Clay in My Boots: A Romp Through My Genealogical Past

  Happy New Year Family, As I mentioned in last year's genealogy letter I co-taught a three-day class on Jewish Genealogy in June for my Temple, Beth Ami. Unfortunately, it was taught over Zoom because of the pandemic, however class went extremely well and I received wonderful reviews.    Based on our performance we were invited to teach a 1/2 day class to our local Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington.    I'll also be solo teaching a 4 evening class for the Vitality Society in January. ( bit.ly/vsgenealogy ), thanks to a referral from our cousin Canter Daniel Singer of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan.   I'd like to welcome Dan to the family, he is my 5th cousin 1x removed through the Highstein, Krieger, Shenker, and Khazen family-line as his Father's Singer family name was changed from Khazen a few generations back. Dan was nice enough to include me in a Zoom genealogical family meet-up this summer. I'd also like to welcome Ellen Davis to the

  http://sefer.ru/Birzhai.1-376%20(19.06).pdf Michael, Don’t know if you ever stumbled across this book? It is all about the old Jewish cemetery in Birzai. Too bad most of it is in Russian. Wish it was translated to English. There is a directory at the end and a map of the cemetery. Was surprised to see some familiar names there, but I didn’t see surnames. Would be interesting to at least match dates of death, if available, to the names in our trees. Cantor Dan Singer

August 4, 2020 Dear Kremenets district friends, We hope to "see" you at the annual meeting of the Kremenets District Research Group / Kremenets Shtetl CO-OP. The meeting will be online  Wednesday, August 12, 10:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time , as part of the  40th IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy . At the meeting, where we'll share news on current and future projects. I f you do plan to attend, please let us know by replying to this email. Reminders: Attendance at the meeting is free. If you have not registered for the entire conference, you'll need to  register  and select the “Free Limited Access” option. Then select our meeting: The "Free Limited Access" option also allows you to attend the IAJGS Annual Meeting & Awards, the IAJGS Leadership Seminars, and the JewishGen Annual Meeting. It also gives you the opportunity to share with other conference attendees up to 8 surnames and 8 ancestral towns in the conference Family Finder. The paid conference

Suzanne Fialkoff a friend, temple member, and co-genealogy junkie who has been doing research for 30 years, and I were invited to present a three week class as an Introduction to Jewish Genealogy , Tuesday 6/2, 6/9, and 6/16/2020 for the Live & Learn  series of classes at our synagogue,  Temple Beth Ami . The class was extremely well received with well over 40 participants each week. It was truly a mitzvah to me able to encourage our temple members to consider exploring their Jewish roots. Based on feedback, I know of a few folks who were inspired to get started or renew where they'd left off. We did not record the sessions for privacy reasons, but following are the handouts and responses to chat questions: Handouts Week 1:  https://bit.ly/LnLGenD1 Week 2: https://bit.ly/LnLGenD2 Week 3: https://bit.ly/LnLGenD3 Chats Week 1: https://bit.ly/LnLGenC1 Week 2: https://bit.ly/LnLGenC2 Week 3: https://bit.ly/LnLGenC3 Highlights of the class includes a few of mine

I just discovered my 6th Great-Grandfather, Movsha Tamshe from Vilkija, Lithuania on the Nemanus River. Carol and I drove along the Nemanus on our way back from the Baltic Sea towards Kaunas.  We visited a few town and villages as this is where our guide's Grandmother lived all of her life. She was a righteous Lithuanian gentile recognized by Yad Vashem. I found him while looking at a Census Record for his son Iosel Tamshe. When adding records into Ancestry, some times people in the notes aren't recognized by the program and don't get added to your tree. Now I get to go back to my Census records and see who else I can find. Iosel was born in 1766, so I guess Movsha was born in 1745 +/-

While we are at home waiting for the quarantine to be lifted, I've been taking the time to do some cleanup of my Genealogy information stored in Ancestry.   One of the features that I recently learned about was how to add events to an individual's life-story using images. Artist::Alex Levin Above is an image I added to my 2nd Great-Grandfather Shmuel SHNAYDER to show his occupation as a Tailor.  I added the same image to my Grandfather Mike, his father Yashua, his father Shmuel, his father Zelik David all who census records show were tailors. Likewise, I've added dentist images to my father and maternal Grandfather. I've also added photos to represent merchants, taverns keepers, and retailers.  Its nice to include some personal touches to my ancestors as I dig for information on their lives and occupations. I've also added events to show the expansion of railroads across Eastern Europe as it effected my ancestors emigration path to America. Another important event w

When doing Genealogy, you often run across folks who reach out to you because they have a DNA match, because of a shared family name, or there is an ancestral town in common. When this new "cousin" reaches out to me, I enjoy trying to find a shared ancestor and/or help them along their research journey.  I welcome the opportunity to explore a branch of my family that has laid dormant for a few months or years. Some of my latest research has been the following: - A "cousin" in Florida found that he had an ancestor married in to my OKS family from Lutzk and Kremenets Ukraine ... but we also had a DBA match.  So we tried to explore how maybe those married ancestors might also have had shared ancestors. - A "cousin" in New York has a DNA match, but the only surname that matched was KHAZAN, however our DNA matched on my fathers side of the family and KHAZAN is on my mother's side. We also found that he had some BASS relatives on his family tree, so t

https://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/kremenets/kremenets.html