you type.
Typing in Yiddish
• If you only need to enter a few characters, click on the tab labeled 'Insert' on the overhead ribbon, followed by 'Symbol.' Select your Hebrew font in the drop-down box, highlight the desired Hebrew character and click 'Insert.'
• For anything longer than a word or two, use the left alt+shift command and type in Hebrew. Word will automatically correct right-to-left phrases and sentences within an English-language left-to-right document. You can get more help at:
Yiddish-QWERTY Keyboard Viewer
Translating from Yiddish or Hebrew
Google Translate is fairly easy to use. Open a browser and go to
translate.google.com. Then, switch to your Yiddish or Hebrew keyboard and type in the left box. Set the right box to English, and Google Translate will give you the English.
Jewish Names
Given Names
Family Names
Learn more about Jewish family names at “Jewish Surnames Explained” by Bennett Muraskin on Slate.com:
and
and
Newspaper accounts
These can be awesome (One of my great-uncles stopped an armed robbery! One ancestor was a sod buster in western Kansas!). They can also be distressing (another relative was busted for running an illegal lottery).
One real advantages of newspapers is that they run obituaries which often contain information about birthplaces and relationships as well as biographies. Start by using a person’s nameand the word obitin a search engine. If you know where the person died, add the name of thecityor stateto narrow down your search.
The US Library of Congress has a website called Chronicling America, where you can
search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about a particular American newspaper. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
Your public library may give you access to other resources:
nSearch
AncestryLibrary’s (available in-library only through subscribing libraries) census collection by year and enter as much information as you know. Once you find the correct result, you can view and print the original document.
nFind census records in
HeritageQuest (the 1930 census isn’t completely indexed) for the state, county, and township where your family lived.
nUse NewspaperARCHIVE to search for people by name, year, and location
nNews stories can be found through EBSCOHost Newspaper Source One
Cemetery Records
Death Records
One really good resource for researching a death record in America can be found at the Online Searchable Death Indexes and Records website at
https://deathindexes.com.This website is a directory of links to websites with online death indexes, listed by state and county. Included are death records, death certificate indexes, death notices and registers, obituaries, wills and probate records, and cemetery burials.There is a link on that site to an Obituaries Research Guide that may be useful.
Jewish tombstones
These can be very useful. Jewish tombstones usually give the name of the deceased's father and sometimes the mother's name and her maiden name.
Landsmanshaftn and burial societies
Jewish immigrants are often buried in cemetery plots owned by societies (landsmanshaft) comprising people from the same town in Europe. (I found out my great-grandfather came from Fastov because he's buried in the Fastover Society section).
Hometowns can help a lot
Many towns in eastern Europe have different names in different languages and that can make it hard to find them on a map. The town the Zwickels came from was called zlo-zitch, according to my dad, and it took me a lot of searching to figure out that this was the Yiddish name for the city known as Zolochiv, Ukraine. Be creative in spelling and pronunciation!
Shtetls
“The word “shtetl” is Yiddish, and it means “little town.” Shtetls were small market towns in Russia and Poland that shared a unique socio-cultural community pattern during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Shtetls ranged in size from several hundred to several thousand residents. Forests and fields often surrounded these small towns. Gentiles tended to live outside of the town, while Jews lived in the town proper. The streets were, for the most part, unpaved, the houses constructed of wood. Public spaces included synagogues (often wooden), the beit midrash (study house), shtiblekh (smaller, residential houses of prayer), a Jewish cemetery, Christian churches (Russian Orthodox or Roman Catholic, depending on the location), bathhouses, and, of course, the marketplace.”
Wikipedia also has a List of shtetlsyou may find useful. Keep in mind that 25% of Eastern European Jews lived in cities, notin shtetls.
The Russia/Poland/Galicia/Austria-Hungary maze
Without writing a treatise on the history of Eastern Europe, let me try to explain the geography of the Ashkenazi Jews. If your ancestors came from Russia, Prussia, Poland, or Austria, this may help clarify things.
Before Napoleon’s time, these were separate countries and Jews lived in all of them. Near the end of the 1700s, Poland was split up between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The area known as Galicia (now split between Poland and Ukraine), was divided by treaty between Austria and Russia. This treaty brought millions of Jews into the Russian Empire.
The Russian Jews were forced to live in a separate section of western Russia, called the Pale of Settlement. A few did manage to live outside the Pale, usually in big cities, with special permission from the authorities. In the early 1800s, the Russian government set out to persecute the Jews, hoping to convert them or drive them out. They were denied permission to marry, drafted into the brutal Russian army, and ground into poverty. In 1881, the Czar was murdered and the persecution of the Jews got much worse. Millions of Jews fled west, many coming to the USA.
The Austrian Jews in the western part of Galicia became one minority in a diverse empire that also included Christians and Moslems. They were treated as well as any minority group and were not officially persecuted the way the Russian Jews were. In 1867 Austria and Hungary joined to form the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
After WWI, Poland was re-created and Austria and Hungary became separate countries.
So, your ancestors may have come from a town with a different name in Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Ukranian, and German (the language of Austria). Be patient and be creative!
Mapping can help locate a hometown or local region
One technique that worked for me when searching for hometowns was creating a “mash up” map. This is the kind of thing they do on the TV show Numb3rs—marking up a map to find a pattern.
I started with JRI-Poland, searching for family names, and from that I made a list of every town that had someone with the family name. Then I used Google to get alternate spellings of the town names and the latitude and longitude for every town.
With Google Earth, a free application, I was able to locate towns by name or by latitude/longitude and to plot each one on a map. I did this with my great-grandparents and once the towns were plotted, it quickly became obvious that there was a pattern for each name, indicating a high probability that that’s where my ancestors came from.
More Search tools
http://jri-poland.org{5 million records from more than 550 Polish towns are now indexed and you can now see photos of the actual records. You will need to set up a free account with
jewishgen.orgto search the database.}
http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/city VirtualShtetl will help you find out more about the small Eastern European towns where Jews lived before WWII (NOTE: about half of the Eastern European Jews lived in cities, not small towns)
Holocaust victims and Survivors
If, unfortunately, you lost family members in the Nazi Holocaust, you can start at The Central Database Of Shoah Victims' Names
http://yvng.yadvashem.org. This is searchable, but not 100% accurate—a lot of duplications and misspellings.
Good luck.
Steven Zwickel
