Forgive the silly question, but it's worth clarifying, since some non-Jewish people do post here occasionally: the ancestors you're referring to in your father's family were Jewish, right? Because when you say "updated DNA results," that makes me think that what you're referring to is Ancestry's estimate of your ethnicity (which were just updated this week for many if not all customers), as opposed to your father's family's birthplaces or their nationality. 

Ancestry now gets fairly granular at estimating ethnicity, for both Jewish and non-Jewish ethnicities. Within the "European Jewish" ethnicity there are are now six different sub-regions, which have substantial geographical overlap with one another and are organized into two different groups: three sub-regions in "Central and Eastern Europe," and three in "Western and Central Europe." (This latter group includes the sub-region I think you might be referring to here: "Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg." There are even more sub-regions listed for the non-Jewish "Germanic Europe" ethnicity. 

Here's the thing: the ethnicity estimates are not even close to a declaration of the specific geographical location where your family lived when they immigrated from Europe about 130 years ago. They are a broad and likely messy estimate of a population your ancestors were a part of, say, 400 to 1500 years ago. (Ancestry says: " your ethnicity estimate..shows you where your ancestors might have lived hundreds, or even a thousand years ago.") But people, especially Ashkenazi Jews, didn't stay in the same place for a thousand years! So just because AncestryDNA's estimate gives your ethnicity as "European Jewish-->Western and Central Europe--> Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg", that doesn't mean that your ancestors couldn't have lived in the Russian Empire around 1880. All it means is a substantial number of your ancestors in maybe 1300 or 1400 most likely came from a Jewish population in Central or Western Europe. They could definitely have moved east from what is now Germany into what became the Russian Empire over the intervening centuries.

So where, exactly, did your ancestors live in the 19th century, and how might a family with ancestors who likely lived in Central Europe around the Middle Ages ended up listing "Russia" as their birthplace on their naturalization papers? An ethnicity estimate can't even begin to give you answers to those questions; only careful research can.

Adam Turner

I've posted a vital record in Polish for which I need a translation.
This is the death certificate of my grandmother's lost sister who died in Lublin when they were living in Warszaw/

It is on ViewMate at the following address ...
https://www.jewishgen.org/viewmate/viewmateview.asp?key=VM86494
Please respond via the form provided on the ViewMate image page.

Thank you very much.

Dr. Ofer Cornfeld

I am a volunteer for Find A Grave, and photograph gravestones at my local cemeteries when there is a request. I have not done the reverse (someone please correct me if I am wrong), but I think you can create a memorial for the grave, and then request a photo. If there is a volunteer nearby, maybe they will take it. 
--
Carl Kaplan

KAPLAN Minsk, Belarus
EDELSON, EDINBURG Kovno, Lithuania
HOFFERT, BIENSTOCK< BIENENSTOCK Kolbuszowa, Galicia
STEINBERG, KLINGER, WEISSBERG, APPELBERG Bukaczowce, Galicia

I have a ship log (Umbria, arr. NY Feb. 19, 1906) for my great grandfather Shmuel Raskin, his wife, and 7 children, the youngest of whom is Wolf, age 4.  In the last columns on the ship log for Wolf it says "Dr Certificate Idiot."  On the Special Inquiry log, Shmuel and Wolf are deported, the others are admitted on appeal. Thanks to a great Boston JGSGB Zoom session I recently attended conducted by Marian Smith, I have found in indexes 2 index cards listing the appeal and rehearings. The first is headed "REHEARINGS, Jany-26-06" and lists "50,030-1 RASKIN family; Ch-Idiot-Sec 11".  The second is headed "Appeals. New York (Feby-5-06)" and lists "50,030-1 RASKIN Schmuel & wf & 6-ch; Idiot-sec-11"   (The dates in the headings are surely wrong - unless they are the starting date for each card's list? - because their ship didn't arrive until Feb. 19, 1906.) 

My questions:
1) Is there likely to be any correspondence about this case?
2) If so, is 50,030-1 the index case number, in which case I can use it on a Genealogy Records Request USCIS Form G-1041A to see if there is any correspondence about this?  or do I have to still submit a request to find the index case number?
3) What is Section 11?

Judy Leiderman Kaufman
Irvine, CA

Both Zablotow & Kolomyja are part of the region Galicia.
This region was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until WW1, then it was part of Poland and now it is part of Ukrain.
Both Gesher Galicua and JRI-Poland have indexed relevent records for thus region.

Kherson is not part of the same region.

Good luck,
Daniella Alyagon

The first line is adapted from the book of Lamentations 3:48.
--

Everyone else has pretty much covered all the bases so I wish you all a hearty - AMEN!
--

Greetings from Australia , Charles german 😀👍🇮🇱

"We are talking about the late 1800s, so is this a geographic/historical thing, that country borders changed so much?"

Records of your family beat DNA every time. Much of what was Prussia became Poland, some Germany. In Napoleon's time, the Kingdom of Poland, roughly, was French, the Department of Warszaw.

Where my ggrandparents lived was Prussian (New East Prussia), French, then Russian; later it was Poland, near Lithuania and Belarus, so they probably spoke some of all these languages.  Their neighbors spoke them all. Even in Germany or Italy, people from one town couldn't understand people from another town, unless they were familiar with that language. Our ancestors knew Hebrew and Yiddish, and they spoke whatever languages were spoken around them, as they bought and sold, so they had to buy and sell in whatever language you spoke. If your ancestor did business with Englishmen, he spoke English

My 2nd ggrandfather, actually my ggrandmother's foster father and probable uncle, was a translator for the NYC police department. He was from Sztettin, and spoke the usual bunch of languages, Polish, Russian, German, and dialects of them; Hebrew and Yiddish, of course, and he probably learned enough Italian to get by.

Sally Bruckheimer
Princeton, NJ

May G-d’s light and love shine on us through the coming year, bringing you all health, peace and joy--

--
Deanna M. Levinsky, Long Island, NY

Hi!
I've uploaded three documents to viewmate, 85440, 86439 and 86436.  These are from internal passport files that I found on Litvak Sig, for two of my great aunts, daughters of Leizer/Leyzer Meierowitz of Smorgon. 

One passport was referenced as "German passport in file".  That one is a little confusing, I think it's in Russian.  The other two documents are in Polish. There's other documents, but I'm trying to use online translator tools for the rest.
Thank you for any help you can offer, Laura

Happy New Year! I am researching my paternal grandfather, Jacob Mack, who was born in Ostrog Wolyn, Russia on 9 November 1885. His father's name was Israel Mack, his mother was Annie Lichtenstein. How would I find his birth record, and possibly the marriage records of his parents? He emigrated to to Lynn, Massachusetts (in the US) in 1904. Thank you!

To the Jewishgen Team,