She lives in Ohio and or Florida, so there is no problem with DNA testing for her. Yes the mamzer possibility is why the Chassidic (Haredi) Rabbinate has forbidden DNA testing for the purpose of findi

#dna

Do you have Hebrew on her tombstone? A Ketuba? Either of these would give her Hebrew/Yiddish name as opposed to other possibilities (of which there are many).

#names

My family story is that my great grandfather bought papers under the name Fishel Meyer to avoid the Czarist conscription. He came to the US in 1884. According to family information our original family

#russia #general

I would suggest getting genealogy software made for a Mac. The following programs are either Mac only or have Mac versions. Some have free trials. Ask here or google reviews: In alphabetical order Fam

#general

Is it possible that they were immigrant children and the photos were taken in NY or Chicago in a studio that was set up to look like the old country?

#russia #general

These appear identical to the ones that I inherited from my paternal grandmother. She was born in the shtetl of Kolonie L'vovo. This shtetl was in Kherson Guberniya not far from Nikolaev and from the

#general

SteveMorse.org has transliteration options from the Latin alphabet into the Cyrillic alphabet. You may need to try several different searches to find her.

#names

Both FamilySearch's tree (NOT their records) and Geni are collaborative trees and hence controversial. This style of tree allows others to change your information because someone else has other data.

#general

Both Legacy and Roots Magic have free versions and neither deluxe version is expensive. Personally, I prefer Legacy to Roots Magic (by a lot). That said, you can import your Legacy Tree into Roots Mag

#general

I would only do this with a private tree that you share with your family, unless the birth date and place are not shown. Other options to share with your family include a private Facebook group or a t

#general

In Legacy, you can use Jewish dates in the description or note fields but not in the date fields at this time. About 10 years ago, I met someone from the Legacy team in person (on a plane I think), wh

#general

If you have this problem, please open your Gedcom as a TEXT file in Notepad or Wordpad (do not use Word). You can edit it there replacing that slash with something else (such as a dot) using search an

#general

SteveMorse.org in the NYC vital records section - you can use Italiangen or Familysearch and other sites as part of his one step pages. That said, I went looking on both of these via SteveMorse.org fo

#records #usa

I believe that their app is only for trees not for records.

#general

Tanya, I think it was a Y chromosome study and females do not have a Y chromosome. The Y goes back farther than the autosomal. I am sure that he did have female descendants, it is just that they can't

#dna

Try using the Jewishgen given names database from Foreign to European, use Romania. Since this is difficult to find I am including the link and hope that the moderator will permit this as a reply to g

#romania #names

Judith Franzin 's book A Translation Guide to 19th Century Polish -Language Civil Registration Documents, is one resource that I have used. Another is to join Facebook's Tracing the Tribe group and po

#poland

The Find A Grave Facebook group has suggestions relative to the best way to photograph a stone like yours. It involves going out early or late and taking a friend and a large mirror to shine the light

#photographs

As discussed below - if they did Y tests they would only have matched by coincidence. However if they had done a Family Finder test (autosomal) they should have matched. The good news is that there wi

#dna

Beider has Rapel as from the noun Rappel German for craze or crazy mood. It also has Rafel which goes to Rafal - which is Rafael as was suggested.

#poland