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One thing I can certainly say about the annual IAJGS conference is that it is never boring. Today I saw two of my own cousins, several clients and numerous friends and colleagues from all over the world.  What I didn’t get to see was Warsaw! I understand from those who, unlike me, did get out and about that the Polin Museum is exceptional and that the old city was very moving.

When I did get out of the hotel, it was dinner time, and although we went to the same restaurant as last night – the Red Hog, we were told after being seated, that there was a problem with their cash register system and that until it was repaired, they couldn’t serve any more food, so we went down the road to their sister restaurant: Folk Gospoda. This restaurant, because of its outside decor is very noticeable!

Dinner was wonderful – Russian perogie for me – basically a dumpling stuffed with potatoes, cheese and onions, accompanied by a mug of clear borscht.  Oh, and did I mention the bread?  Dessert was a terrific Polish cheesecake topped with white chocolate accompanied by a small scoop of some fruit flavored ice.

I know that none of this has anything to do with research, or so you would think. Genealogy is more than just dates on a timeline and lists of names. It’s also understanding the culture our ancestors lived in and this of course means food.

Where you might well ask is the photo of the noticeable decor?

I am flying to Amsterdam and then on to Warsaw. As we all are, on the way to something new, I am filled with both anxieties and also eager anticipation. The last time, years ago, that I traveled to Eastern Europe to research in archives, I traveled alone to meet people I had never met before in person. I was on my way to do research in archives with someone I had only met via email, who had no experience doing research and who knew nothing of Judaism. It was an exploration into the unknown. The experience(s) were wonderful, and more rewarding than I could imagine, but definitely not for the faint of heart.

On that trip, Miroslav, a former student of my cousin Ella, who had several qualities I was looking for: he spoke English, Russian and Ukrainian, he could be trusted, he had a driver’s license and he lived in Kiev. He was able to take two weeks off work,drive me around, and he was eager to learn.  He made arrangements for us to get into archives in Zhitomir and Tarnopil, and quickly picked up on issues with Russian transcriptions of Yiddish names.

This trip is very different. I am starting in Warsaw (a city I have never visited) attending the IAJGS Conference meeting people I see ever day in our Salt Lake City ancestryProGenealogists office – experienced researchers who speak a variety of Eastern European languages, and who are all familiar with the challenges of Jewish and non-Jewish research.

What an adventure. I feel so close to all my clients and this research onsite where their ancestors lived is, I am sure, going to be a very emotional experience. Next stop Warsaw.

I am getting really excited about the upcoming IAJGS conference in Warsaw, taking place in August 2018. The conference itself will, I’m sure be awesome, and I love going to each year’s conference – for me it’s the highlight of the summer.  This year’s conference in Eastern Europe has opened a door to opportunities beyond the conference.

My team at ancestryProGenenealogists specializes in Eastern European and Jewish research. Of course, we couldn’t resist the draw of the Warsaw conference and we are going on an adventure after the conference! For all of August we’ll be traveling and doing client research, getting photos and background material in a lot of places. We start of course, in Warsaw, and then head for Marijampolė, Kaunas, Raiseinai, Vilkija, Vilnius, Łomża, Białystok, Kovel, Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Vinnitsa, Mohyliv-Podilskyy, Chişinău, Iaşi, Kuty, Ivano-Frankivsk, Stryy, Lviv, Sanok, Rzeszów, Przemyśl, Limanowa, Kraków.

We start our adventure on August 3 and I’ll be blogging with photos daily. I’m sure that it will be a journey filled with discoveries. Part of our plan is to photograph the remains of the Jewish cemeteries in the smaller areas we visit, and contribute those to JewishGen’s JOWBR.  When I was in Ukraine in 2009, I arranged for the large cemetery in Zhytomyr to be photographed and a team of us translated the almost 3,000 stones there and those have been online for the last few years, at JOWBR.

We can all be storytellers. We all have stories to tell not only of our own lives but also those of our ancestors.  Sometimes we know their stories through direct experience or because we are repeating what we have been told, other times, it is pure conjecture based on the bits and pieces we learn from our research. I know this isn’t profound or new news, but I was reminded of the importance a few days ago when speaking with a cousin. Although I had never spoken with him before, I did know who he was – he’d been on my tree for years. His grandfather and mine were brothers. For him though, I was new. He found me through an Ancestry DNA match.

Our great-grandparents were Moses Silberman and Perl Buchbinder. I didn’t know much about them growing up.  My grandfather told us that his father was apprenticed to Abraham Buchbinder who was, not surprisingly a bookbinder. He married the boss’s daughter. After Moses died, Perl came to the US.  Obviously that wasn’t the whole story.

Moses and Perl married when she was 16 and he was 32. From a document submitted around 1900 in Suceawa, Romania, it appears that prior to living in Suceawa, Moses had been a bookbinder in Husiatyń, which was in Galicia, Austrian Empire. It is now called Husyatyn, Ukraine. From Perl’s 1928 ship manifest, we learned that she was from Tłuste
Zaleszczyki, Galicia, Austrian Empire. This is now Tovste, Ukraine.

Although we have not yet found any documents which provide us with information about Perl and Moses’ early years, we do know that by 1883, they lived in Suceawa. Perl’s father, Abraham, died there in 1879. Perl had at least two sisters, one of whom, Golde, was living there by 1878, another sister, Sura was in Suceawa by 1883.

Perl and Moses moved to Suceawa with their two oldest children, David and Lea.  By 1907, they were married and had immigrated to the US where they lived for the rest of their lives.  Perl and Moses had at least 12 children. Their 3rd child, Chaya Ettel died in 1884, less than a month after her birth. Their fourth child, Avraham Yosef died later that year, less than a month after his birth. I can’t imagine the sadness and grief that must have engulfed Perl and Moses. I have found no record of their fifth child, Solomon Wolf, beyond his birth in 1885. I hope that means he lived into adulthood, and that no record meas he  moved away and I just have not identified where he was. There was more sadness to come Ruchel born in 1894 died when she was 10 months old Marjasse died at 18 month old in 1897. Of their daughter, Chaya Ettel, born in 1889, I also have found no information.  Something told to me long ago, makes me think that she died in young adulthood, but like many stories, it has not been substantiated. Of course, these family tragedies hardly describe the totality of their lives.

Many of their children lived to adulthood.  In addition to David and Lea, there were Adolph, Julius, Norbert and Harry. Five of these 6 immigrated to the US and married. Of those 5, 4 had children and many of their descendants are scattered throughout the US. Norbert, the son who remained in Europe also married, one of his daughters immigrated to the US. Norbert was murdered in October 1942 in Mauthausen.

There are so many stories, so many tragedies and so many celebrations. I am grateful to my grandfather for sharing some of his stories, and for giving me at least the outline of his family that I could use as a jumping off point to find more. I am sorry that some of my cousin’s grandparents did not share more of their stories.

Genealogical research is never-ending. After all, how can you say that you have reached the end, that you have found the last document, the final fact? New information is always waiting just around the corner and family stories are waiting to proven or even found to be false. As we research and find information, we make shifts in what the story of our families may be.

In this vein, yesterday, I confronted the need to shift my own beliefs of my family’s story. For many years I had thought that my family at least recently came from Kiev or Zhitomir. A trip to the Zhitomir archives in 2009 identified my grandfather, Ber Moldofsky’s birth record but not those of his siblings or other Moldofsky family members. Because of the surname, we had believed that the family originated in Moldova. Perhaps this finding was verification of that. But how did they get to Zhitomir and when? My great-grandfather had indicated on his ship manifest that his last residence was not in Zhitomir, and yet my grandfather was born just a few weeks after his father’s departure in Zhitomir.

It is good, when researching to have speculative thoughts about what the research will result in, but it is also good to leave no stone unturned and to keep an open mind. A few months ago, as a result of the translation work Jewish Gen’s Ukraine SIG is doing with records resulted in my being able to identify the marriage record of Ber’s grandparents in Zhitomir. That 1868 record pushed back my thinking of when the Moldofsky family might have arrived in Zhitomir since it indicated that both the bride and groom and their parents (!) were from the area.  A revision list from 1834 has shown that the fmaily was in the area much longer than previously thought.  It’s so exciting – now I need to just keep digging!

What is the connection between events happening thousands of miles apart? This summer I was privileged to present several talks at the IAJGS conference. Once of those talks, Personalizing History, is for me, always fun. In it I discuss how my own family’s immigration experience and historical events in New York created an amazing connection for me, over 100 years after the events. It seems to have touched the imagination of a reporter, Jane Edelstein, at Heritage, Florida Jewish News.  http://www.heritagefl.com/story/2017/09/01/features/making-a-personal-connection-with-past-generations/8498.html