Tombstone carvers often symbolically represent a life cut tragically short, as when a child dies, by a cemetery monument in the shape of a truncated tree trunk. This motif is sometimes also used among Jewish genealogists when drawing charts of families cut down in the Holocaust; shoots are shown growing from the severed trunk when…
Tag: genealogy
Weiner’s Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova
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Ten years ago (in 1988), Miriam Weiner wrote a letter to a regional museum in Priluki, Ukraine, requesting information on any Jewish documents there. Back then, relations between Western and Iron Curtain countries were still affected by the deep freeze of the Cold War. In the 1980s, relatively few Jewish genealogists attempted to correspond with…
New hope for the dead (cemetery restoration)
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“Jewish gravestones are fairer than royal palaces.” — Talmud (Sanh. 96b). When the Nazis marched into Staszow, Poland, in 1939, not even the Jewish dead could rest in peace any more. Highly utilitarian, the Germans removed the tombstones from the cemetery for use as paving blocks in the streets. After the war, the town repaved…
What’s in a name?
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Back in the Toronto of 1913, when my future grandfather Isaac Naftolin announced his intention to marry my future grandmother Esther Arnoff, his parents Meir-Feivel and Etta Naftolin were said to have opposed the match on the grounds that the name Esther was too much like Etta and that such a coincidence would surely bring…
Kaminkers come together in Toronto
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About 220 relatives of the Kaminker family, all descended from a common ancestor born about 1806 in Pomuran, Galicia, are preparing to come together for a four-day reunion this weekend in Toronto. Besides Toronto, participants are coming from Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Dallas and other American cities, as well as from Argentina, France, Ukraine…
Publish your family history
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To everything there is a season, says the Ecclesiastian writer, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted. For genealogists and family historians, there is a time to gather in family stories and details … and a time to…
Find your family’s passenger lists
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As I am researching the history of my mother’s huge Toronto mishpocha (family), I’ve attempted to locate as many ships’ passenger manifests as possible showing the arrival of relatives to Canada from their various towns in Belarus, beginning about a century ago. The recently established web site of the National Archives’s Canadian Genealogy Centre (www.genealogy.gc.ca)…
Sephardic Jews in early Canada
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One of the most interesting and unusual items pertaining to the Jewish history of confederate and pre-confederate Canada is a two-centuries-old diary in the custody of the National Archives of Canada. The diary belonged to Samuel Jacobs, a European merchant whose ship, the Betsy, was known to have plied the St. Lawrence carrying trade goods…
The 1911 census is a powerful tool
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The 1911 census of Canada, which became available to the public in mid July for the first time, is a tremendously valuable resource for family tree researchers whose relatives were in Canada in the first decade of the 20th century. It is the latest in a wave of genealogical resources — the Ellis Island data…
Genealogy as a labour of love
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“I’m working on a book of family history,” Sara Edell Kelman declares, as she shows me her massive collection of archival documents, ketubot, photographs, Yiddish letters and other family memorabilia, spilling out of diverse albums, binders and boxes. “No, it’s more than one book — it’s a series of books. There’s a lot of stuff…
