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…
Tag: genealogy
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)…
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…
The Family Orchard, family history novel
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Nomi Eve, author of The Family Orchard, has taken sections of her family history, as supplied to her by her father, a genealogist, and used them as the foundation for a novel that spans two centuries and the familiar Jewish terrain from Eastern Europe to the land of Israel. As she advises, references to actual localities…
Mormons still baptizing deceased Jews (2002)
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Jewish and Mormon officials met this week to discuss allegations that church members are still posthumously baptizing many deceased Jews, including thousands of Holocaust victims. Seven years after the church signed an agreement to do all it could to stop the practice, new evidence has emerged that the church=s vast International Genealogical Index lists as…
A conversation with great aunt Sophie
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It is a truism of family tree research that you can visit libraries and archives any time you like, but you must not delay interviewing elderly relatives as they will not be around forever. The greatest regret of many genealogists is that they didn’t ask the right questions of the right people at the right…
More genealogical adventures (Jassem, McCartney)
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Peter Jassem’s surname was always a puzzle to him as he grew up in a Polish home in Krakow. Jassem certainly wasn’t a Polish name; neither was it Belarussian, Latvian or Ukrainian. His father said it may have come from the town of Jassy (Iasi) Romania but Peter wasn’t convinced and suspected the truth even…
