Finding and Understanding Bubbe and Zayde’s Galician Vital Records with Mark Halpern

Date & Time:  March 1, 2023 at 7:00 - 8:30 PM ET

Location:  Zoom

Program:  A great many Galician researchers have acquired copies of family records from repositories in Poland and Ukraine or online images provided by a State Archive or a Genealogical organization. Over the past twenty years, the work of Jewish Records Indexing - Poland and Gesher Galicia has made these records more readily available to all Galician researchers. This session offers an in-depth examination of Galician vital records along with a strategic framework to help researchers in acquiring records to further their research. A historical perspective covering the regulations that governed Jewish recordkeeping in Galicia will be provided. Most importantly, this talk will make sense of the regulations covering civil marriages that impacted the legitimacy and surnames of children. Close examination of sample birth, marriage, and death records will reveal the information contained in the records, identify the records having the most genealogical value, and uncover surprises found in many of these records.

Speaker:  In 1996, while on business in Poland, Mark Halpern visited Bialystok, his mother’s birthplace. Upon his return home to Philadelphia, Mark dove down the rabbit hole searching for his Galician and Polish roots. Now retired, Mark works with JRI–Poland, JewishGen, IAJGS, and Jewish Genealogical and Archival Society of Greater Philadelphia (JGASGP) helping others research their roots. Mark is on the Board and Executive Committee of JRI-Poland, the founder of BIALYGen – the JewishGen Bialystok area research group, and past President of JGASGP. Mark chaired the program committees for the 2009 and 2013 IAJGS Conferences, served on the Program Committees of the 2018, 2020, and 2021 Conferences, and served as advance coordinator for the 2018 Warsaw Conference. Mark was honored in 2018 with the IAJGS Lifetime Achievement Award.