Sympathy Saturday ~ Adolf Handler's Death Record

As I recently noted, a researcher in Šid, Serbia, contacted me via JewishGen's Family Finder and shared with me some digital images from the local archives.

This is the death record for my husband's great grandfather, Aron / Adolf Handler. When he died, he left several adult children, but also four young children from his second wife: Rose, Josef, Sam, and Regina.

Again, I have taken the long horizontal entry and split it into two pieces for easier reading. And again, I got help with the translation from Google Translate.

Researching Jewish Ancestors? Use JewishGen Family Finder!

The Internet, and especially JewishGen, has made researching Jewish ancestors easier than it might have been just a few years ago.

In November, I shared Handler Birth Transcriptions at JewishGen with the news that the Hungarian Databases at JewishGen had added a new database of transcribed records from Erdevik, Serbia, which included some Handler ancestors.

JewishGen also has the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF), where a researcher can enter surnames and places being researched. In August 2012, I added some of my husband's family names in the JGFF. I just added a couple of new ones. This is what my Family Finder list looks like:

I am very excited to report that the Serbian researcher from Šid, Serbia, who transcribed the records from the Historical archive Srem - Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia, contacted me after seeing my interest in family from Ilok, Croatia (in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries), which is a community just over the border from Erdevik, Serbia, where he is researching. He has provided me with a family tree of information about the Handler family!

New Year's Resolutions

This is a cross-post from my other blog: From Maine to Kentucky, though there are a few differences.

I generally avoid New Year's Resolutions, but this year, with the announcement that Family Tree Maker is being retired, it prompted me to share my primary genealogy resolutions for 2016: By the end of 2016, I will have decided on a new genealogy software program and will have "cleaned up" my data, especially sources, in the process.

I have been reading about Thomas MacEntee's Genealogy Do-Over and I think that if I am exploring new genealogy software in 2016 then it's a good year for a Do-Over (or at least a Go-Over: I have over 5,000 people in my primary tree and I don't want to enter everyone from scratch). I also have a few separate family trees in Family Tree Maker for extended family members and I have to decide if I want to put all of these trees together into one big family tree, or if I want to keep separate trees for the extended family members and create a separate family tree for my husband and his ancestors.

See Genealogy Do-Over: 2016 Topics for more information. You can subscribe to this blog by RSS feed or by email. There is also a Facebook Group for the Genealogy Do-Over where members are very helpful.

If I don't blog as often as I did last year, it's because I'm working on cleaning up my Family Tree Maker database in order to transfer it to new software. I will blog about interesting stories that I find during this "Genealogy Go-Over" process.