One of the best and most popular software programs for genealogy is RootsMagic. Here to give us the latest on RootsMagic and RootsMagic. 8, which is the newest version, is the developer and the CEO of RootsMagic, Bruce Buzbee.
Genealogy Software versus Online Family Tree
Lisa: One of the questions I get a lot is how is having your genealogy on a software database, like RootsMagic, different or preferable to having just an online family tree?
Bruce: We get we get asked that a lot, why should I do this when I can keep my tree on Ancestry or FamilySearch, or MyHeritage?
No one can change your data
The biggest thing is having your data on your computer, on your own computer. That way you have complete control over it. You don’t have to be connected to the internet in order to access your data, and you don’t have to worry about somebody else coming in and changing your data. Some of the places you can put your data are global trees (where all users contribute to one shared tree). This means that other people can go in and change your information.
Control over your data without a subscription
Some of the online trees are not global, and you do have your own tree. But you have to pay per year to do that. And if you stop paying, all of a sudden, you’ve kind of lost some of that control over your over your data and linked records.
Backups
If you have your genealogy database on your own computer – the pictures, scanned documents, all of those things are on your computer – you can make backups of them, so they’re safe.
Protection from website changes
The other advantage to having it on your own computer is just the peace of mind that if that website has problems or goes down or something happens, you’ve still got your own copy. So, you don’t have to worry about that.
Reporting
Another advantage of having your data on your own computer is the fact that there are unique things you can do in a desktop program that there just isn’t the computational power to do on a website. Things like doing massive merges and generating large reports. Those are things that if your data is up on website, the only way you can get all of the data, for example, for your whole database in a report is to download all of that data into a report or have the website actually have the computational power to generate that report, and then send you that report over the internet. Both of those are very difficult to do, transporting that data back and forth or being able to generate enough computational power for each individual user. If you have thousands or millions of users you can’t, as a website, dedicate that much power to each one of those users. Whereas on your own personal computer, that computer is only working on your what you’re doing.
Lisa: That’s a great point. I mean, I’m a huge advocate of having what I call it my master family tree in my software on my computer for all the security reasons you mentioned.
You also talked about, which I think is so important, that ability to slice and dice and have so many layers of data that we can analyze. And I think the more ways we can look at our data the better so that we can learn more from it.
The Origins of RootsMagic
When did RootsMagic begin? I feel like it’s been out there forever.
Bruce: The actual RootsMagic program was released in 2003. I actually had written a program called Family Origins before that, which was kind of a predecessor to it. It was sold through another company. I did all the development and everything and they did the sales and marketing. That was release in about 1991. So, we went about 10 years as Family Origins, and probably about almost about 20 years as RootsMagic.
RootsMagic 8
Lisa: that’s amazing. And it’s gone through many different versions. Of course, the most recent release was RootsMagic. Eight. Tell us about that. When did that come out? And what are what are we getting now?
Bruce: RootsMagic 8 came out October 2021. In January 2021 we released a kind of public community preview. So, we did about 10 months of just letting users pound on it and complain about it and give us opinions – you should change this, this doesn’t work right, or I like this, or I don’t like that. We were able to use a lot of that information.
We released it in October 2021 and it’s by far our biggest update. It was a total rewrite. We basically started from scratch, because there were a lot of things in the earlier versions that could really bog you down. You’d go into the older versions of RootsMagic, and you’d be looking at a screen with people, and if you wanted to see your places you’d have to pop up another screen. If you wanted to see your sources, you’d have to pop up a separate screen to see your sources. And so, you had to go into these multiple levels of depth, screen after screen. to get to things. Then, when you were ready to get back to your people, you’d have to close each pop-up screen to get back. So that was one of the things that we really wanted to fix with version 8.
In version 8 one of the big things is kind of the overall workflow to doing things. Instead of always being on a person screen, and then hopping to sources, or hopping to places or hopping to tasks or hopping to something else, and then going into that, and then when you’re done backing out, and then to go to something else, you have to go back, what we did is we created multiple views in the program. So, there’s the person view. You can be looking at any person, and if you want to see the places, you just change your view to the place view. It’s not a separate pop-up window. You can switch to that view and switch right back. And you can switch from the person view to a place view, and then switch directly from that to source view, and then directly to a task view or the address view. You can switch between these views without having to always come back to that person view. So, it really speeds up getting things done.
Another great thing about these views is since they’re not a pop-up, whatever you’re looking at on that view stays on that view. So, if I’m looking at the places and I select a particular place, I see all the information about it. If I want to look at a source, I can switch to the sources. And when I switch back to that place view, I’m still working with the same place as I was before, I’m not having to go back into a place pop-up and then search for that place again to get back to where I was. It just it basically keeps in its’ memory a lot more things. You’re not having to search over and over for that same thing. When you’re on it, you’re on it.
Lisa: That makes a lot of sense. What you offer over an online tree is all of these different ways to look at our data.
Why Does RootsMagic Need Changing?
Is it that over the years with all the different updates those layers kind of accumulated and then it brings you to a place where it needs updating?
Bruce: Exactly!
And every time you come up with an update, we think ‘oh, we’re going to add this new feature.’ So, for example, in the past we added to do lists, and then we added research logs and then we added the ability to do more stuff with sources. Every time we added something it was like, ‘Oh, well, the best way to do that is to pop-up a new screen and put everything there.’ And every time you added a new feature, it just added another thing you had to, like going back and forth.
Now if we were to add a new type of feature, we don’t necessarily have to make a pop-up. We can create another view and make it always available so that you can switch in and out of it without losing your place within that view.
Lisa: So, it was a complete rewrite, and I know that it synchronizes with some of the online family trees websites. It had to have been an arduous process. You said that you went through months and months of user testing, which I think is fantastic. So many times, you look at a website, and you think they must never have run this past anybody who ever used it, because it doesn’t look like it runs the way a user would use it. How was that process for you? Was that a difficult decision to invest the time upfront, and have people wait until it can be launched the way you felt like it needed to be?
Bruce: We were still fixing bugs too. So, it wasn’t like we took a completely bug free program and asked users to try it out. They were finding bugs and reporting bugs, and they were also reporting this is overly complicated here to do. And so, there were places where we would tear something out and change it a little bit, or we would leave something the way it was working because we liked it.
Some of the users found it was harder than what they were used to. So, we went back and added functionality that was more similar to what they maybe were used to. Probably our biggest challenge even now is users that are coming from RootsMagic 6 or 7 that have been using it forever. All of a sudden 8 works different. It’s not the same, and they feel like ‘oh, this is harder to use’ when in reality, it really isn’t, it’s just different. We have new users that are coming over from other programs or from no program at all, and they overwhelmingly love the way it works. They love the way they can get around and switch to any view. They overwhelmingly love it.
It’s our own existing longtime users that seem to have the most issues with it, which is unfortunate. A lot of that is just because it doesn’t work the same as it used to. I’m the same way. I understand completely! For example, with my programming tool suite, if a new version of my programming tools come out, and they work quite a bit different than it was, I almost immediately hate it! But after I use it for a while, I’m like, ‘Okay, I guess I can see why they did this.’ But I had my I had my groove, and now my groove was disrupted. The hotkeys are not the same, for example. I used to be able to do all this, this, and this and something was done. Now it’s like, I have to do different alt keys, I have to click twice instead of hitting four Alt keys. And so, for them it feels like it takes longer, when in reality, there are fewer steps. It’s just not what somebody is used to.
Lisa: Right, change is always a little challenging!
Bruce: I understand it completely because I’m the same way.
Can RootsMagic Run on a Mac?
Lisa: Can we use this on a PC and a Mac?
Bruce: Yes. With version 8, we now have a native Mac version and a native Windows version. They both work exactly the same.
If you use one and then switch to the other, it looks exactly the same except it’s got little red, yellow and green dots instead of x’s. But yes, they have the same file format. They have the same set of commands.
Many times, you’ll have a software product that the Mac version and the Windows version are quite a bit different. That’s because they’re completely separate sets of code. You have one team developing Mac, and one team developing Windows. They look and work differently and maybe sometimes even have different file formats.
With this, they’re the same. They look and feel the same. The command structures are the same, the screens are the same, the file format is the same. In fact, when we sell the program, you get a key, and it’s good for both the Windows and the Mac version. So, if you have a Windows computer and a Mac computer, when you buy the program, you’re entitled to use both versions. You can install one on your Mac and one on your Windows computer.
Top Features of RootsMagic 8
Lisa: That’s terrific. So, we’ve talked about all the new great views, and that it works on both PC and Mac. That’s two great features. What’s your third favorite thing about the new program?
Bruce: Well, it’s a tie. It’s a tie between tasks, which are new, and our new report engine.
Reports
We rewrote our reporting engine. In the older version our reports were using a word processor control that we licensed. It had some limitations. It couldn’t create really large reports. And there was a bunch of things with it that we didn’t like, but we couldn’t fix because it was a third-party product.
When we switched to going both Windows and Mac, the product was only available for Windows, so we had to rewrite the report engine from scratch. It’s giving us a lot more flexibility to do things on reports in the future.
One of the things we can do in reports is instead of saving as a rich text file, we can save report as actual Word .docx files, an actual Word document. It comes into your word processor, whether it’s Word, or whether it’s Libre, or whatever you use. They can all read a .docx file. It’s a lot more structured. It’s not quite as rolling the dice that it will work as RTF as RTF was.
Tasks
Then with tasks, we kind of combined things in RootsMagic 7. We had to do lists. We had research logs, we had correspondence logs, we had all these things, which all were very similar. What we did is we kind of replaced those all with what we call tasks.
Tasks are super flexible. You just create a task, and that task in RootsMagic can link to almost anything. It can link to people, places, sources, citations, addresses, and media. What’s nice is, instead of having like a hardwired Research Log, where you go in and say I want to create a research log, and this is what it’s, and going in and manually adding items to that research, you can just create a task. You attach it to whatever people or families or events or sources or places you want. Then when it comes time to generate a report, you just say give me all the tasks that are attached to this group of people that are within 50 miles of this place. You end up with customized research logs. So, instead of having to create a fixed research log, and then adding individual items to it that only belong to that, you take these tasks that are attached to any number of things. Then you just tell it, give me a list of all the tasks for whatever criteria you want. The result is a completely customized Research Log, customized to do list, whatever you want to use it for.
That’s one of my favorites. It’s super flexible. It can be a little confusing to work with at the beginning. But once you kind of see what’s going on and the simplicity – that all you have to do is create a task and attach it to whatever you want – it’s great.
RootsMagic Help and Website Features
Lisa: Tell folks a little bit about the website. You guys have always been in the forefront of providing support and education for being able to use your program to its fullest capability.
Bruce: From the website, you can access, basically everything we have.
Help Chat
When you go to the website, down on the bottom corner, there’s a chat feature. You can chat with our tech support if you need help. They can answer questions and help you out.
RootsMagic Wiki
We also have a wiki. We’ve moved away from the online help of the past. You’ll find it on our website in the menu under Learn. It’s nice because it’s much better than help, for several reasons. One, we can keep it updated. With the old Help feature, if we change or add something, you don’t know about it unless we remember to update the Help file. Now, as soon as we add something, we can stick it on the wiki.
The other thing that’s nice about the wiki is that we can put videos and more graphics and links in there to other topics. Everything you could possibly want to know about how to use RootsMagic is there in the wiki.
Videos and YouTube Channel
We have tutorial videos and our YouTube channel. We have a bunch of YouTube videos on how to use the program.
Webinars
We also have the videos of webinars we’ve done. We’ve been slacking a little bit, the last few months, and we haven’t had a webinar recently. We need to get back on that. But all of the webinars that we’ve had, and we’ve recorded, they’re available up there to watch as well.
Online Community
We have an online community, a message board, that’s very active. We of course have a blog with articles on all kinds of help topics. And we have our email newsletter. That’s kind of where we notify people when there are updates or if there are things we need to contact them about. We do that mainly through our email newsletter. So, all of those things are available through the website.
New Website
We redid the website at the same time that we released RootsMagic 8. The old website was kind of clunky. It wasn’t mobile responsive. So, we redid it all.
User Groups
Oh, I guess we also have a list of user groups on our website, too. There are user groups all over the country, in fact they are worldwide. It also includes a list of people who want to start a user group. So, if somebody wants to start a user group in their area because there isn’t one, they can give us their name and contact information. We can put that up so people can connect easily and quickly.
Lisa: There is certainly a lot that’s new this year at RootsMagic. Bruce, thank you so much for stopping by. It’s been terrific talking with you!
In this “Blast from the Past” episode, Lisa gives voice to the era of silent films, in a unique approach to understanding her great-grandmother’s life. Her passion for this mostly-forgotten film genre comes through in her conversation with film archivist Sam Gill of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, California.
Don’t miss these fun segments, too:
A listener writes in after discovering a birth mom’s story in passport records (see what lengths he goes to in order to access the records!).
Just after RootsTech 2018, Your DNA Guide Diahan Southard reports on the latest DNA news you’ll want to know.
NEWS: DNA NEWS ROUNDUP
First up was MyHeritage, showing their support for the 7 million adopted individuals in the United States with their new DNA Quest campaign. MyHeritage will provide 15,000 DNA test kits to eligible participants free of charge, in order to help these adoptees use DNA to reunite them with their biological families. With this initiative they “hope to make this project a shining light for corporate philanthropy and an example to be followed by other commercial companies in their own lines of expertise to make the world a better place.” MyHeritage has assembled an advisory board of genetic genealogists and genetic counselors to help drive this project and ensure it meets the needs of the community. If you or someone you know is interested in participating, you can head on over to the DNA Quest website (www.dnaquest.com) to fill out an application. But you better hurry, the application deadline is April 30, 2018.
Next, addressing the biggest problem in genetic genealogy, namely the looming What Next? question facing millions of newly swabbed participants, MyHeritage announced the Big Tree ? a giant network of genetic and genealogy results that will automate much of the match comparison and tree searching to replace your head-scratching with light-bulb moments. They have already made significant headway on this project, as reported in the journal Science, which MyHeritage’s own chief scientific officer Yaniv Erlich collaborated on. The journal reports that the team of scientists successfully extracted public family trees from Geni.com (a MyHeritage daughter company), and then used a computer program to clean up and link the trees together. It sounds like MyHeritage will be adding genetic data to this kind of tree data in their Big Tree project.
MyHeritage isn’t the only company out to improve the DNA matching experience. UK based LivingDNA announcedthat they plan to add DNA matching to their popular origins test by third quarter 2018. When they launched in October of 2016, LivingDNA was not offering cousin matching, but opted instead to focus all of their resources on providing very detailed origins reports, including breaking down the UK in to 46 categories. In the months since their launch, they have been working on a genetic matching system, called Family Networks, that will appeal to a wide range of users and will “reduce the risk of human error and take away the tedious task of figuring out how each person on a user’s list are related to one another.” They are promising an experience that provides “a level of relationship prediction and specificity beyond anything currently on the market.”
So it sounds like if you are currently struggling with turning your DNA matches into genealogical discoveries, our testing companies want you to know you are not alone, and they are working hard to provide solutions to these problems. Time will only tell if they can succeed.
Diahan also provides answers to questions asked about this blog postannouncing updates to MyHeritage DNA matching technology and its new chromosome browser.
If you’re listening through the Genealogy Gems app, your bonus content for this episode is a marvelous soundtrack of silent film music, played live (you’ll hear audience laughter occasionally in the background) and supplied by Sam Gill at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum. TheGenealogy Gems app is FREE in Google Playand is only $2.99 for Windows, iPhone and iPad users.
GEM: INTRODUCTION TO SILENT FILMS
(Image above: a page from Lisa’s grandmother’s journal)
Genealogy Gems Podcast Episode #2 about transcribing family journals and letters was remastered inEpisode #134.
Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum: the website for this museum is packed with resources: links to Chaplin-Keaton-Lloyd film locations; the International Buster Keaton Society; Classic Images Magazine; a timeline and early history of film and more.
Films mentioned in this episode:
Diary of a Lost Girl starring Louise Brooks (watch trailer)
Shown here: Sam Gill and Lisa Cooke at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum on the day of this interview. Throughout their conversation, you hear the sounds of excited theater patrons filling the auditorium before a screening.
Sam Gill’s interest in silent film dates to 1966, when as a college student he traveled to Hollywood to interview his aging heroes from the silent screen comedy era. For more than 20 years, he was Archivist of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Margaret Herrick Library, where he established the Academy’s Special Collections and helped it grow to its current status as the preeminent repository for the study of American cinema. He is currently a Board Member of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum. Over the years, he has consulted on or otherwise contributed his expertise to numerous film festivals, museum film programs and film history books.
Sam recently sent us these delightful photos (below) of himself over the years:
(Image 1) 1966: His first trip to Hollywood
(Image 2) 1974: A news article about a research trip to Florida
(Image 3) 2017: A birthday party for Diana Serra Cary (Baby Peggy), the last surviving star of the silent screen, held at the Edison Theater of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum; also shown is Rena Kiehn, the museum’s publicity director and store manager
If you’re looking for a specific movie, start with a Google search with the name in quotations (and, if you like, anything else you know about it, such as an actor or director’s name or the year). You may find lots of results, including a Wikipedia page and film history write-ups, but if you want to WATCH it, limit your search results to Video.
You can also turn to free curated collections online, such as:
Netflix.com: Netflix subscribers can access the service’s little-known collection of silent films by entering the Netflix link for browsing its film categories and then the category specific to silent films, 53310:
Your local public library (search catalog: try searching for an actor’s name as author)
Ebay: May be the right place to purchase a hard-to-find title.Click hereto view current results for a search on silent films, filtered to include only movie/film items.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Lisa Louise Cooke, Host and Producer
Sunny Morton, Editor
Diahan Southard, Your DNA Guide, Content Contributor
Hannah Fullerton, Production Assistant
Lacey Cooke, Service Manager
Disclosure: This document contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting this free podcast and blog!
Native American genealogy research follows the same path that all good genealogy research does, but it also includes some unique records along the way. It’s a fascinating journey, and in Elevenses with Lisa episode 76 professional genealogist Judy Nimer Muhn (Lineage Journeys) joins Lisa Louise Cooke to pave the way. Judy will discuss:
Tribal and personal naming conventions
Tribal-specific resources
How geography impacts research
Native American genealogical records
and more…
Episode 76 Show Notes
Native American genealogy research follows the same path that all good genealogy research does, but it also includes some unique records along the way. It’s a fascinating journey, and in Elevenses with Lisa episode 76 professional genealogist Judy Nimer Muhn (Lineage Journeys) joins Lisa Louise Cooke to pave the way. Judy will discuss:
From the Article: “Native people were largely excluded from the federal census until at least 1860.”
Native American Research at FamilySearch Wiki
National Archives
Article by James P. Collins called Native Americans in the Census, 1860-1890 which will help you understand what you may be able to find during that time period.
Here you’ll find many resources including newspapers, photos and reports to congress and oral histories.
Judy found materials deep within the Library of Congress website using Googling strategies from my book The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox available exclusively at the Genealogy Gems Store.
Three ways to watch: 1. Video Player (Live) – Watch live at the appointed time in the video player on the show notes page. 2. On YouTube (Live) – Click the Watch on YouTube button to watch live at the appointed time at the Genealogy Gems YouTube channel. Log into YouTube with your free Google account to participate in the live chat. 3. Video Player above (Replay) – Available immediately after the live premiere and chat.
Each area of genealogy research comes with a unique set of challenges. Jewish genealogy is no exception, but thankfully there are fantastic websites and online resources available to help. Even if you don’t have Jewish ancestors, these resources may prove very helpful for researching Eastern European branches of your family tree. Many provide detailed maps and information about towns that have long since vanished.
In this week’s Elevenses with Lisa episode professional genealogist Ellen Shindelman Kowitt (Director of JewishGen’s USA Research Division and National Vice Chair of a DAR Specialty Research Jewish Task Force) joins us to share:
unique features that JewishGen.org has to offer
the best regional websites
what you need to do before you dig into these websites
You can watch here, or click “Watch on YouTube” to watch at the Genealogy Gems YouTube channel where you can also view the live chat by signing into YouTube with a free Google account.
Episode 57 Show Notes
Interview Transcript
Lisa Louise Cooke: When I think of Jewish genealogy, immediately my mind goes to JewishGen.org, and I was hoping you could start us off with an overview of that. I know that you’re involved with them and boy, do they have a lot to offer!
Ellen Kowitt: JewishGen is really the premier main source for Jewish records on the internet today.
It’s run as a non-profit and it’s actually a part of a museum on the lower side of Manhattan called the Museum of Jewish Living Heritage. It’s run by a professional executive director, Abraham Grohl, but then there are thousands of volunteers that participate as research division directors, who help to identify records, index records, and translate records because language is a big issue in Jewish genealogy.
They’ve developed some really great data sets that can be searched for free by anyone. There is no charge to search JewishGen. Similar to FamilySearch, they ask that you register for a username and a password, but they don’t sell your name and it’s not going to go anywhere past accessing that website.
JewishGen
They have different tools they have developed that are unique to searching Jewish records.
I think there are a lot of entry points into JewishGen. For a novice, particularly beginners who have not done a lot of research anywhere on the internet, it can be a little overwhelming. They have a unified search, which combines the data sets from hundreds of records into one search function, because you can search each of these data sets separately. But if you’re just browsing and curious, and just want to throw your names in, the unified search is a great place to start.
Something that is really exciting about it is that they’ve had these special algorithms developed that are unique to Jewish names and Jewish languages. I’ll mention the Jewish languages in a minute, but it’s similar to the National Archives in the United States, which developed what we call the Soundex, which is an alpha-numeric code assigned to your name. It helps you navigate other spellings to your name that are similar, but maybe your family didn’t spell it that way, but it could be found in a record that way. The American Soundex doesn’t always work on Jewish or mostly Eastern-European names, so these special Soundexes were developed on JewishGen that are now used throughout the Jewish genealogy world on other databases as well. One is called the Daitch–Mokotoff. Another is called the Beider-Morse, but JewishGen doesn’t call them that. When you go in, it’s blind to you.
You’ll put your name or your town name into the search engine and there is a form with fields that you can populate. It doesn’t matter if you’re spelling the names of your given name, your surname, or your town name correctly, because you’re going to be able to pick a couple of different ways to search in a drop-down menu.
The first one will be called “Sounds Like,” the second is “Phonetically Like,” and then it goes into “Starts With,” “Is Exactly,” “Fuzzy Match,” “Fuzzier Match,” and “Fuzziest Match.” My recommendation is always search on “Sounds Like” and “Phonetically Like” because those are Daitch–Mokotoff and Beider-Morse Jewish algorithms for Jewish names and places. So that’s really, really helpful.
Many times people coming to Jewish genealogy are just hung up on names, where they come from, and figuring out an immigrant’s place of origin. Because, think about it: nobody spoke English in the Russian Empire or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is where a majority of Jews came from after 1880. So, they’re speaking languages like German and Russian, Lithuanian and Polish, and even Yiddish, which is linguistically more like German although it is written with Hebrew letters.
These immigrants come to American ports and there could be an immigrant from another part of the world with a different kind of accent, like an Irishman. So, an Irishman in America listening to a Yiddish speaker from Russia – of course they’re going to butcher spelling the names. It’s just par for the course.
People can’t get hung up on the spellings of Jewish names, particularly the surnames and the towns of origin where they are emigrating from. Of course, those towns are important to narrow down and understand where they were, because that’s where you’re going to look for the records.
JewishGen’s Communities Database
That’s a second point about JewishGen that’s so helpful. They have a Communities Database, and that lists over 6,000 places where Jews mostly lived in the largest populations around Eastern Europe. In many of those places, Jews don’t live there anymore, but they will outline for you in different time periods where the records are or where they were.
We always refer to Jews coming from Russia because we see that on passenger manifests or census records. But a lot of times when you see Russia as a place of origin for a Jewish family, if they came before 1917, that was Russian Empire. The Russian Empire doesn’t exist anymore, and what was the Russian Empire pre-1975 is not Russia-proper today.
There are a lot of countries where your family could have come from, including Poland, because part of Poland was in the Russian Empire. Your family might actually be from Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, or Ukraine, or even some places in the south that don’t exist anymore. There used to be an area referred to as Bessarabia, and another one, Bukovina. These don’t exist anymore. Even Prussia, when you talk about the German Jews who came over, and this is true for non-Jews, too. There is no Prussian Empire anymore, and what was the Prussian Empire is now largely Poland, parts of Russia, and Germany of course. But it’s misleading that if your family spoke German and said that were Prussian, that they were German the way we think of Germany today. A lot of Jews came from Prussia, so that’s why I mention it.
Those are the key things about JewishGen. It helps with you the name complications and determining what other spellings there might be in records. It also helps you with locating these towns and what the administrative districts today would be.
How to Get Started in Jewish Genealogy Research
If you’re researching a Jewish family, it’s no different than any other American family, if you’re starting in America. You start with the civil records, the vital records, the census records, and the passenger manifests. None of these American records are divided by faith or ethnic group. So, a Jewish person, or if you’re researching a Jewish branch, should be starting the same way as any other American research. Start with yourself, work backwards, go through and exhaust all of the American records that you can, which will help you determine what those original names and place they came from are. That’s where JewishGen really helps you. It’s kind of like a 102 class. You have to do the American 101 records, and then when you’ve exhausted all of that, you jump to the Jewish records, which are largely available through JewishGen.
JewishGen Networking
And the big point about JewishGen is the networking, because there’s this huge discussion group. They are now on Facebook with a group.
They have something called the JewishGen Family Finder, where you can register the names you’re looking for and/or the towns. Likewise, you can search to see whom else is researching the same names and towns that you are.
Through the messaging on JewishGen, you can get in touch with them and say, “Hey this is my story. Can I see your tree?” or “Do you have any family photos?” or “Have you had any success finding records for the little town in the middle of Ukraine?” Or even, “Have you hired a researcher that was helpful in pushing your research back in this particular archive in Lithuania?” It’s a fantastic way to find people researching the same obscure, small areas of the world that you are.
Lisa Louise Cooke – That’s an amazing resource, and you’re so right that we still have to follow the basic genealogy methodology. We still need to go through those records here. It’s tempting – I know people will say, “Well I know they were Jewish” so they’ll want to jump into that, and yet you miss so many clues that would probably come in super handy once you get over to JewishGen and you’re ready for that.
Ellen Kowitt: Absolutely…I find people who come to Jewish genealogy as beginners have not done that. I’m often backtracking and teaching American research before I ever get to a single Jewish record. I think that it’s really important that people take a look at (American records).
If they’re not in the United States and they’re listening, Canadian records or British records, wherever you might be starting from. You need to start in the country where your person that you’re researching is located, with those records first.
JewishGen Research Divisions
Lisa Louise Cooke: That’s a great point. I know for my own Sporowskis who were German-East Prussians, really they’re out of Belarus. I’m pretty sure that even though my great-grandfather later was going to the Lutheran church in America, I think they were a Jewish family back in Belarus. JewishGen has been one of the few places to find information about some of these locations that have changed names and boundaries. It’s just an amazing resource in that way.
Ellen Kowitt: Belarus is a good example. JewishGen has maybe over 20 research divisions. I happen to be the director for what’s called the USA Research Division, and just to define that, it’s not census records and passenger manifests. It’s looking at records held at Jewish repositories that are in the US, like the American Jewish Archives or the Southern Jewish Historical Society.
There are research divisions geographically all throughout Eastern Europe and there is one for Belarus called the Belarus Research Division. If you click on their link from JewishGen’s drop-down menu, they have their own website and they give a lot of maps, from now and then, of what Belarus was, and lists of towns divided by province, or what was gubernia. There are ways to connect with people and search what their records are.
Here’s a little tip I have about Research Divisions and any project on JewishGen. If you don’t find what you’re looking for and you really think it might be there, or you’re spelling it wrong and it’s not showing up in the Soundex, contact whoever the person is on that record set or who the Research Division director is, or who the town leader is.
In Ukraine, there are hundreds of town leaders for these little towns and what we find is that the town leaders and the Research Division leaders often know or are holding onto records that are not online. If you’re not finding something, it’s free to send an email! Just inquire and say, “Do you know anything else about Grodno, Belarus in 1854? Or the name Cohen?” or whatever it is, and you just never know what these folks have because I have found there are a lot of offline lists that the experts know about.
Lisa Louise Cooke: That’s very good insider information. It’s true, as you go into your genealogy research you get more and more daring and send that email. All they can do is just not be available. But it sounds like those folks are more than happy to help. What a wonderful idea.
Regional Jewish Genealogy Resources
Lisa Louise Cooke: We were talking about specific regions and I’m sure there are all kinds of different things here, but what other types of websites might be out there for regional Jewish genealogy?
Ellen Kowitt: It’s a little confusing. There is kind of a hierarchy. It’s not coordinated by any organizing body, but there are three independently run Jewish database sites. When I say the names, sometimes people say, “Oh that’s part of JewishGen.” They’re not. They are run independently. The three are:
JRI-Poland which stands for Jewish Records Indexing Poland,
And what we used to call LitvakSIG, and SIG stands for Special Interest Group.
All three of these groups kind of have roots in JewishGen and then for different organizing reasons all wanted to organize as independent non-profits. But they share their data. Now, do they share all of their data? Do they share their data at the same time? Are they sharing it in the same place? The answers really vary. This is why, I always say, if you’re brand new, check out Unified Search on JewishGen.
Ancestryactually has some of LitvakSIG, some of JRI-Poland, and some of JewishGen’s records. Just recently LitvakSIG released some of their records to MyHeritage. So, there is some overlap back and forth on the data sets. But if you’re from these three particular geographic regions, I would not only be looking on Ancestry, FamilySearch, and JewishGen. I would always go to their original databases on each of their original websites.
LitvakSIG
LitvakSIGreally stands for Lithuania, but Lithuania today is really different than the geographic borders of Lithuania a hundred years ago. When you look at modern-day Lithuania on a map, if your family is coming from a part of Latvia or Belarus or an area of Russia that surrounds that area, you might want to look there. I have this corner of southwestern Lithuania that part of my family came from, but it has also been Prussian, it has been Suwalki, Poland, and it’s right near Belarus, but yet I found records in Lithuania in LitvakSIG. I have also found them in Suwalki from JRI-Poland. So, loosely when you define your location, consider what’s geographically around the modern-day borders. But LitvakSIG is predominantly Lithuania and a lot of Jews came from Vilnius and Kaunus and all these places up there.
JRI-Poland
The second one is JRI-Poland. They are fantastic in their records acquisition. They’ve had partnerships with the Polish state archives. They give locations of microfilm that are for Polish municipalities at the FamilySearch digital collection. They have tons of volunteers who have worked there for 30 years. It’s extremely extensive.
For listeners who don’t know, the Polish State Archives has largely gone online, so a lot of vital records are digitized and you can go right to the record. Now, it may be in Polish or Russian, but you can get to those records for free, just like you can on FamilySearch sometimes.
JRI-Poland is just a powerhouse for getting access, using their indexes first to locate if there are records for your family in a town, using the Soundexes that are the Jewish Soundexes, and then getting to the original record. I just love JRI-Poland.
And be loose on those borders because it’s going to include Suwalki and those areas north on the Lithuanian-Russian border. Even the Belarus border and that Prussian border on the other side. For JRI-Poland, ‘cast a broad net’ is areas that were ever considered Poland, even on the southern side, too.
Gesher Galicia
The third one is called Gesher Galicia, also run independently, and also shares data with JewishGen. Galicia does not exist anymore. It was a designation for an area that today you would think of on a map as western Ukraine and eastern Poland, and a lot of Jews lived in Galicia. Unique to that area is that it was Austro-Hungarian Empire at one point, so the records are in German, not so much in Russian or in Polish.
But Gesher Galicia has got a fantastic search engine on their database, and they are another powerhouse that is just continuing with their volunteer army of adding so many great data sets.
They’re really good, too, at allowing you to list what towns you’re researching if you join, and I think they have a small membership fee. In fact, each of them have a membership fee that they’ve added on, and I think that just gives you access to records maybe a little bit sooner.
These three are often lumped in with JewishGen but are really organized as separate organizations and they acquire records and index them in a different way.
Lisa Louise Cooke: That’s a great overview and it reminds us, like with all genealogy, that when you see partners working together and they end up with records on multiple sites, I find myself wanting to look at those records, even if they’re the same, on every site. You never know what the nuances are. You never know if their image is clear. There are so many different possible variations.
Jewish Records at Ancestry.com
Ellen Kowitt: There are! I have taken a deep dive on Ancestry’s records of JewishGen. They started an arrangement awhile back, I think in 2008, and JewishGen gave them a bunch of records in return for Ancestry housing their servers. So a great business arrangement for a little non-profit like JewishGen, but confusing for people like researchers that only use Ancestry and never look any further.
Certainly if you’re finding things on Ancestry (Jewish Records at Ancestry)that are JewishGen, you want to go to JewishGen and search also because JewishGen has not updated all the records that they sent to Ancestry ten or more years ago. There are unique records that were never sent to Ancestry, and you pick up those Jewish Soundex search capacities on JewishGen.
Now, Ancestry’s search has definitely advanced in recent years but it’s not the Beider-Morse the Daitch–Mokotoff Jewish algorithms for searching Jewish names. If you can’t find somebody on the JewishGen collection at Ancestry, go to JewishGen and try running the search there.
Holocaust Research
Lisa Louise Cooke: Another area I can think of as a roadblock area for folks in their research is around the Holocaust. What kinds of resources do we have to conduct research when it comes to the Holocaust?
Ellen Kowitt: I started doing this about 25 years ago and it used to be that either the records were not released by some of the archives in Russia or in the East, or they weren’t in English, or they weren’t indexed. You would put in these requests and it would take literally years for certain repositories to answer a basic inquiry with “Yes” or “No” if they have a card on your family.
I think there was a lot of mythology build around ‘you can’t document the Holocaust and what happened to people’ and what we’re finding all these years is later is that there are so many records. Plenty of people are documenting their families. We are continuing to find more resources available online, even from repositories that are traditionally not in English.
It’s hard to say where to start, because the story of the Holocaust has also evolved. It used to be we learned in school, if we even learned at all about the story of the Holocaust, that it was the story of the concentration camps and the Jews being gassed, and that’s certainly true. But there are so many other elements of the Holocaust like the story of the 1 ½ million Jews killed in Ukraine before anyone ever was killed at Auschwitz. We call this “the Holocaust by bullets” (and the story and most of what was the Soviet Union at that time), was the Jews were rounded up and, this is gruesome, but they were executed and left in mass graves that are unmarked, largely, throughout what was the Soviet Union.
Even Jews who knew their family was tied up in those kinds of stories thought there was no way to figure out what happened to their family or the town. But we do have records. The Russians kept records. It turns out the Germans kept records. A lot of this has become available online that you can search in English.
It really depends, for a family that knows they have a Holocaust story, where they were, what country they originated in, if you know the story that they went to a camp, or if they were in a small town where there was a mass grave. You’re going to be looking at very different resources.
I would say, if you only had to look at one and you wanted to just start this process, Yad Vashem’s website in Israel, in English, would be the place to do a general top-level search. The reason is because Yad Vashem is like the US version of the (United States) Holocaust (Memorial) Museum in DC, and they have resources too, but the one in Israel is called Yad Vashem and it has a larger collection.
They have also collected these pages of testimony from survivors who talk about their family members and where they last saw them, or if they know the exact story about what happened to them or their whereabouts throughout the war. Thousands of these pages have been submitted and they’re searchable. You can see the original pages that people submit and you can even get in contact with the people submitting them. It’s a great networking opportunity for people looking to connect. Yad Vashem has these great success stories, less and less because the survivors are aging out, where they connected people who still had living relatives in Argentina, Australia, or in Europe, and they’re just fantastic renewal stories.
But yes, complicated topic. It is possible to learn what happened to a community, hopefully to an individual. Records are at Bad Arolsen, the Arolsen archives in Germany, in addition to Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum.
JewishGen does have a Holocaust collection worth searching, although it’s smaller than these other larger repositories. There are all kinds of things on the internet – webinars, speakers, and even books that have been published on how to track down victims and survivors of the Holocaust.
And non-Jewish, too. I recently was looking into someone who came from a Ukrainian Orthodox family and they were shipped out of Ukraine to what would be now the Czech Republic, and they were in a work camp. Sometimes these repositories you think of as Jewish record repositories for Jews in the Holocaust also tell the story of the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Lisa Louise Cooke: I so appreciate your vast knowledge on this. I know you teach people about genealogy, Jewish genealogy – tell us a little bit about you got started in genealogy and then into it professionally.
Ellen Kowitt: I guess like everybody out there, I just have that gene. Even from a young age, I was the one who just gobbled up the stories at the holiday tables and remembered the names and connected the relationships and just kept track of it in my head, long before I realized that was not normal, it was unusual and not everyone does that.
There is a woman, Sallyann Sack, who writes a lot of books on Jewish genealogy and she’s one of the publishers of Avotanyu, which is both a journal on Jewish genealogy and also a publishing company on books about Jewish genealogy. In my twenties, I happened to go to a lecture she gave at a synagogue in Washington DC, 25 or more years ago. She said “Hey we have this club! It’s a Jewish genealogy society and we’re doing a beginners workshop. Do you want to come?” I went and there was no looking back. I just got the bug. I started interviewing relatives like we all are taught, to talk to the oldest people first and the records can wait.
It just went from there. I got super involved as a volunteer. I actually think volunteering is a great way when you’re a beginner to learn about record sets. I have seen probate records, naturalizations, and Jewish records that I would never have found in my own family by helping index through a project with a local society. That was fascinating to me.
Then one day a friend insisted on paying me money to do some research on his mother, and I actually liked it. I thought, wow, if I can make a few extra dollars to pay for my genealogy obsession – and these websites can be expensive, the conferences cost money – but if I can make money and help to pay for my obsession, then I’m going to be a professional. So, that’s how I fell into that and it’s grown from there.
Lisa Louise Cooke: I think those of us who caught the bug when we were young are really fortunate because we got opportunities and I think had a focus on talking to and recording some of those stories. I know that’s probably people’s biggest regret, when they didn’t think about it back when they had an opportunity to interview some of the older relatives. I know in my case I just treasure the few interviews that I did do and I still have.
Ellen Kowitt: Me too.
Lisa Louise Cooke: I really appreciate you sharing all these wonderful resources. And of course, folks can visit you at your website at EllenKowitt.com, and I know that you do lecturing and all kinds of professional work on genealogy, and the wonderful article, Find Your Jewish Roots Online, in the May/June 2021 issue of Family Tree Magazine. Ellen, it’s been a delight to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining us here on the show.
Ellen Kowitt: Thank you so much for having me, I enjoyed it!
Jewish Genealogy Reading
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