An international expert on German Jewish genealogy told a Toronto audience recently that the vast horde of Nazi records that the Americans confiscated from Germany after WWII has finally been catalogued, making the material much more accessible to genealogists and historians. Peter Lande, who spoke to the Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada (Toronto) during Holocaust…
Tag: genealogy
Noyek Family Reunion
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Davida Noyek Handler, who lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, once owned a translation company, but gave it up in the early 1980s to concentrate on researching her family tree. Thanks largely to her research skills and perseverance, some 175 Noyek family members from six countries attended a first-ever family gathering at the Holiday Inn Yorkdale…
New book from JGS Toronto
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To mark its 25th anniversary, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada (Toronto) has published a book of 44 genealogy-related stories written by its members. The stories in Tracing Our Roots, Telling Our Stories are diverse and range freely over geography and time, encompassing both the Old World and the New from a couple of centuries…
Windows into Toronto’s past
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Towards the end of the 19th century, as Jewish multitudes left the Old World for the promising shores of the New, the Toronto neighbourhood of St. John’s Ward became a densely populated Jewish ghetto. Toronto’s population was counted as 86,415 in the 1881 census, with an average of 19 persons per acre. On Elizabeth, Chestnut,…
A daughter tells her mother’s story
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Shortly after her mother Frances died in 1989, writer Helen Epstein began visiting the university library near her Boston-area home, browsing through books on death, on Jews and on Central Europe. “I was mourning my mother,” she explains in her latest book Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History, “and if…
Finding your Jewish roots in Galicia
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In the 19th century, as author-historian Ronald Sanders once observed, Jews in Tsarist Russia tended to perceive their cousins in Galicia as almost a breed apart, “with their strange Yiddish accent and irksome quality of seeming coarseness combined with Germanic airs of cultural superiority….” I can’t (or won’t) comment on the relative truth of this…
Descendants of Michigan’s first Jewish settler ‘reunite’
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About 60 descendants of Ezekiel Solomons, an 18th-century Jewish fur trader who operated a trading post in what is now Michigan, gathered recently for a first family reunion at Fort Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City, Michigan, about 50 miles south of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Sheldon and Judith Godfrey, a husband-and-wife-team of historians from Toronto, were…
Translation guide spurred my Glicenstein breakthrough
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Two centuries ago, as part of a wave of reforms that swept Europe after the American and French revolutions, the locks were removed on the ghettos in which the Jews had been confined since medieval times, and the inhabitants were permitted to move freely in and out at all hours as they pleased. Whereas previously…
Yiddishkeit on the Yellow River
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One of the most remarkable Jewish genealogical record books is a 340-year-old parchment manuscript of more than 100 pages, belonging to the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnatti. Dating from about 1660, the manuscript records the lineages of the eight Jewish clans then in Kaifeng, China. All of the city’s roughly 1,000 Jews used only seven…
The International Institute of Jewish Genealogy
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A group of eminent Jewish genealogists recently announced the formation of a new facility, the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy, that will be housed in the Jewish National and University Library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Although still in an early stage of development, the Institute’s board expects it to become a major force…
