We had a terrific turnout in Seattle for the Austria-Czech day at the IAJGS Jewish genealogy
conference. The day began with our guest speaker Vaclav (Fred) Chvatal speaking about
early migration to small Bohemian villages. Then we had a large SIG meeting where everyone
introduced themselves. It was great to see one of our early SIG founders, Barry Spinak, who
may have accidentally volunteered to take over the webmaster position again, so our web
pages can be updated. :-) We talked about our need to index all of the town records on
Badatelna, following the example set by Art Spira, who recently added over 9,000 records

from Trebic to JewishGen. Our luncheon speaker Thomas Fuerth regaled us once again with

a fabulous walk through the crowded old Jewish town in Prague, following a family through
several generations, showing where they lived with old photos and paintings of the town.
After lunch I presented my annual "What's New in Austrian and Czech Genealogy"
presentation. The powerpoint can be downloaded at http://tinyurl.com/jeeny66. In the late
afternoon Vivian Kahn spoke about migration to Hungary and Burgenland >from Bohemia and
Moravia. We had a lively discussion afterwards. In the evening Tony Kahane spoke about
members of the Viennese Schifferes family who were sent to Dachau, Drancy and Auschwitz.

After it was all done, Alex Calzareth told me about some amazing Prague death registers that
he found online at the Jewish Theological Seminary

1680 - 1857: http://garfield.jtsa.edu:1801/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=143974&custom_att_2=direct
1857 - 1868: http://garfield.jtsa.edu:1801/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=141338&custom_att_2=direct
1870 - 1890: http://garfield.jtsa.edu:1801/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=41125&custom_att_2=direct

These kept me up very late as I pushed back my Prague family another generation and
discovered two new family names (MISLAP and RAUSNITZ)!

Thanks everyone who attended, and especially to our conference coordinator Vera Finberg,
who worked so hard to make everything such a success. We are already talking about next year
in Orlando, Florida.

The conference last until Friday, and I have another talk today on Collaborative Genealogy on
Geni.com (powerpoint at tinyurl.com/grotgdm). With so many of us working together, and the
availability of so many records, it's obvious that we have the best SIG in all of Jewish
genealogy!

Randy Schoenberg
Los Angeles, CA
Austria-Czech SIG Coordinator/Moderator