KehilaLinks at JewishGen

JewishGen.org (a favorite website for those researching their Jewish ancestry), offers many resources, as I have shared previously. I receive occasional emails noting updates to the KehilaLinks project and I thought I'd share links to my husband's ancestral communities in one blog post for reference.

What is KehilaLinks? 

From the website: "KehilaLinks is a project facilitating web pages commemorating the places where Jews have lived. KehilaLinks provides the opportunity for anyone with an interest in a place to create web pages about that community. These web pages may contain information, pictures, databases, and links to other sources providing data about that place."

These pages are coordinated by volunteers. Some have more information than others. And there are not pages for every community, but where there is a page, it can provide additional background to your research.

I found the following:

Iaşi, Romania where Morris and Max Goldstein came from.

Shytomir/Zhitomir/Zhytomyr, Ukraine where Simche Segal came from.

Husiatyń/Gusyatin, Ukraine (formerly part of Galicia, Austria) where the Lewites / Levitt family came from (Max, Emanuel, and Sophie).

Farming Communities of NJ (specifically, Woodbine, New Jersey) where the Goldsteins and Levitts settled and where my mother-in-law grew up.

There is not a page for Hőgyész, Hungary, where Anna Honenvald's family was from. The KehilaLinks page for Hungary will show any updates and additions.

There is also not a KehilaLink page for Bonyhád, Hungary, but there is a Yizkor Book page which references Bonyhad: a destroyed community; the Jews of Bonyhad, Hungary, a book by Leslie Blau, from which a KehilaLink page could probably be created. This is where the Hollander family was from, and where the Handler family was originally from before an ancestor moved from there to Ljuba (now in Serbia).

Yizkor Book Project is another wonderful resource from JewishGen. Yizkor books, usually put together by survivors of the Holocaust, were written after the Holocaust as memorials to Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust.  They might contain descriptions and histories of the community, biographies of prominent people, and lists of people who perished. I do own the book for Bonyhád, which gives a wonderful sense of what the community was like before the war.

There don't appear to be any pages for communities in what is now Serbia and Croatia. The Handler family, before immigrating to Akron, Ohio, came from Ljuba, near Erdevik, Serbia, and Ilok, Croatia.

Have you explored the KehilaLinks pages for your Jewish ancestral community? You won't necessarily find your family name, but if you do find your community in this database, you can learn more about the history of the community and explore a variety of different resources.

Wedding Wednesday ~ Adolf Handler and Sali Handler, 1882

Here is another one of the records that the researcher from Šid, Serbia, shared with me.

This record, along with other records in this archives, helps to confirm the story that my husband's great-grandparents were related.

I have split the horizontal record into two sections, for easier reading.

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.