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  • 12/17/2023 4:27 PM | Rick Smith

    Vol. VI, No. 12

    Contributor:  Sylvia Abrams, PhD, JGSC Past President

    Many newspapers have digitized their back issues into searchable archives that are aggregated into databases. The best known is newspapers.com, owned by Ancestry and requiring a paid subscription. A free site for historical newspapers is fultonhistory.com, a searchable repository of historic newspapers published in New York State and the United States between 1795 and 2007, frequently updated. It also includes a handful of international newspapers. The Library of Congress' Chronicling America is another free resource that provides historical newspapers.

    Those who live in Northeast Ohio can access newspapers through the Cuyahoga County Library system using their library cards. Currently available are the historical Plain Dealer, historical NYTimes among others. The Cleveland Memory Project at Cleveland State University houses the Cleveland Press Collection.

    The Cleveland Jewish News Digital Archive includes not only all the CJN papers since its founding in 1964, but also all its predecessor papers:

    • The Hebrew Observer
    • The Jewish Independent
    • The Jewish Review
    • The Jewish Review and Observer
    • The Jewish World

    I’ve been fortunate to have located family information from several of these sites.

    Imagine my surprise to find a feature article in the April 2, 1907 Plain Dealer about my husband’s great grandfather, Jacob Green, noting that he was naturalized that day!  The article provided us with a date for locating his missing naturalization, date of arrival (which was 1879) and town of origin in Hungary. 

    As part of my research on this family branch, I located an article in the July 31,1931 Jewish Independent about the 50th wedding anniversary of Ignatz Green, Jacob’s brother. It provided not only his marriage date of 1881, but also his arrival date of 1883 and the names of all his children as adults, including the married names of his daughters.


    I used newspapers.com to search the Buffalo, NY papers for information on my maternal family.

    I knew that my mother’s birth name in English was Nita, and that she was listed as Annie on the ship manifest when she came to the US as a toddler from England. I had no idea that she was called Anna in school until I came across a Hutschinson High school honor roll list from the December 14,1923 Buffalo Courier. This discovery helped explain why she used the more American sounding first name Ann as an adult, which I found on her engagement announcement in the October 10,1940 Buffalo Evening News. 


    I also had been told that my maternal grandfather, Benjamin Hanf, had died in the flu epidemic. I was able to confirm this fact through an article in the December 5,1920 Buffalo Times that listed his name as one of those being remembered in an Elks lodge memorial program.   

    You may have luck confirming family names or stories through newspapers. With patient searching you can fill out genealogical facts to make ancestors feel more real than a line on a census or a name on a manifest.


  • 11/10/2023 12:22 PM | Ron Gallagher (Administrator)

    Vol. VI, No. 11

    Contributor: Richard Spector, JGSC Past President

    Most experienced genealogists are familiar with Steve Morse’s one-step website: www.stevemorse.org. It is a gold mine of links to valuable resources like the Ellis Island database and U.S. census records. Morse’s site is known for providing access to the data in such sources in ways that are more varied than the search functions of the sites themselves. (Steve gave in-person talks to JGSC on June 6, 2007 and June 4, 2008 and remotely on November 14, 2021).

    The Morse one-step home page has 19 folders...

    CLICK HERE TO READ COMPLETE TIP (Requires member login to view. Please consider joining to see all member resources.)


  • 11/10/2023 10:35 AM | Ron Gallagher (Administrator)

    A special thank you to our latest Lifetime Member!  Carolyn Javitch


  • 10/20/2023 11:21 AM | Deleted user

    cleveland.com

    Updated: Oct. 18, 2023, 2:14 pm - Published: Oct. 16, 2023, 12:26 pm

    By Steven Litt, cleveland.com

    CLEVELAND, Ohio — The library at the Western Reserve Historical Society library remains closed after a fire late last month left archival materials in the basement damaged by water and other parts of the four-story brick building affected by smoke and soot.

    READ THE ARTICLE


  • 10/12/2023 10:24 AM | Ron Gallagher (Administrator)

    October 2023 Research Tip of the Month

    TOPIC: NAMES IN TRANSLITERATION: Why might I suspect that this is my ancestor?

    Vol. VI, No. 10 – October 2023

    Contributor: Elise Norman Cundiff, JGSC Member

    Transliteration is a more complex task than translation. It involves rendering records from both another language and another writing system into a different language and system (example: Russian/Cyrillic letters into English/Roman letters). If you throw in the likelihood that the translator is a native speaker of a third language, with its own unique customs (such as adding endings to names to indicate sex or marital status), it can become even more challenging to determine if a record is that of the person you seek.

    CLICK HERE TO READ COMPLETE TIP (Requires member login to view. Please consider joining to see all member resources.)


  • 10/06/2023 11:02 AM | Deleted user

    JGS Cleveland posts the zoom recording and handout of any program if permitted by the speaker. Check the Member section of the website for details within a few days after a program for the post. The recording and handout for Hal Bookbinder’s “Why did our Jewish Ancestors Leave a Great Place Like the Pale? is now available HERE. You can also watch Hal’s JewishGen presentation of “The Ships of Our Ancestors” on YouTube.

  • 09/05/2023 11:14 AM | Ron Gallagher (Administrator)

    September 2023 Research Tip of the Month

    TOPIC: Simple Merging Not Working on Ancestry tree

    Vol. VI, No. 9 – September, 2023

    Contributor: Susan Greenberg, JGSC Member

    I keep 10 trees, instead of one large tree on Ancestry. One day I opened one of my trees and was shocked that this small tree, with only 110 people listed, had grown by about 25 more individuals! When looking at a tree on Ancestry, one can obviously find duplicate names added. This can happen easily when accepting hints, no matter how careful. To remedy this issue, Ancestry has a feature to merge people with the same name, same parents, so you do not lose any facts...

    CLICK HERE TO READ COMPLETE TIP (Requires member login to view. Please consider joining to see all member resources.)


  • 08/07/2023 7:23 PM | Ron Gallagher (Administrator)

    August 2023 Research Tip of the Month

    Vol. VI, No. 8 - August, 2023 by Marlene Englander (JGSC member & frequent research tip author)

    TOPIC: City Directories, Part II

    A recent column described what City Directories can do. After decades of primarily doing genealogy research on what is quick, easy, and on the internet, I decided to take a step back and work on a project just using City Directories.

    While results from searches on various genealogy databases might include information from City Directories, what else might I find if I went “page by page,” which you can now also do online?

    Here are some questions I hoped these directories could help me answer...

    CLICK HERE TO READ COMPLETE TIP (Requires member login to view. Please consider joining to see all member resources.)


  • 07/12/2023 3:38 PM | Ron Gallagher (Administrator)

    July 2023 Research Tip of the Month

    Vol. VI, No. 7 - July, 2023 by Marlene Englander (JGSC member & frequent research tip author)

    TOPIC: City Directories, Part I: What ChatGPT Has to Say

    Have you tried using ChatGPT yet? Were you successful? Were your results accurate? My experience has been mixed so I thought it would be fun to try it again. I asked ChatGPT “How can I use City Directories to find information about my Jewish family?” Here’s what it said:

    “City directories can be a valuable resource for finding information about your Jewish family. Here are some steps you can take to use city directories effectively...

    CLICK HERE TO READ COMPLETE TIP (Requires member login to view. Please consider joining to see all member resources.)

  • 06/22/2023 9:29 AM | Ron Gallagher (Administrator)

    EPISODE 52: GENEALOGIST DANIEL HOROWITZ

    Check out this podcast produced by the CLEVELAND SCHMOOZE!

    This week, we are talking to Daniel Horowitz, a genealogy expert at MyHeritage. He lives in Israel but was recently in town as a speaker for the Jewish Genealogy Society of Cleveland's 40th anniversary kick-off event. We recorded this conversation with Daniel Horowitz at the Orange Branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

    CLICK HERE to listen to this podcast.

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