Jewish Genealogy Society of Cleveland

Judge Raymond L. Pianka and Jonathon Holoday

Community Building and the Fir Street Cemetery

This was a presentation about the community based renovation of the Fir Street Cemetery by the major forces behind the renovation.

Richard Spector

Researching Eastern European Archives.

Richard Spector presented "Researching Eastern European Archives". Contrary to common impression, there are huge numbers of family records in archive locations in Eastern Europe. These archives contain more than 100,000,000 names, some going back 300 years. New records useful to genealogists are being discovered every day. Although some of these records are available on the Internet, the majority must be accessed in other ways. This presentation provided an overview of some of the available Eastern European sources of family information, how to research these sources, and what they can contribute to your family tree.

Jerry Kliot

The 30th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy -
Ya Shoulda Been There!

Jerry shared his impressions of the convention and gave an overview including highlights of films, live theater, history, research techniques, and writing family history.

Roma Baran

Suddenly Jewish.

In August 2008, at the age of 61, Roma Baran received a stunning e-mail from a Jewish genealogist looking for heirs to a small estate of a Holocaust survivor -- her father's cousin - and learned that her casually Christian parents, and the whole rest of her family were not Polish Catholics, but Jews, including a rabbi and a Warsaw ghetto leader, and that her parents had survived the Holocaust under assumed names. Roma learned that not only were her family's names and identities false, but that she had actually lived in Israel from 1949 to 1951.

Ms. Baran described -- with photos, documents and maps -- how she systematically reconstructed her past over the last year. She focused on the Galizianer side of her family, and included her new research on her father's Warsaw family. She traced her parents' war-time escape from the Przemysl ghetto to Tarnawa, Krakow, and other towns, and their post-war journeys to Israel and Canada. She also examined the emotional consequences of uncovering family secrets of staggering proportions.

Cynthia Spikell

Myths And Mistakes: What To Avoid When Researching Jewish Families.

Our own Cynthia Spikell exposed some common assumptions, myths, and mistakes in doing Jewish family research and told how to avoid and overcome them.

Joni Mihelich

Researching At Fairview Park Library: One Day In The Life Of A Family Historian.

The Genealogy Specialist at the Fairview Park Branch of the Cuyahoga County Library discussed the genealogy resources available at that library by using a case study.