People seem to be having trouble with understanding the facebook event for some reason, 
https://occgs.com/mtg_event/speakers/bio_silverman.html is an alternative way to register for the event
--
Vivs Laliberte
www.theOCGG.com

Orange County, Calfiornia

Carl,

If they married in NYC you can use this free search to find her husband's full name:
NYC Marriage License Index 1950-1995
https://stevemorse.org/vital/nymarriages-rec.html

If they married in NYC before 1950 you can try this database on Ancestry, or if you have access to Ancestry just try this one since it covers more years:
NYC Marriage Licenses 1907-1995
https://stevemorse.org/vital/nymarriages-anc.html?range=1

You can also use these databases to see if her husband re-married.

Good luck in your search,

Sherri Bobish

The "wrong people" issue is a longstanding problem. For me, the value of
sharing information outweighs the downside, so I try to be zen about the
mistakes I so often run across. (Like the guy who seems to believe that
my great-grandfather was age 8 when he had his first child.)

About the unresponsiveness on places like Ancestry: I am guessing some
people test, or upload a tree using a burner email, and never come back
to check messages.

It would be helpful if Ancestry had more sophisticated data validation.
But they are apparently are making enough money without offering too
many bells and whistles, and they only (grudgingly) make enhancements
when they can no longer ignore demand.  MyHeritage has been more useful
for trying to locate connections, but it's still early days for this
industry.

I'm sad to see that people are keeping trees private. I understand the
desire for record integrity, but that can be achieved via a tree that's
maintained offline. We don't own our ancestors' info, and if my public
tree can help someone else with a breakthrough, well, isn't that part of
the reason we do this?

JoAnne
--

 

Unfortunately, even JewishGen is not immune to this issue. I have had someone go in and hand transcribe a large portion of my tree from the FTJP into their own tree on Ancestry, and then proceed to change things to fit their methodology. This person was not even a blood relative! No amount of pleading with him would make him budge or change anything. :(

Scott Groll
Ventura County, CA

--
Hello. I would like to join to research info about my 4 x g grandfather Abraham ben Gedaliah Tiktin 1764 - 1820. With thx.

Randy wrote: "There is so much misinformation about Geni from people who don’t really use it. The critic Alan Ehrlich, for example, has added just 34 profiles..."

It's my sincere 'hope' that Randy's incorrect statement above is solely because he was misinformed. However, since he so often unflinchingly disses anybody who's critical in any manner about Geni, well I don't know... Anyway, for information, allow me to set the record straight:

Even before Geni's official launch, while Geni still was in beta test mode, I uploaded an initial gedcom file which by then documented circa 3'000 ancestors and relatives... plus further updated that on several occasions during the following year and months. Oh yes, since then my family database gradually grew to include 20'000+ persons... which many of you know first hand as I've always been eager to share with others all the information it contains.

Perhaps 'food-for-thought' on Geni's behalf, rather than reflexively responding 'ad hominem', perhaps offer remedies to the serious short-comings we are pointing out.

Kind regards,
Alan Ehrlich
Geneva, Switzerland

Thank you Deborah, Mike, and Rachel for all of the links and recommendations.  Coming to The Table, Enslaved.org and The Beyond Kin Project all look like a fabulous organizations and resources. You all have given me a good starting point. Where this will take me, I do not know, but the import of this type of research has never been clearer.   

Brad Fanta
Austin, Texas

Researching
Ingwiller, France: HAAS, UHRY 
Wattwiller, France: WEILL
Cernay, France: GENSBURGER
Westphalia (greater Warburg), Germany:  DANNENBAUM, ROSENBAUM, LEWY/LEVI, MEYERFELD, ROTHSCHILD, SIEBENHAUER
Osterberg/Fellheim, Germany: LAUPHEIMER, SCHWAB
Poznan, Poland:  BLY/BLEY, LEWY/LEVY, MARCUS, KOTTWITZ, KAISER
Grudziadz:  BRASH
Jihlava, Czechia:  POKORNY, EPSTEIN, KRASSNY,
Budapest, Hungary: SINGER

Jessica, this is why you never copy from someone else! Often these people just seem to want to brag about how many people are in their tree. One person posts unverified data in their tree and 100 others copy these mistakes into their trees and the mistake snowballs. Don't be one of those people.

Don't concern yourself about what someone else has in their tree, just worry about your own. If worried then make your tree private. Do your own research and prove the source of each of your entries.

--

Sunday at 10:00 am PDT the Orange County California Jewish Genealogy
Society is having their next meeting on Zoom. The speaker is Ellen
Kowitt talking about doing Jewish Genealogical Research in the
Ukraine. Registration is required at www.ocjgs.org. Registration is
free to OCJGS members and $5 for non members. All fees can be paid
for at our website www.ocjgs.org.

Michelle Sandler MLS
President OCJGS
Westminster, California

--
Joel Weintraub
Dana Point, CA

I  find Geni's accessibility to be two-edged sword, causing potentially more damage than it has benefits.  I've just found someone added 3 half-siblings – no names, no gender, not vital data – to my immediate tree.  It seems that their tree had me and my two brothers as my father's children but didn't have my mother's identity, so Geni registered them as different people.  It's too easy to add the wrong information and much harder to find and correct such mistakes.
--

Lee David Jaffe

Surnames / Towns:  Jaffe / Suchowola, Poland ; Stein (Sztejnsapir) / Bialystok and Rajgrod, Poland ; Joroff (Jaroff, Zarov) / Chernigov, Ukraine ; Schwartz (Schwarzman?, Schwarzstein?) / ? ;  Koshkin / Snovsk, Ukraine ; Rappoport / ? ; Braun / Wizajny, Suwalki, Poland,  Ludwinowski / Wizajny, Suwalki, Poland

It also retains history of changes, which is invaluable for sorting out errors, and ensuring a high level of accuracy.

This is all great as an aspirational goal for Geni curators, but as applied to 98% of actually existing Geni trees, it's risible. The vast majority of Geni users are unaware of/uninterested in how to do cleanup on others' Geni trees, and errors that are theoretically correctable end up persisting on the site forever, getting copied over and over into other people's trees on other sites, etc. While there are certainly a few large, well-manicured Geni trees out there, there is also a gigantic "long tail" of Geni trees (which includes most of the ones I routinely come across via search engines) that receive none of this curatorial attention, and it shows. Saying the equivalent of "stop telling people not to use Geni then, if lots more people use it it will get much more accurate!" comes off as...very wishful thinking at best.

Since kvetching about Geni has been done to death in this forum, I'll instead diss FindAGrave, which has even higher practical barriers to corrections than Geni. As far as I can tell, only the person who has claimed a FindAGrave memorial page can edit it - and there are some users who have claimed hundreds of thousands of them for the purpose of uploading all the photos of the stones they photograph. The part that drives me up the wall is that frequently, these FindAGrave power users contribute their own error-filled "research" to the memorial pages; by "research," I mean they appear to have spent about 5 seconds pasting the results of a search on Ancestry or FamilySearch into the memorial, without doing any double-checking whatsoever to be sure they've correctly matched these records with the grave they photographed. Then when you point out their obvious errors to them, half the time they snippily demand that you provide rigorous citations for your correction before they will apply it!

My point here is that it's very easy for sites reliant on user-generated content to slip into an eye-rolling equilibrium: one where the power users do virtually zero due diligence of their own to propagate very long-lasting errors, and then set the norms that everyone else, not they, 1) are the ones who should be responsible for performing the labor of cleaning up the mess they made; 2) also need to be held to a far higher data quality standard than they themselves used to originally make that mess.

Adam Turner

As a correction to my earlier post, the transcription was prepared  in 1932/33 by Samuel Jeselsohn, not his son Sigmund. Additionally, Samuel Jeselsohn had a  copy of the Neckarbischofsheim Jewish vital records for 1811 - 1870 prepared which can be viewed at https://www.nli.org.il/en/manuscripts/NNL_ALEPH997007685352605171/NLI#$FL135956650 . Although other copies of these records exist, this copy is typewritten and therefore easier to use.

Alex Calzareth

The issue I have with genealogical cross-pollination is when trees contain some information that i know to be correct, but much of it is wrong and that gets repeated across hundreds of trees. This isn't just confined to one site.

I have worked hard for 30 years to be diligent, accurate and documented. I started a private tree on Ancestry which only contains names of people I can document. There are no names with “no sources” or only with hints from other trees. I know who every person is, how they connect to me. I’ve always taken care to make sure the documents I attach are the correct person. If I’m not sure, I’ll add it to my notes to research more. Ancestry has helped me immeasurably to locate documents that I would not have been able to find on my own.

I decided to make my tree public, in the hope that people might contact me with new information. Then I started getting hints to trees with completely incorrect documents: naturalization records from a state where the person never lived; grave records in a state the person never lived; incorrect birthplace; children’s names with no sources, parent’s names I know to be wrong.  Those trees also contained link to my tree.

Those incorrect trees then became the source for other trees that propagate the incorrect information. Just because someone has thousands of names in their tree does not make them more reliable than someone who has several hundred. People don’t link at the tree with the most sources, or even look to see what those sources are.  When you have a very common last name, it is even easier to get things wrong.

I made my tree private again. Unfortunately, the barn door of misinformation has been blown off the hinges and it can’t be fixed. I can’t reasonably be expected to contact each tree owner and fix the cascade of incorrect information.

It hurts me very deeply to see my work mixed in with those who just seem to be collecting names. Every name in my tree is precious, every document I find helps them come alive. Each document chronicles that they lived in that place at that time, what they did, how they lived. My family is full of tailors, plumbers, shoemakers, shopkeepers. They sold insurance, owned gas stations and delis. They weren’t famous, though some of their descendants are. Documenting their lives connects me to an experience that I cannot live myself but I can reconstruct to honor them.

Laurie Sosna
San Francisco, CA
FRIEDSON: Ukmerge

Need help deciphering name of a place my mother z"l mentioned as an area that my FELD family were from. 
It sounds like Brest Kuyav and might be in the Wloclawek/Dobrzyn nad Wisla area.
Any ideas as to which place this might be? 
Help would be appreciated,
Relly Coleman
FELD Dobrzyn nad Wisla, Zakroczym
WARSZAWSKI

Friends,

I have posted a 3-page document, likely a letter, in cursive Hungarian on Viewmate. This document comes from a soon-to-be 99-year-old cousin’s family and I have no idea what it might hold. Any help will be much appreciated and would be a great birthday gift!

 

First page: notations in top left and top right might carry many clues

 

Second page: continuation. Seems to be a letter

 

Third page: has what may be an address, signature, and postal seal.

https://www.jewishgen.org/viewmate/viewmateview.asp?key=VM93208

 

https://www.jewishgen.org/viewmate/viewmateview.asp?key=VM93209

 

 

https://www.jewishgen.org/viewmate/viewmateview.asp?key=VM93210

 

Please respond via the form provided on the ViewMate image page.

 

Thank you very much.

 

Barbara Toby Stack

USA

Try. Go to stevemorse.org

--
Diane Jacobs, Somerset, New Jersey