SFBAJGS - Past Programs

Sunday, December 8, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Navigating Metrical Books for the Non-Russian Speaker

Speaker: Ellie Vance

Vital records were often recorded in Russian and can be tricky to navigate, especially for non-Russian speakers, but with the proper tools you can learn to identify ancestral surnames, common vocabulary, and record format. An extensive handout complete with column heading translations, examples of handwritten key vocabulary, common given names, and resources to help you determine the handwritten forms of your surname will be included with the presentation.

Speaker Ellie Vance graduated from Brigham Young University with degrees in Russian and Family History and Genealogy. She worked as the Slavic research specialist for the FamilySearch Library and currently works as a technical historical records expert at FamilySearch. Ellie enjoys helping others trace their roots in the former Russian Empire.

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You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Monday, November 4, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

5:00 pm until 6:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Researching World War I Veterans in Your Family Tree HANDOUT

Speaker: Sharon Fingold

Veteran’s Day was formerly called Armistice Day. The original holiday celebrated the end of World War I. You may have discovered that some of your American relatives served during the war. How well do you understand their war experience? Do you know where they went for training? Have you looked at the Order of Battle? Have you found their muster rolls and unit histories? How about photos of training camps and, if they served overseas, of the places where they were stationed? If they were sent to battle, do you know which battles and the dates? How do you find newspaper articles, memoirs, and other information with details about their experience?

Sharon Fingold will share resources that can provide context and color to better understand what it was like for American men to serve during World War I. She’ll use case studies from her own family to demonstrate the rich variety of information available at free and fee-based Internet sites and provide tips for searching the internet for material. Case studies include men assigned to an Aerosquadron, Field Artillery, and the Quartermaster Corps. Often the fee-based sites allow free access for holidays such as Veteran’s Day. Prepare to take advantage of special deals!

Sharon Fingold—born, raised, and still living in California—first became interested in her family tree while attending college in Massachusetts when her grandmother introduced her to relatives in New Jersey. They in turn introduced her to relatives in New York and England. Since then, she has been meeting relatives and researching her family history in fits and starts. Sharon has been a member of SFBAJGS for almost 35 years and was the co-coordinator of the JewishGen Belarus SIG for several years. Now retired, she has more time to devote to research and is slowly writing up the stories for her extended family.

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Sunday, October 20, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: A Silent Escape: Uncovering Her Father’s Truth in 1939 Lithuania

Speaker: Nancy Rosenfeld

For almost half a century, Bernard Rosenfeld’s early life was hidden from family and friends, afraid of what might occur if he allowed himself to feel. He didn’t share his desperate escape along at age 17 from Raseiniai, Lithuania in 1939, during early World War II. He veiled the horrific loss of seventeen family members murdered in the forest and killing pits. His relentless silent quest spanned decades and continents, searching for any trace of their names and fates.

His daughter and co-author of the 2024 historical biography, "50 Cents for a Life: A True Story of Surviving by Synchronicity," will share and respond to questions about his tireless quest, her research of the World War II theater surrounding his escape, and bringing his manuscript to completion. Shortly after the book’s publication, after her father’s six decades of searching, synchronicity unveiled new maps, translated interviews, and current-day Lithuanian individuals, discoveries Bernard had sought but never witnessed.

Formerly a CFO and strategic planning consultant to leadership teams, Nancy spiraled up into her own authenticity through speaking, writing, painting, and living her best life on Maui, Hawaii. Bernard Rosenfeld’s photos and book information can be found at www.50centsforalife.weebly.com.

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Monday, September 9, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

5:00 pm until 6:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Untangling Threads and Breaking through Brick Walls HANDOUT YouTube

Speaker: Sharon Fingold

Sharon Fingold will use her recent breakthroughs on her Fingold/Feingold branch of the family to show how she identified the original surnames; traced the family’s immigration journeys from Ukraine to Scotland, Canada, the USA, and Cuba; sifted fact from fiction in family stories; and discovered how all the cousins are related. The presentation includes how Sharon found newspaper articles that helped provide context and color for immigrant journeys, and how she used the Krakovsky records and the JewishGen Ukraine Database to identify family relationships, occupations, and towns of origin.

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Sunday, August 4, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: GenealogyIndexer.org: Searching Historical Directories, Yizkor Books, and More HANDOUT

Speaker: Logan Kleinwaks

GenealogyIndexer.org is a free site for searching 2 million+ pages of historical European directories (business, address, telephone), yizkor books, Galician secondary school reports, Polish and Russian military documents, community histories, and more. Containing tens of millions of personal names — often with towns, street addresses, and occupations, and sometimes with genealogical details such as patronymics, maiden names, and vital dates — most of the 4,000+ sources are not searchable elsewhere. This talk will provide an overview of all sources, with a focus on recently added sources and search techniques. The use of directories in the Warsaw property restitution process will also be discussed briefly.

Logan Kleinwaks is JewishGen's Research Director for Danzig/Gdańsk, a former Board Member of Gesher Galicia, and creator of online genealogy research tools. His site GenealogyIndexer.org received the IAJGS 2012 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Jewish Genealogy via the Internet, Print or Electronic Product, and was one of Family Tree Magazine's 101 Best Websites for 2015–2023. He received JewishGen's Susan E. King Volunteer of the Year Award in 2022. During the war in Ukraine, Logan has worked to support Ukrainian archives' needs and facilitate preservation of Jewish genealogical documents in Lviv.

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Sunday, June 2, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: How I Found My Jewish American Family

Speaker: Daniel Horowitz

Family history research is a journey through time and sometimes through space, too! Join Daniel Horowitz on a tour of the main repositories and techniques used to discover his Jewish American family, and learn how you can also discover new information about your family tree.

Dedicated to genealogy since 1986, Daniel was the teacher and the study guide editor of the family history project "Searching for My Roots" in Venezuela for 15 years. He is a past board member of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, is involved in several crowdsourced digitization and transcription projects, and holds a board-level position at the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA). Since 2006 Daniel has been working at MyHeritage liaising with genealogy societies, bloggers, and media, as well as lecturing and attending conferences around the world.

We are pleased to welcome Daniel, but it should be noted that SFBAJGS is not endorsing MyHeritage over any other product or service.

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Monday, May 6, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

4:00 pm until 5:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Family Declassified HANDOUT

Speaker: Katherine Fennelly

Katherine Fennelly’s academic specializations are in demography, public health, and immigration policy. After learning of her Jewish heritage as an adult she began a very different kind of research—a study of the life of her maternal grandfather, Ferenc (Francis) Kalnay, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant who arrived in the United States 100 years ago. The result is Family Declassified, a book in which she describes how Kalnay became the head of an elite espionage unit for the Allied Forces and an award-winning children’s book author. Fennelly will discuss her motives, sources, and methods, including six years reviewing previously unexamined government records and conducting personal interviews and genealogical searches, to piece together the life of a man who hid his Jewish identity, the nature of his work as a spy, and the murder of his sister and nephew by Hungarian Nazis.

Katherine Fennelly is an emeritus professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. She has an M.S., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her site is https://www.katherinefennelly.com/.

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Wednesday, April 17, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.
co-sponsored with Jewish Community Library

Time and Place:

7:00 pm until ? pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Pathways to Preserving Family Histories HANDOUT

Speaker: Basya Petnick

This workshop will provide guidance for collecting, organizing, and preserving your own family history. What photos and documents exist? Who is available to be interviewed? Basya Petnick will stimulate thinking about the stories behind the births, marriages, deaths, and migrations in your family, as well as the presentation forms that might work best—such as oral history, legacy letter, or ethical will—to help you move forward in creating a beautiful gift from the past to future generations.

Basya Petnick has been practicing oral history for 35 years. She served as the co-director of the Legacy Oral History Program at the Museum of Performance + Design, and as director of the Alumni Memory Project of San Francisco Ballet. Working in partnership with the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley, she was invited to add several of her oral histories to their Bancroft Library Special Collections, including Gratefully Yours, an oral history of Rabbi Stephen Pearce, and Song and Spirit: A Cantor’s Life, an oral history of Roslyn Junever Barak. Her work has been honored by several major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the founder and principal of Books & Lives, a creator and publisher of oral histories and life stories.

Program made possible, in part, by Judy Baston.

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Sunday, April 14, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Loose Records in an Archive: What Are They?

Speaker: Melissa Barker

Genealogists use minute books, ledger books, and other bound records located in archives, libraries, and genealogical societies. Another type of record that genealogists should be seeking is called Loose Records. Learn what loose records are, what records groups they can be found in, and how they can benefit your research.

Melissa Barker is a Certified Archives Manager and Public Historian currently working at the Houston County, Tennessee Archives & Museum. She is known as The Archive Lady in the genealogy community. She writes a popular blog titled A Genealogist in the Archives. She has been a professional genealogist for the past 19 years with expertise in Tennessee records. She has been researching her own family history for the past 33 years.

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Monday, March 11, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

4:00 pm until 5:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: The Knowles Collection

Speaker: W. Todd Knowles

In this presentation, attendees will learn about the Knowles Collection and how to use it. This collection is six databases that contain the genealogical records of more than 1.5 million Jewish people from all parts of the world. The databases are indexed and linked as families. The entire collection is available free of charge at https://www.familysearch.org/. We will also discuss the Knowles Collection blog, which updates the activities in the collection.

W. Todd Knowles is an Accredited Genealogist who currently serves as a Deputy Chief Genealogy Officer at FamilySearch, where he has been employed for more than 25 years. His personal family history story began at the age of 11, when he first discovered his own Jewish heritage. That journey, which led to the Knowles Collection, still continues today. The Knowles Collection is six databases which contain the records of more than 1.5 million Jews. The collection is available free of charge at https://www.familysearch.org/. The collection also has a blog which provides updates on the records (https://knowlescollection.blogspot.com/). Todd is a past president of the Utah Jewish Genealogical Society and currently serves as a trustee of the International Society for British Genealogy and Family History.

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Sunday, February 11, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Phonetic Matching: An Alternative to Soundex with Fewer False Hits

Speaker: Dr. Stephen Morse

Searching for names in large databases containing spelling variations has always been a problem. One solution, known as Soundex, is to encode each name into a number such that names that sound alike will encode to the same number. The search would then be based on finding matching numbers, which results in finding all names that sound like the target name. The "sounds alike" criterion used in Soundex is based on the spelling, with no regard to how the name might be pronounced in a particular language. The phonetic encoding described here incorporates rules for determining the language based on the spelling of the name, along with pronunciation rules for the common languages. This has the advantage of eliminating matches that might appear to "sound alike" under the pure spelling criterion of Soundex but are phonetically quite unrelated. This work was developed jointly by Alexander Beider and Stephen Morse.

Stephen P. Morse is the creator of the One-Step Website, for which he has received both the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Outstanding Contribution Award from IAJGS, the Award of Merit from the National Genealogical Society, the first ever Excellence Award from the Association of Professional Genealogists, and two awards that he cannot pronounce from Polish genealogical societies. In his other life Morse is a computer professional with a doctorate degree in electrical engineering. He has held various research, development, and teaching positions, authored numerous technical papers, and written four textbooks and holds four patents.

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Monday, January 22, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

4:30 pm until 6:00 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Unlocking the Past: Exploring Dutch Ashkenazi Jewish Ancestry HANDOUT YouTube Recording

Speaker: Steve Jaron

Join us for an exploration of Dutch Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry led by Steve Jaron, a dedicated genealogist with a compelling story to share. You'll accompany Steve on a deeply personal journey as he delves into the intriguing world of his Dutch roots within the Ashkenazi Jewish community. Through ancestral narratives filled with surprising family connections and heartwarming reunions, you'll gain a unique perspective on the power of genealogical research to unveil hidden stories and connections. Steve will impart practical research strategies and tools that will equip you for your own genealogical quests. This event should be of interest to everyone, whether you have Dutch Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry or simply possess a curiosity about researching unfamiliar territory.

Steve Jaron is a lifelong Pittsburgh resident whose passion for genealogy was shaped by two significant experiences. First, during his bar-mitzvah trip to Israel, he met with several relatives, including his granduncle. His uncle shared a family story about discovering their shared ancestry when his grandaunt brought a photo of her great-grandparents into their home. This revelation led to the realization that they were second cousins. Although Steve later learned that his uncle was quite the storyteller, this tale kindled his interest in family history.

The second pivotal moment in Steve's genealogical journey occurred in college when he took a Spanish class. As part of an assignment, he had to create a family tree to learn the words for relationships. Fortunately, he already had a well documented family tree thanks to his grandaunt's efforts. Inspired by this class, he decided to explore further and searched an uncommon Jewish last name, "de Jongh." To his surprise, he stumbled on an online version of a book detailing his grandmother and grandaunt's mother's ancestors in the Netherlands, and his fascination with genealogy took root.

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Sunday, December 3, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.
Copresented with Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon

Time and Place:

11:30 am until 1:00 pm, Pacific Time Note earlier time
At Your Home

Topic: The Industrial Removal Office: How a Little-known Program Scattered Jews throughout the United States HANDOUT

Speaker: Risa Heywood

The Industrial Removal Office, a little-known organization in operation from 1900 to 1922, was created to help alleviate overcrowding in the Jewish areas of New York City. Its agents scoured the U.S. for businesses that needed skilled workers and matched them with immigrants in need of jobs. After accepting a job offer, an immigrant would receive a one-way ticket to a new city. Learn how to search this organization’s records and how they may help you solve the family mystery of why your family ended up in Cheyenne, Chattanooga, or some other unexpected place across the United States.

Risa Daitzman Heywood is a professional genealogist, writer, and speaker specializing in Ashkenazi Jewish research. She began researching her family more than 25 years ago after inheriting a six-generation family tree, meticulously hand-drawn by her grandfather on the back of a large piece of wrapping paper. The tree had only Americanized names and no dates or places, so she began learning about genealogy in order to figure out the family’s original surname and where they were from. Risa earned a Certificate in Genealogical Research from Boston University and is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists. She is a past president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado and served as cochair of JewishGen’s original Belarus Special Interest Group (SIG). Risa lives in Lisbon, Portugal.

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Sunday, November 19, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Discovering European Immigrant Ancestors: Their Experiences and the Records HANDOUT

Speaker: Nancy Loe

Learn about essential resources to research immigrants who left Europe between 1820 and 1920. What did they experience when they decided to leave their homes and communities to sail to America? What was the voyage like? When they reached America, what did they experience? Discover essential and lesser-known migration records for your family history research.

Archivist, librarian, and genealogist Nancy Loe has been helping researchers with their family trees since 1977. She specializes in U.S. and European family history research, presenting at Webinars and conferences in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Nancy’s Web site is sassyjanegenealogy.com. Her great-grandparents immigrated to Chicago from Prussia, Scotland, Austria, Romania, Norway, and Sweden.

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Monday, October 23, 2023 POSTPONED

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

4:00 pm until 5:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Learn Just Enough Russian for Genealogy

Speaker: Jane Neff Rollins

Start by learning the Cyrillic alphabet, both printed and handwritten, and graduate to stringing letters together to form words and names. With this overview and a bit of practice, attendees will be able to identify family names and basic genealogical terms in handwritten vital record registers and printed business directories.

Jane Neff Rollins is a professional genealogist who cried when she first saw her grandfather's name on the 1900 census. She has researched in archives in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC, and Jerusalem. Jane routinely translates 19th-century Russian documents into English for clients and online databases.

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Sunday, September 24, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and special members-only event.

Time and Place:

11:00 am until 12:30 pm, Pacific Time Note earlier time
At Your Home

Topic: Finding Relatives in Russian Empire Records for Non-Russian Speakers

Speaker: Lara Diamond

This is a members-only presentation, per the request of the speaker.
Co-presented with Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon

More and more Russian Empire records are becoming accessible online, but few are indexed. But for those who don’t speak Russian, browsing through the records in old-style Russian handwriting can be daunting. This talk will focus on how to identify, within various types of Russian Empire records, records relating to a researcher’s family, in spite of not having any Russian-language background. The talk will also cover various sources for online Russian Empire documents and discuss how to leverage these for one’s own research.

Lara Diamond is President of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland, leads JewishGen’s Subcarpathian SIG, and is on JewishGen’s Ukraine SIG’s board of directors. She has lectured around the country and internationally on Jewish and Eastern European genealogy research as well as genetic genealogy. She also runs multiple district- and town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns. Lara blogs about DNA and her Eastern European research at https://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com/. Lara began researching her own family around 1989 and has traced all branches of her family multiple generations back in Europe using Russian Empire-era and Austria-Hungarian Empire records. Most of her personal research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. She has done client research leading to their ancestors in many parts of the former USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and more.

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Monday, August 14, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

5:00 pm until 6:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Into the Archive: Voyagers from the Russian Empire to the United States

Speaker: Kelly O'Neill, Ph.D.

Over the course of the 19th century, more than half a million subjects of the tsar set sail for America. The records of their voyages are held at the National Archives, and while they provide only a sketch of each man, woman, and child who left the empire behind, when taken together they are a powerful tool for understanding the social and geographical origins of Russia’s immigrants. Dr. O’Neill will introduce the sources and a set of interactive tools she has built to allow researchers to identify patterns, uncover stories, and better understand the historical context of the 19th century.

Dr. Kelly O’Neill is a historian of the Russian Empire. Her first book, Claiming Crimea: A History of Catherine the Great’s Southern Empire, was published by Yale University Press in 2017. In 2018 she established The Imperiia Project at Harvard University, which integrates history, geographic information science, and historical cartography. She teaches, conducts training workshops, and regularly presents her research to audiences ranging from high school students to colleagues at academic institutions around the world.

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Sunday, July 16, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: The ABCs and 123s of Researching Your Ancestor's School Records HANDOUT

Speaker: Melissa Barker

The records of local public schools and universities can be valuable resources for finding information about your ancestors. Even if your ancestors didn't attend school, you would be surprised by what you can find in school records about them. This presentation will show what types of school records there are and how to find them in repositories.

Melissa Barker is a Certified Archives Manager and public historian currently working at the Houston County, Tennessee Archives. She is known as the Archive Lady in the genealogy community. She lectures, teaches, and writes about the genealogy research process, researching in archives, and records preservation. She writes a blog called "A Genealogist in the Archives." She has been a professional genealogist for the past 19 years with expertise in Tennessee records and has been researching her own family for 33 years.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Sunday, June 25, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Did My Family Lie, or Are the Records Wrong?

Speaker: Daniel Horowitz

Daniel’s quest to find the truth about one of his great-grandmothers led him to a wealth of newly available records from the Holocaust in the Arolsen Archives—which just might help you find more information about the fate of your own family before, during, and after the war. Learn the techniques used to sift the true from the false and find out where to look and what to ask when researching a Jewish family that lived during the Holocaust.

Dedicated to genealogy since 1986, Daniel was the teacher and the study guide editor of the family history project “Searching for My Roots” in Venezuela for 15 years. He was a board member of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies for 10 years, now is involved in several crowdsourced digitization and transcription projects, and holds a board-level position at the Israel Genealogy Research Association. Since 2006 Daniel has been working at MyHeritage, liaising with genealogical societies, bloggers, and media, as well as lecturing and attending conferences around the world.

We are pleased to welcome Daniel, but it should be noted that SFBAJGS is not endorsing MyHeritage over any other product or service.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Monday, May 22, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

4:00 pm until 5:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Death and Burial

Speaker: Rabbi Scott Kalmikoff

By walking you through the steps he took to conduct his personal genealogical research, Rabbi Scott will teach you the methodology of searching for records & documents, analyzing them & using the information they contain to build your family tree. The workshop gives you an overview of online death and burial resources so you can use them from the comfort of your home.

Rabbi Scott’s hope is to excite you about genealogy & empower you to conduct the research on your own. For Rabbi Scott, genealogy isn't just a hobby or profession. Genealogy is a wonderful journey of personal exploration & self-discovery. While learning about our ancestors we learn about ourselves. While learning about our history we connect with & deepen our Jewish identities. Jewish history & our families' stories are our story & deeply influence who we are today in ways we may never fully comprehend. Genealogical research provides us with a precious gift we can pass to the next generation, L'Dor VaDor.

Rabbi Scott Kalmikoff was born & raised in Staten Island, NY. He grew up in a two-family home where he lived with his parents, younger brother & maternal grandparents. Growing up, Scott had a particularly close relationship with his grandparents who shared many stories with him about their lives, relatives & family history. These family stories inspired a curiosity within Scott who wanted to learn more about his family tree.

Scott began his genealogical research fourteen years ago at the young age of fifteen. Since then, he has traced parts of his family tree as far back as the 1600s & discovered roots in Belarus, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania & Wales. Scott has traveled across the globe, visiting the towns his ancestors emigrated from & meeting distant relatives. Rabbi Scott received a BA in Jewish Studies with a concentration in Jewish History from Yeshiva University. He was a recipient of the university’s Altshul, Pearlman Memorial Award for Highest Ranks in all Jewish Studies. Following graduation from Yeshiva University, Scott began his studies at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School & was ordained in June 2018. Scott is a member of the Jewish Genealogical Society of New York & currently resides on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Scott was inspired to offer his genealogical expertise in American & European Jewish Genealogy to those who are interested in connecting with their roots. For Rabbi Scott, genealogy isn't just a hobby or profession. Genealogy is a wonderful journey of personal exploration & self-discovery. While learning about our ancestors we learn about ourselves. While learning about our history we connect with & deepen our Jewish identities. Jewish history & our families' stories are our story & deeply influence who we are today in ways we may never fully comprehend. Genealogical research provides us with a precious gift we can pass to the next generation, L'Dor VaDor. Rabbi Scott's website.

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Sunday, April 23, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:30 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Excel for Genealogists HANDOUT Class Exercize.xlsx Class Exercize.pdf

Speaker: Stewart Traiman

Stewart loves spreadsheets! He uses spreadsheets every day to analyze genealogical data. Laying out genealogy facts in Excel can help researchers see gaps in knowledge or correlations between data points. Breakthroughs can easily happen by visualizing data in spreadsheets. Stewart shows many examples of his use of spreadsheets to track newspaper clippings, a vital records catalog, tracking ancestor addresses over time, and tracking whole families over many censuses. Stewart will teach how to use Excel filter, sort, color code, calculations, and many other functions. Spreadsheets are fun!

Stewart Traiman is a professional genealogist, a graduate of ProGen #49, and attends national conferences and annual institutes (GRIP, IGHR, SLIG). He is a public speaker and blogger. “LGBTQ Genealogy” and “Excel for Genealogists” are his most popular presentations. He has been a volunteer with the California Genealogical Society since 2014, serving six years on the Board of Directors, with five years as recording secretary. He published the monthly CGS eNews for eight years. He continues to volunteer with CGS on the Digital Historian Committee. For more information see SixGen.org.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Sunday, February 26, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

3:30 pm until 5:00 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: The 1950 Census: One Year Later

Speaker: Dr. Stephen Morse

The 1950 Census was released on April 1, 2022 after being sealed for 72 years. Since the release date, many of us have tried to find records in the census and have run into various quirks. This presentation will discuss the things that we have learned since opening day. The topics covered are searching the census by name and what was involved in creating a searchable name index, searching the census by location and the various sites that have tools to support this, confusion between census sheets and census pages, transient handling and the Individual Census Reports, and the cross-referencing that was done if nobody was home when the census taker came to call.

Steve Morse is the creator of the One-Step Website, for which he has received both the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Outstanding Contribution Award from IAJGS, the Award of Merit from the National Genealogical Society, the first ever Excellence Award from the Association of Professional Genealogists, and two awards that he cannot pronounce from Polish genealogical societies. In his other life Morse is a computer professional with a doctorate degree in electrical engineering. He has held various research, development, and teaching positions, authored numerous technical papers, and written four textbooks and holds four patents.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Sunday, December 4, 2022

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: The Increasingly Accessible U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Correspondence Files HANDOUT

Speaker: Marian Smith

This presentation will introduce researchers to immigration correspondence 1882-1957 and Bureau of Naturalization correspondence 1906-1946 at the National Archives (NARA) in Washington, DC, then discuss various finding aids that give access to the files. Among the finding aids covered will be original finding aids and indices (some digitized online, some available only at NARA) as well as in-progress indices being created by NARA to break down what has been a brick wall barring access. Also discussed will be how to request correspondence files from NARA.

Marian Smith is retired after 30 years as an historian for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), later U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). She now spends some of her time working to create a course on researching U.S. immigration and nationality records, and occasionally speaks to researcher groups on late 19th- and 20th-century immigration and naturalization record topics.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Monday, November 14, 2022

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

4:30 pm until 6 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Family Research Spawns Debut Novel

Speaker: Judith Berlowitz

Share Judith’s journey from genealogical search for a single surname to an investigation into the life of a woman whose name ended up in Gestapo and Soviet records but whose story had yet to be told.

Los Angeles-born Judith Berlowitz couldn’t wait to retire from her position teaching Spanish at Mills College to step into the world of fiction. Judith’s experience in genealogy opened one door, but her background as a musician, tour guide, and medical interpreter took her all the way to her first novel. Judith lives in San Francisco with her husband and sings in the San Francisco Bach Choir. Her site is https://judithberlowitzauthor.com/.

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Sunday, October 30, 2022

SFBAJGS Co-Presentation with KlezCalifornia and Jewish Community Library ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

11:00 am until 12:45 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Ashkenazic Family Names: What Our Names Mean About Our Families RESOURCES

Speaker: Binyumen Schaechter

Find out about your Ashkenazic ancestors from 200 years ago, when they took family names: what kind of work they did, what their first names were, how they looked or behaved, what their socio-economic status was, and where you came from. Learn the etymology of the names of many celebrities, friends, co-workers, etc. The presentation will consist of a brief history of Ashkenazic family names and an in-depth analysis of Ashkenazic patronymics, matronymics, occupational names, geographical names, nicknames, and more.

Binyumen Schaechter is best known as a musical theater composer (five off-Broadway shows as “Ben Schaechter”), Yiddish choral conductor and arranger (for the New York City-based Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus), Musical Director and accompanist (of Di Shekhter-tekhter, and others), translator of lyrics into Yiddish (“Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” “Over the Rainbow,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “O, Mio Babbino Caro”, and many others), and leader of Yiddish sing-alongs (especially his recurring Yiddish Song Workshop & Sing-along). But additionally, he is frequently invited to conferences and festivals, JCCs, museums, synagogues, and universities, to give lectures and workshops relating to Yiddish music and the Yiddish language. Among his most frequently requested topics are “How to Sing in Yiddish So That It Sounds Like Yiddish,” “Ashkenazic Family Names: What Our Names Mean About Our Families”, and, from an autobiographical perspective, “How It Came to Be, in 21st Century America, That Our Entire Extended Family Speaks Yiddish.” He is forever grateful to his parents, Dr. Mordkhe and Charne Schaechter, z”l.

Registration closes four hours before event begins.
No charge; donations encouraged.
Information and Register for this meeting.

Sunday, October 2, 2022

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Using the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Digital Resources from Home

Speaker: Megan Lewis

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has multiple digital resources that family historians can use in their research. More and more of these resources are becoming available to people unable to travel to Washington, DC. This presentation will demonstrate these resources, including some unfamiliar to most genealogists, and provide hints on how to use them effectively.

Excitingly USHMM recently uploaded more than 60 collections from Ukrainian State Archives that researchers can now access (and download) online through our Collections Search catalog. Records are from all over Ukraine, including eastern Galicia, Kyiv region, Odessa and Mykolaiv regions, Khmelnitskiy, Rivne, Vinnitsa, and Transcarpathia and equal several million pages of material. Holocaust-era records include censuses, slave labor lists, and information about confiscated Jewish property. Postwar records include the return of evacuees. Many collections contain interwar records that are full of genealogical information such as passport applications, records from a wide variety of Jewish organizations, school records, probate records, and records regarding victims of the 1919–1921 pogroms. Also new is an improved system for downloading records from the Collections Search catalog and the addition of dozens of personal paper collections.

Since 1998, Megan Lewis has served in different roles at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and has developed a deep knowledge of the Museum resources that can be used in genealogy. She has spoken at many genealogy conferences, meetings, and programs. Megan currently serves as a reference librarian at the USHMM Library and Archives reference desk. She earned a BA in History and a Master’s of Library Science from the University of Maryland. In addition, she holds a post graduate certificate in Curation and Management of Digital Assets.

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Monday, September 12, 2022

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

4:30 pm until 6:00 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Jewish Research in Prussian Poland HANDOUT

Speaker: Roger Lustig

Roger Lustig, who has researched Jewish families from Prussian Poland for more than a decade, will describe the various eastern territories, their absorption into the Prussian state, and the origins and character of the Jewish communities in each one; key resources in and outside Poland for researching ancestors from this area; and recent examples of how today's Poles are learning about the Jews who lived there and are preserving the traces of that history. Members researching family in any part of Prussian Poland are encouraged to email Roger in advance at Roger.Lustig@verizon.net with questions about particular topics, places, and families of interest. He will do his best to work these queries into his talk.

Roger Lustig is a genealogical researcher based in Princeton, New Jersey. Since 2002 he has specialized in Jewish families of Prussian Poland, especially Upper Silesia and West Prussia. He has done research in archives in the U.S., Germany, and Poland. As research coordinator for GerSIG (German Special Interest Group) he is developing databases, including NALDEX (Name-Adoption List index), Württemberg Family Registers, and the Hessen-Gatermann database. He has also contributed more than 35,000 Prussian records to the JRI-Poland database, for which he is the Prussian Poland Area Coordinator. He moderates the GerSIG group on Facebook and is one of four admins of the Tracing the Tribe group, one of the largest Jewish genealogy groups on Facebook.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Sunday, August 14, 2022

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

11:00 am until 12:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Arolsen Archives: History, Exploration, and Online Access

Speaker: Serafima Velkovich

Many myths surround the collections of the Arolsen Archives: International Center on Nazi Persecution in Bad Arolsen, Germany. Formerly known as the International Tracing Service, the Archives was established by the International Red Cross and Allied forces at the end of World War II to trace missing and displaced people and help reunite survivors with their relatives. In this lecture, Serafima Velkovich, Head of the Family Roots Research Section at the Yad Vashem Archives, will demystify the Arolsen Archives by describing its history, the types of files it holds, and what information can be gleaned from those files. Additionally, Ms. Velkovich will offer strategies for identifying relevant documents and key clues when searching its new Online Archives and additional collections available at the Arolsen Archives and five partner institutions worldwide, including Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Serafima Velkovich, Head of the Family Roots Research Section in the Reference and Information Department in the Yad Vashem Archives division, is a PhD Candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a frequent lecturer at international and local conferences, participates in films on Holocaust topics, and assists visiting genealogists.

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Sunday, June 12, 2022

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Why Did Our Jewish Ancestors Leave a Great Place Like the Pale? HANDOUT

Speaker: Hal Bookbinder

Jews had lived in what would become the Pale of Western Russia for centuries. In many ways they flourished there, creating diverse institutions and with a huge increase in population from about 1 million at the beginning of the 19th century to more than 5 million by the end of the 19th century. Then, between 1881 and 1914, more than 2 million left all that they had known for the West. This talk discusses how the Pale came to be, life in it, and why this mass migration occurred. It breaks the 120-year history of the Pale into periods of creation, confinement, repression, enlightenment, pogroms, and chaos. There is much more to the story than the horrific pogroms at the turn of the 20th century.

Hal Bookbinder is a retired information systems professional who continues to instruct business courses at the university level. He has been actively researching his genealogy for more than three decades, identifying more than 4,000 relatives and tracing two lines to the mid-1700s in modern Ukraine. Hal has written and spoken on border changes, migration, citizenship, safe computing, and unique research techniques. He is a past president of the JGS of Los Angeles and of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies. Hal publishes a series of monthly articles on safe computing which are freely available at https://www.tinyurl.com/SafeComputingArticles. He and his wife, Marci, were raised in the Catskills of New York State and now live in the Los Angeles area.

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Monday, May 16, 2022

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

5:00 pm until ? pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Adding Historical Context to Your Genealogy Research

Speaker: Kate Eakman

Adding historical context to our genealogical research makes it richer and more interesting, and helps explain some of the changes in our families. But if you aren’t a historian, how do you know when there is an opportunity to add history to your research? In this presentation, we will discuss

●Why adding historical context to your genealogy can make your research more interesting to the younger generation;
●How it has the potential to help break down brick walls;
●How to identify people, places, and events ripe for added historical context;
●Where to find the history; and
●How to incorporate your results in your genealogy.

Kate Eakman holds an M.A. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with additional graduate work in history and education. She has been doing genealogical research since she was in grade school, collecting family stories and photographs of 200-year-old family graves in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia. She is currently the British Research Team Manager for Salt Lake City-based Legacy Tree Genealogists. In addition to traditional genealogical research and writing, Kate has taught a variety of classes on genealogical topics. Kate lives in Gresham, Oregon, where she and her husband have a retired racehorse named Leon and a mustang named Gwen. The four of them provide opportunities for disadvantaged children to experience a very large animal up close and in person.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Sunday, April 10, 2022

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Bubbie, Who Are You?: Finding the Maiden Names in Your Family Tree

Speaker: Janice M. Sellers

Female relatives can be difficult to trace, but they can be found. This class introduces resources for tracing the women in your family, including family items, oral histories, federal and state census records, immigration records, vital records, religious records, journals, newspapers, legal and court records, library archives, and manuscript collections.

Janice is related to actor Peter Sellers and to John of Gaunt, son of a king and father of a king. At least that’s what her grandparents told her. Unfortunately, they were wrong, but that’s why she has researched her family for 46 years and now helps others find the right pieces to fit their genealogy puzzles. She specializes in Jewish, Black and forensic research. She is responsible for publicity and programs for the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society and is the editor of ZichronNote. Janice is also president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon. Her site is ancestraldiscoveries.com.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Monday, March 14, 2022

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Links

Rootstech 2022 Family Tree Maker Booth Videos

Facebook User Group

Details about Family Book Creator

Charting Companion

Time and Place:

4:00 pm until ? pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: What's New in Family Tree Maker

Speaker: Mark Olsen, MacKiev/Family Tree Maker

Mark Olsen will join us for a discussion and Q and A session to answer all your questions about Family Tree Maker: the latest version, updates, features, and more. He will also talk about FTM partner products -— Charting Companion and Family Book Creator — which are plugs-ins that can help you create charts, books, and even show you some additional finds with your DNA test results. This class is for all levels of genealogists, whether you are just getting started or very experienced.

Mark Olsen is the Family Tree Maker Ambassador to historical and genealogical societies around the world, working to support their members as they use Family Tree Maker. Mark is a graduate of Brigham Young University and holds a Bachelor's degree in Family History with a Spanish records emphasis. He has been working in the genealogy industry since 2007.

We are pleased to welcome Mark, but it should be noted that SFBAJGS is not endorsing Family Tree Maker over any other product or service.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Sunday, February 13, 2022

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Genealogy for Sale: Researching in Auction Houses HANDOUT

Speaker: Daniel Horowitz, MyHeritage

Every day, hundreds of historical treasures go on sale on websites like eBay, Bidspirit, and other online auction houses. While you may strike lucky and discover an artifact related to your own family history, you may also discover objects that bear tangible testimony to the context in which your ancestors lived: perhaps a pince-nez like the one your great-grandfather dons in that old photo, or a copy of a poster that inspired your grandmother to join the war effort and work in a factory. In this lecture, Daniel will show you how to leverage auction houses for your genealogy research.

Dedicated to genealogy since 1986, Daniel was the teacher and study guide editor of the family history project "Searching for My Roots" in Venezuela for 15 years. He was a board member of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies for 10 years. He now is involved in several crowdsource digitization and transcription projects and holds a board-level position at the Israel Genealogy Research Association. Since 2006 Daniel has been working at MyHeritage liaising with genealogy societies, bloggers, and media, as well as lecturing, and attending conferences around the world.

We are pleased to welcome Daniel, but it should be noted that SFBAJGS is not endorsing MyHeritage over any other product or service.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Monday, January 24, 2022

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

5:00 until ?, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Navigating the New York City Census with Fewer Tears HANDOUT

Speaker: Dr. Stephen Morse

Several state censuses were taken in New York starting from 1790. The most valuable for genealogical purposes are the 1905, 1915, and 1925 censuses because that was a time of large influx of immigration. Numerous assorted aids existed for navigating through those censuses, but they were often hard to use, covered only specific years or boroughs, and not available at all libraries. The One-Step Website rectifies that situation by putting a universal finding aid online that covers all New York City boroughs in each of the three census years. This presentation describes the One-Step approach and contrasts it with previous methods.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Sunday, December 12, 2021

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 until 2:30pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Tracing Your Jewish Family in Ukraine

Speaker: Alex Krakovsky

Alex Krakovsky will discuss his work in Ukrainian archives, his online site, and the documents he is making available to researchers outside Ukraine by digitizing and publishing them online.

Alex was born at a very young age in Kyiv in 1982. He graduated from Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in 2005 and started his own genealogy tour in 2011. Since then he became involved in various Ukrainian archive projects. Most notable is his goal to digitize and publish online all of the Jewish records in Ukraine. He has spent years in Ukrainian archives finding previously unknown Jewish lists and putting them online. He has won many lawsuits with Ukrainian archives to make records open and available to everyone.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Sunday, December 5, 2021

SFBAJGS Co-Presentation with Jewish LearningWorks ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

2:00 until 3:00pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: A Rosenberg By Any Other Name

Speaker: Kirsten Fermaglich

Common thinking about Jewish name changing tends to focus on clichés: ambitious movie stars who adopted glamorous new names or insensitive Ellis Island officials who changed immigrants’ names for them. The real story is much more profound. In her research, Fermaglich examines previously unexplored name change petitions to reveal that in twentieth-century New York City, Jewish name changing was actually a broad-based and voluntary behavior: thousands of ordinary Jewish men, women, and children legally changed their names in order to respond to an upsurge of antisemitism. While name changing helped Jewish families avoid antisemitism and achieve white middle-class status, the practice also created pain within families and became a stigmatized, forgotten aspect of American Jewish culture that had a lasting impact.

Kirsten Fermaglich is professor of history and Jewish studies at Michigan State University. Her most recent book, A Rosenberg By Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America (NYU, 2018) was awarded the Saul Viener Book Prize by the American Jewish Historical Society in June 2019. Fermaglich is also the author of American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957-1965 (Brandeis University Press, 2006) and the co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (2013), with Lisa Fine. She is currently co-editor of the journal, American Jewish History, along with Daniel Soyer and Adam Mendelsohn. Her current research focuses on the migration of Jewish academics to college towns throughout the South and Midwest in the years after World War II.

This program is made possible, in part, by Lawrence Burgheimer.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Sunday, November 21, 2021

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 until 2:30pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Here Comes the 1950 U.S. Census! What to Expect HANDOUT

Speaker: Joel Weintraub

The 1950 U.S. census will become public on 1 April 2022. Joel Weintraub will prepare us for its debut by describing the census, how it was taken, its questions and codes, the training of enumerators, and more. He will also briefly discuss his and Steve Morse’s 1950 census location tools, available at SteveMorse.org.

A New Yorker by birth, Joel is an emeritus Professor of Biology at California State University at Fullerton. He became interested in genealogy more than 20 years ago and volunteered for nine years at the National Archives in Southern California. Joel has helped produce location tools for five federal censuses and three New York State censuses for Steve Morse’s One-Step Website. He has published articles on the U.S. census’ 72-year rule, finding difficult passenger records, and the challenges of searching NYC census records. His YouTube channel at “JDW Talks” features his genealogy talks.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Monday, October 18, 2021

SFBAJGS Online Presentation via ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

4:00 until 5:30, Pacific Time NEW TIME!
At Your Home

Topic: Levi Strauss: It’s All in the "Genes"

Speaker: Michael Strauss, AG

This lecture focuses on the life of one of California”s most well known pioneers. Levi Strauss was a prominent businessman and philanthropist both in the Jewish community and to the general public in the San Francisco Bay area. From modest beginnings, born to a Jewish family in Europe, Levi Strauss arrived in the United States to find his fortune. He will always be remembered for his charity, as well as for his fashion-world “jeans” and the legacy he left to the American west.

Michael L. Strauss is a professional Accredited Genealogist and a resident of Utah. He holds a B.A. in History and is a U.S. Coast Guard veteran and a licensed private investigator in Virginia. He is a qualified expert witness in estate matters in court in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. Additionally, he is an approved genealogist with the U.S. Army to locate DNA-qualified persons for MIA service members from Korea, Vietnam, and World War II. Michael was the film historian for the 2014 film "Finding Vivian Maier." Visit his site at https://genealogyresearchnetwork.com/.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Sunday, September 19, 2021

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 until 2:30pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Holding a Family Tree-union on Zoom

Speaker: David Milgram

In April 2020, a cousin of mine who was SIPing in NYC suggested that a Zoom call among our surviving cousins would be a good way to catch up in the midst of the pandemic. I took up the challenge and started figuring out what needed to happen in order to pull it off. The idea mushroomed to include as much of the family tree as possible, with a recognition of the unfamiliarity of the younger generation branches with each other. On June 7, we staged the Milgram/Weiner Family Tree-union with more than 100 viewers attending through 50 gallery windows. My talk describes the process and the successful result.

David is a retired computer scientist since 2009, chairman of the Los Altos Hills Public Art Committee, and a member of Congregation Kol Emeth since 1979. His current activities are photography, Jewish study (Talmud), and public art.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Monday, August 23, 2021

SFBAJGS Online Presentation via ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

3:30 until 5:30, Pacific Time NEW TIME!
At Your Home

Topic: Sephardic Jewish Research: Jewish Ethnicity and DNA: History, Migration, Genetics

Speaker: Schelly Talalay Dardashti and Maria Apodaca

Schelly Talalay Dardashti will build on her introduction to Sephardic research program with a deeper look into Jewish ethnicity as seen through historical events, migrations, and DNA evidence. Maria Apodaca will offer her compelling personal story, "My Journey: It Only Took 500 Years", covering her family's history, genealogy, and DNA and her return to Judaism.

Schelly is a journalist and genealogist, founder of the award-winning “Tracing the Tribe: Jewish Genealogy on Facebook” (38,000+ members/101 countries), and the U.S. Genealogy Advisor for MyHeritage.com. She was an early proponent of DNA for genealogy and co-admins several DNA projects at FamilyTreeDNA. She has traced her Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi roots for more than 35 years. Schelly is a founding member, Centro Sefarad NM (New Mexico); president, JGS of New Mexico; and media coordinator, Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies.

Maria’s family has been in New Mexico since arriving with the Juan Onate expedition in 1598. She was born and raised a Catholic in Albuquerque before finding out, at 14, her family’s true heritage. She made her return to Judaism in 1999 and is active in many Jewish organizations. Her affiliations include founding member and event coordinator, Centro Sefarad NM; vice president, Jewish Genealogical Society of New Mexico; outreach coordinator, Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies; and member, New Mexico Jewish Historical Society. She has shared her personal story and the Sephardic saga as a speaker for the Road Scholars program since 2016.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Sunday, July 11, 2021

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 until 2:30pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: The Archaeology of San Francisco Jews YouTube Video

Speaker: Adrian Praetzellis

This illustrated talk will be mainly about two San Francisco archaeological sites associated with Jews: the former cemetery of congregations Sherith Israel and Emanu-el under Dolores Park and the 1870s Frohman site at what is now the Yerba Buena/Moscone Station. In addition to archaeology, this work involved research in a range of primary archival sources, ranging from the manuscript minutes of several Jewish organizations to cemetery relocation records. The presentation draws on my article “Archaeology of San Francisco Jews” (IJHA 2021) and bounces off my work on Jewish sites in San Francisco, Oakland, and Sacramento.

Adrian Praetzellis’ experience in archaeology began on Roman and Medieval sites in the UK. Moving to the USA, he reoriented to the archaeology of California and has since worked at sites ranging from a 12,000+-year-old hunting camp in Lake County to the remains of an 1870's “parlor house” (a high-end brothel) in downtown Los Angeles. Adrian has a Ph.D. in Anthropology/Archaeology (UC Berkeley) and is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Sonoma State University. He is married with two children and three grandchildren, photos of whom he will happily share.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Monday, June 21, 2021

SFBAJGS Online Presentation via ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

4:00 until 5:30, Pacific Time NEW TIME!
At Your Home

Topic: Finding your Eastern European Jewish Family on JRI-Poland.org HANDOUT

Speaker: Robinn Magid, JRI-Poland.org

JRI-Poland's vast collection of 6.2 million records from more than 600 towns includes information about towns and families in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Germany, and the former territories of Galicia and Prussia. Through understanding the contents of the database and how to improve your search results to exploring preserved Holocaust-related records, this lecture will focus on the good things that can come out of a genealogical search.

Robinn Magid is the Assistant Director of JRI-Poland.org. She recently became the project manager of the JRI-Poland “NextGen Project” to redesign the JRI-Poland site, search engine, and database. As the Lublin Area Projects Coordinator, she is responsible for coordinating the indexing of Jewish vital records for approximately 100 towns. Robinn has spoken at many IAJGS conferences on behalf of JRI-Poland and served as the chair of IAJGS 2018 Warsaw, Poland conference and the IAJGS 2020 Virtual Conference on Jewish Genealogy. She is a member of the San Francisco Bay Area JGS.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Sunday, May 23, 2021

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 until 2:30pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: How a Record Match Almost Led Me to an Insane Asylum

Speaker: Daniel Horowitz, MyHeritage

Daniel’s quest to find the truth about one of his great-grandmothers led him to a wealth of newly available records from the Holocaust, which might help you find more information about the fate of your own family before, during, and after the war. Learn the techniques used to sift the true from the false and find out where to look and what to ask when researching a Jewish family that lived during the Holocaust.

Daniel Horowitz is the Genealogy Expert at MyHeritage, providing key contributions by liaising with genealogical societies, bloggers, and media, as well as lecturing and attending conferences around the world. Dedicated to genealogy since 1986, he was the teacher and the study guide editor of the family history project “Searching for My Roots” in Venezuela for 15 years. Daniel is involved in several crowdsource digitization and transcription projects and holds a board-level position at the Israel Genealogy Research Association.

We are pleased to welcome Daniel to explain all the intricacies of what MH has to offer, but it should be noted that the SFBAJGS is not endorsing this product over any other.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Monday, April 19, 2021

SFBAJGS Online Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

4:00 until 5:30, Pacific Time NEW TIME!
At Your Home

Topic: Organizing Family History with Photos

Speaker: Susan Gerbic

As many people know, organizing any box of photos can be intimidating and stressful: How do you start and what do you do first? Imagine how stressful it can be when you have far more than a box, but many boxes, and photo albums that are wasting away. Susan will talk about how to start and organize medium and large projects concerning family history with photos. Her main emphasis will be on the organizational part of the project. How do you set goals? Understanding what you are attempting to do is as important as doing the job itself. While the technology involved will be covered, it is not the main focus of the talk. Photo preservation will NOT be discussed.

Susan Gerbic has organized and journaled her family's large collection of clippings, letters, photos, videos, and more. She was chief photographer and manager of a portrait studio for 34 years and holds a B.A. in social history. She firmly believes that photos are more usable in digital form than on paper.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Sunday, March 14, 2021

SFBAJGS Online Presentation

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00 until 2:30pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Street Names and Numbers: Grid Changes, Renaming, and More

Speaker: Thomas MacEntee, GenealogyBargains.com

We will review the history of street naming and learn how to break down street address data. We’ll cover street grid changes for towns and cities as well as how to track “missing” streets. Learn how to use innovative online tools to visualize a specific street address and the information you need to know when working with street names and addresses.

What happens when a “tech guy” with a love for history gets laid off during the Great Recession of 2008? You get Thomas MacEntee, a genealogy professional who’s also a blogger, educator, author, social media connector, marketer, network builder, and more.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Wednesday, March 10, 2021

The SFBAJGS is pleased to be the co-sponsor of this presentation by the Jewish Community Library:

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

6:00 until 7:00 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Nuestra America: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation MORE INFO

Speaker: Claudio Lomnitz

In Nuestra America, Claudio Lomnitz traces his family’s experiences across Romania, Peru, Colombia, Israel, California, Mexico, Chile, and beyond. Weaving the stories of Jews like them, who fled Europe to South America, with the complex web of Latin American history, Nuestra America is a narrative of exile and immigration that transcends genre to reveal the complex and subtle connections between South American radical movements and Jewish emancipation and exile in the early 20th century.

Claudio Lomnitz, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, is an anthropologist, historian, and critic who works broadly on Latin American culture and politics. Lomnitz’s books include Death and the Idea of Mexico and The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón, among many others. As a regular columnist in the Mexico City paper La Jornada and as a dramaturgist, he is committed to bringing historical and anthropological understanding into public debate.

Register for this meeting

Monday, February 22, 2021

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

4:00 until 5:30, Pacific Time NEW TIME!
At Your Home

Topic: Making the Most of FamilySearch for Jewish Research CLICK TO VIEW VIDEO: YouTube; 1 hour 4 minutes

Speaker: W. Todd Knowles

The FamilySearch site (https://www.familysearch.org/) holds the records of more than 6 billion people worldwide, making it the largest collection of free family trees, genealogy records, and resources in the world. In this presentation, Todd will guide us through the FamilySearch site, with an emphasis on finding our Jewish families. We will also learn how to use the Knowles Collection, six databases that contain the records of more than 1.4 million Jewish people. These databases are "The Jews of the British Isles", "The Jews of Europe", "The Jews of North America", "The Jews of South America and Caribbean", "The Jews of the Pacific Islands", and "The Jews of Africa, Middle East and the Orient." Todd will show us how to access the collection and how best to apply it to our own family research.

W. Todd Knowles, Accredited Genealogist, is Deputy Chief Genealogical Officer for FamilySearch International in Salt Lake City, UT. After being introduced to family history at the age of 12, he soon discovered his Jewish roots. The journey to find these Polish Jews has led to the creation of the Knowles Collection (knowlescollection.blogspot.com), which grows almost daily and is now part of FamilySearch.org. Todd has spoken throughout the world, and his articles have been widely published.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Sunday, December 6, 2020

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

12:00 noon, Pacific Time NEW TIME!
At Your Home

Topic: The History of the Geography of New York City HANDOUT

Speaker: Dr. Steve Morse

New York City has undergone numerous changes to its geographical boundaries over the years. An understanding of these boundaries is important in order to know what archive to search when looking for vital records. This talk shows the changes to New York City's geography and describes the difference between New York City and the City of New York. The origin of the counties and their changing boundaries, along with the early geographies of Brooklyn and Queens, are presented. Finally, the consolidation of 1898 that created the City of New York and defined the five boroughs is discussed.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Sunday, November 15, 2020

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Hungarian Jewish Family Research: New Additions to the JewishGen Hungary Database and Much More HANDOUT

Speaker: Vivian Kahn

With almost 2 million records already online and more added regularly, the JewishGen Hungary Database is one of the best resources for researching Hungarian Jewish families. There are, however, a wide variety of other sites that are less familiar to many researchers. This presentation will highlight what’s available from JewishGen and identify other lesser known online resources that can help you expand your Hungarian research horizons. Although many of them are in Hungarian, armed with a list of basic genealogical terms and an understanding of the site design and contents, you can search these resources even if you don’t understand Hungarian. Vivian will review some of these sites, describe what they offer, and provide tips on how to use them.

Vivian Kahn is JewishGen’s Hungarian Research Director and moderates the Hungarian discussion list. She has presented workshops on Jewish genealogy and, especially, Hungarian Jewish family research at IAJGS annual conferences, for Jewish genealogy societies, and in Sighet, Romania, during a May 2015 gathering of Sighet descendants. Since beginning research on her own family from pre-Trianon Hungary more than 25 years ago, she has identified and used a wide range of archival, print, and online resources to research her own family and for others and has made research trips to Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Sunday, October 25, 2020

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: Reclaim the Records: Using Freedom of Information Laws for Genealogical Research

Handout

Webinar Deck as pdf (very large file)

Speaker: Brooke Schreier Ganz

Tired of being told by state archives or libraries that the records you want are inaccessible? Reclaim the Records is a not-for-profit group filing Freedom of Information requests to get these “off limits” genealogy records released back to the public and put online for free. Learn how we successfully challenged the NYC Municipal Archives in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, and our upcoming plans.

Brooke Schreier Ganz is a genealogist, computer programmer, and open-data activist. She works on making archival records more accessible to the general public through technological solutions and legal remedies. She is a former Vice President of Gesher Galicia and designed and built the Gesher Galicia Web site, including its innovative and free All Galicia Database. Brooke won second place in the 2012 RootsTech Developer Challenge for the underlying search engine codebase, named LeafSeek.

Monday, October 19, 2020

SFBAJGS Presentation

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306

Topic: Intimate Histories: Genealogy and American Jewish Religion Speaker: Rachel Gross

Sunday, September 13, 2020

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

1:00pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Topic: 20th Century Immigration and Naturalization Records

Speaker: Marisa Louie Lee

The National Archives maintains a wealth of records relating to immigration and naturalization in the 20th century. This includes more than one million Alien Case Files, or "A-Files", at its facilities in San Francisco, California, and Kansas City, Missouri. Created beginning in 1944, these files relate to noncitizen alien residents of the United States and are a potential wealth of genealogical information. We'll discuss more about what's in the A-Files, who is documented in them, how to find them at the National Archives, and how to access records that remain with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Marisa Louie Lee is an archival researcher specializing in federal records. While an archivist at the National Archives at San Francisco, she co-authored the article "The A-Files: Finding Your Immigrant Ancestors", published in the Spring 2013 issue of Prologue magazine. A fifth-generation Chinese-American, Marisa first worked with federal records as a college student researching her own family's history in the United States. She has presented talks at the California Genealogical Society, the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG), the Japanese American National Museum (in conjunction with the Nikkei Genealogical Society), and the Chinese Historical Society of America.

Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Monday, August 24, 2020

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

NEW Time and Place:

4:00-5:30 pm Pacific Time

Topic: Getting Ready for the 1950 Census: Searching with and without a Name Index
Facilitated by: Dr. Steve Morse

When the 1950 census is released in April 2022, it will not have a name index. So finding people in the census will involve searching by location instead. Even when a name index becomes available, there will still be many reasons for doing locational searches. The census is organized by Enumeration Districts (EDs), so the location needs to be converted to an ED before the census can be accessed. The One-Step Website contains numerous tools for obtaining EDs. This talk will present the various tools and show circumstances in which each can be used.
Steve Morse is the creator of the One-Step Website, for which he has received both the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Outstanding Contribution Award from IAJGS, the Award of Merit from the National Genealogical Society, the first ever Excellence Award from the Association of Professional Genealogists, and two awards that he cannot pronounce from Polish genealogical societies. In his other life Morse is a computer professional with a doctorate degree in electrical engineering. He has held various research, development, and teaching positions, authored numerous technical papers, and written four textbooks and holds four patents.

Sunday, August 23, 2020

SFBAJGS Presentation CANCELED

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and NEW Place:

Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm
San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch, Latino/Hispanic Room
100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 Map

Topic: Story Lines: Beyond the Family Tree

Speaker: Nancy Siegel

You've done the research, gathered facts and photos, and created a family tree. How can you bring these fragments together to create compelling narratives? You don’t have to write a book! These narratives can take various shorter forms, including profiles of particular ancestors, accounts of your family's lives before they came to America, remembrances of family members who died in the Holocaust, stories you heard about the lives of the first generation to settle in America, and success stories documenting your path to solving family mysteries. This session will help you get started!

Since 2009, Nancy Siegel has edited the JewishGen Success! Stories publication, part of JewishGen's educational outreach. These stories showcase the many resources of JewishGen and inspire as well as inform those who read them. Nancy also prepares the Research Notes and Hints at the end of every story to highlight the resources used by the authors in achieving their successes as well as to list other avenues of research that could be helpful to readers. Since 2019, Nancy has also served in the volunteer position of Director of Communications for JewishGen.

Sunday, August 2, 2020

SFBAJGS ZOOM Presentation Free and everyone interested is welcome.
Time and Place:: 1:00-4:30 pm Pacific Time
At Your Home
Topic: Jewish Records Transcription Day Facilitated by: Jeff Lewy and Pierre Hahn, Coordinators

Sunday, July 19, 2020

Membership Meeting CANCELED

Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic:: Bring Your Own Brick Wall
Speaker:: Oakland SFBAJGS experts

Monday, June 15, 2020

SFBAJGS Special Presentation WEBINAR

This Webinar is FREE, and everyone is welcome to attend.

Time and Place:

6:00-7:30 pm Pacific Time
At Your Home

EASY online registration. You will receive a confirmation via e-mail with a link to attend the Webinar.

Topic: Adoption and Misattributed Parentage Events: DNA-based Research Strategies HANDOUT

Speaker: Meredith Sellers

Hoping to shed light on adoption and misattributed parentage events in your own family tree? Eager to use your skills to help adoptees connect with biological family members? Join us to discover how the results of direct-to-consumer genetic tests, Leeds analysis tools, and “What Are the Odds Trees” can help solve decades-old mysteries. The talk will also address the challenges and nuances of these DNA-based research strategies for those of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.

Meredith Sellers is a genealogist with a passion for integrating traditional archival research with learnings from direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Most recently, she has applied these interests by serving as a volunteer “search angel” with the DNA Detectives and Search Squad Facebook communities. Professionally, Meredith is a technical consultant with a doctoral degree in chemical engineering and the author of numerous books, journal articles, and patents.

Sunday, May 17, 2020

SFBAJGS Special Presentation WEBINAR

This Webinar is FREE, and everyone is welcome to attend.

Time and Place:

2:30-3:30 pm Pacific Time
At Your Home

EASY online registration. You will receive a confirmation via e-mail with a link to attend the Webinar.

Topic: MyHeritage Unique Technologies to Research Your Family & How a Record Match Almost Led Me to an Insane Asylum

Speaker: Daniel Horowitz, MyHeritage

MyHeritage Unique Technologies to Research Your Family
An overview of new and previous features available in MyHeritage. You will learn how to navigate across the tree, invite and share information to work collaboratively with family members and other researchers in 42 languages. Take advantage of Matches, Discoveries, Statistics, PedigreeMap, Events, ConsistencyChecker, Global Name Translation, and other technologies MyHeritage has, to help you find long-lost relatives and historical records for every person in your family tree.

How a Record Match Almost Led Me to an Insane Asylum
Daniel’s quest to find the truth about one of his great-grandmothers led him to a wealth of newly available records from the Holocaust, which just might help you find more information about the fate of your own family before, during, and after the war. Learn the techniques used to sift the true from the false and find out where to look and what to ask when researching a Jewish family that lived during the Holocaust.

Daniel Horowitz is the Genealogy Expert at MyHeritage, providing key contributions by liaising with genealogy societies, bloggers, and media, as well as lecturing and attending conferences around the world. Dedicated to genealogy since 1986, he was the teacher and the study guide editor of the family history project "Searching for My Roots" in Venezuela for 15 years. Daniel is involved in several crowdsource digitization and transcription projects and holds a board-level position at the Israel Genealogy Research Association.

We are pleased to welcome Daniel to explain all the intricacies of what MH has to offer, but it should be noted that the SFBAJGS is not endorsing this product over any other.

Monday, April 27, 2020

SFBAJGS Presentation POSTPONED

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306

Topic: Getting Ready for the 1950 Census: Searching with and without a Name Index

Speaker: Dr. Steve Morse

When the 1950 census is released in April 2022, it will not have a name index. So finding people in the census will involve searching by location instead. Even when a name index becomes available, there will still be many reasons for doing locational searches. The census is organized by Enumeration Districts (EDs), so the location needs to be converted to an ED before the census can be accessed. The One-Step Website contains numerous tools for obtaining EDs. This talk will present the various tools and show circumstances in which each can be used.

Steve Morse is the creator of the One-Step Website, for which he has received both the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Outstanding Contribution Award from IAJGS, the Award of Merit from the National Genealogical Society, the first ever Excellence Award from the Association of Professional Genealogists, and two awards that he cannot pronounce from Polish genealogical societies. In his other life Morse is a computer professional with a doctorate degree in electrical engineering. He has held various research, development, and teaching positions, authored numerous technical papers, and written four textbooks and holds four patents.

Sunday, April 19, 2020

SFBAJGS Presentation POSTPONED Free and everyone interested is welcome.
Time and Place:: Doors open 1:00pm, Program begins 1:30pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic: Jewish Records Indexing Day Facilitated by: Jeff Lewy and Pierre Hahn, Coordinators

Monday, February 24, 2020

SFBAJGS Presentation Free and everyone interested is welcome.
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306
Topic: Book 'em, Dano! Publishing Your Family's Story Speaker: Jeff Lewy

Sunday, February 9, 2020

SFBAJGS Presentation

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and NEW Place:

Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm
San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch, Latino/Hispanic Room Map
100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

Topic: Getting Ready for the 1950 Census: Searching with and without a Name Index

Speaker: Dr. Steve Morse

Sunday, January 19, 2020

SFBAJGS Presentation

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

NEW Time and Same Place:

Doors open 1:00pm, Program begins 1:30pm
Oakland FamilySearch Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map

Topic: Digging Deeper on FamilySearch.org Handout

Speaker: Kimberlee Miller

Are you frustrated that you can’t find what you need on FamilySearch.org? FamilySearch has millions of records from all over the world, but how do you access them? Come to this informative presentation on how to dig deeper in FamilySearch by using some little-known tips and tricks to access the 70% of records that don't have an index. Learn about waypoints that break down the massive collections and how to find out if there are problems with the collection you are looking at.

Kim Miller has degrees in Liberal Arts and Education, plus a Family History Research certificate from BYU Idaho. She is presently on staff at the Oakland FamilySearch Library, where she is one of two people in charge of staff training.

Sunday, November 17, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

NEW Time and Same Place:

Doors open 1:00pm, Program begins 1:30pm
Oakland FamilySearch Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map

Topic: American Jewish Family Clubs and Circles As a Genealogy Resource HANDOUT

Speaker: Robinn Magid

Anthropologists say that kinship clubs are unique to American Jewish families of Ashkenazi background. This presentation will explore Jewish family clubs and family circles as a cultural phenomenon and will show through example how exploring cousin clubs can be useful for genealogy research. Most examples used in this presentation are from clubs in the Midwest, including the Katz family of Cleveland, who held a family reunion in 1905 with photos and a memorial book to kick off their club.

Robinn Magid is a long-time JRI-Poland board member. She served as lead co-chair of the IAJGS Warsaw conference and is chairing the 2020 San Diego conference. As JRI-Poland's Lublin Archives Coordinator, Robinn manages projects for 90 towns in the Lublin region and has helped hundreds (perhaps a thousand?) people find answers to their nagging genealogical questions. She has lectured and taught hands-on workshops along the West Coast and is active in SFBAJGS. Robinn is a retired management consultant who specialized in Information Systems. She lives in Northern California with her husband and four children, whom she conspires to turn into genealogists.

Monday, October 28, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation Free and everyone interested is welcome.
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306
Topic:: Stolpersteine/Stumbling Stones: The Act of Remembering Handout
Speaker:: Judy Vasos

Sunday, October 20, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation Free and everyone interested is welcome.
NEW Time and Same Place:: Doors open 1:00pm, Program begins 1:30pm
Oakland FamilySearch Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map

Topic:: Geni.com: A Collaborative Workplace for Your Family Tree

Speaker:: Dr. Judith Berlowitz

Dr. Berlowitz will discuss the history of Geni, how it is different from other sites, its major features, and some issues with the site. She also plans to do a live demonstration of how you can use Geni in your research.

Judith Berlowitz holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley and is a federally certified translator. Her publications are based on research in the Judeo-Spanish romancero, ethnomusicology, and genealogy.

Some sources to look at before the meeting:
About Geni
Geni Users Group Facebook page
Geni def
Geni and privacy
Randy Schoenberg: “Privacy Issues with Online Trees”
Pamela Wilson: “An Uneasy Truce: Brokering Collaborative Knowledge Building and Commodity Culture”

Something to bring to the meeting:
Person from your “brick wall” with dates and places if possible

Friday, October 4, 2019

SFBAJGS Special Presentation

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

NEW Time and Same Place:: Doors open 1:00pm, Program begins 1:30pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic:: Crowdsourcing the Path to the 1950 Census HANDOUT

Speaker:: Joel Weintraub

The 1940 U.S. census opened in 2012 without a name index. A FamilySearch-led consortium used 160,000 volunteers to create a name index for that census in five months. In addition, Steve Morse and Joel, over seven years with about 125 volunteers, developed free utilities to find which of 150,000 census districts someone was in when a location or address was known. These projects are examples of crowdsourcing. Steve and Joel are now doing a similar project for the 1950 census. Joel will discuss differences between the 1940 and 1950 censuses that had an impact on their planning and project designs. The film scanning, publicity, volunteer response, Yahoo Group site, cloud storage, software, One-Step utilities, and project phases will be discussed. All 233,800 1950 enumeration district definitions have now been transcribed. Street indices have also been completed for more than 2,400 communities to help find 1950 census district numbers. Original 1950 census documents will be displayed.

Joel Weintraub is an emeritus Professor at California State University at Fullerton and was a volunteer for nine years at the National Archives branch in Laguna Niguel, California. For more than a decade, Joel has created search tools for the U.S. and New York City censuses that are freely available on the Steve Morse "One-Step" site. He has given presentations on censuses (both federal and New York City), immigration and naturalization, biographical, and Jewish genealogy topics and has published articles on many of those topics also.

Sunday, September 15, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

NEW Time and Same Place:: Doors open 1:00pm, Program begins 1:30pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic:: Using Cluster Research to Understand Your Ancestors: When a Tree Isn't Enough HANDOUT

Speaker:: Anne Gillespie Mitchell (Ancestry.com employee)

Everyone has brick walls in their genealogy research. People who appear to have been dropped out of the sky. Women whose maiden names seem to be unknowable. Cluster research will give you new avenues break down those brick walls by researching their family members, their neighbors and anyone and everyone they were associated with. Explore methodologies that will help you uncover new information about your family.

Anne Gillespie Mitchell has been chasing her ancestors up and down the Great Wagon road through Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina for many years. She currently works for Ancestry on a variety of products including search, Ancestry Library Edition, AncestryK12, and now RootsWeb. She has completed the Boston University Online Genealogy Certificate course as well as multiple sessions at SLIG and IGHR. She has also taught genealogy courses at many national conferences, including NGS, FGS, and RootsTech and at SLIG. Before Ancestry she worked in the Internet industry in software development and has been a product manager for several companies. She has a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Purdue University, where she also taught Computer Science for eight years.

It should be noted that Ancestry is a commercial, paid genealogy site and the SFBAJGS does not endorse any commercial product.

Monday, August 19, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation Free and everyone interested is welcome.
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306
Topic:: Finding Presidents and Their Ancestors in the Strangest Places

Speaker:: Steve Morse

We are used to looking for our ancestors in passenger lists and in census records. We have mastered a variety of tricks for finding people in spite of name misspellings and incorrect birthdates. You might think that U.S. presidents are a breed apart from our ancestors, but they are not. They also arrived on ships and have come face to face with the census taker. This talk will show you how to search for presidential records, and you will see that it is no different than searching for ancestral records. We will encounter some of the same problems with both searches, and we'll see how these problems can be solved.

Sunday, August 18, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation Free and everyone interested is welcome.
NEW Time and Same Place:: Doors open 1:00pm, Program begins 1:30pm
Oakland FamilySearch Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map

Topic:: Labor Omnia Vitae: How Your Hard Work Can Conquer All at the Sutro Library
Speaker:: Dvorah Lewis

Labor Omnia Vitae: How Your Hard Work Can Conquer All at the Sutro Library, Dvorah Lewis Sutro Library, the California State Library branch located in San Francisco, has one of the largest genealogy collections west of Salt Lake City. Sutro Library is not just a physical hub for the genealogy community, it is also a virtual hub. Come learn how to access Sutro Library's genealogical resources on site as well as online.

Dvorah Lewis has been the Genealogy Librarian at Sutro Library for two years now. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in Jewish Studies at UC Irvine and earned her Master's (MLIS) at UCLA. Her passion for archives and genealogy was inspired by an interview with her great Aunt Essie, the then eldest member of her family. She is excited to help genealogy researchers learn how to navigate the State Library’s extraordinary collections and resources. Dvorah feels that by preserving the past we can understand the present and bring positive change to the future. She is a board member of SFBAJGS.

Sunday, July 14, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

NEW Time and Same Place:: Doors open 1:00pm, Program begins 1:30pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic:: Jewish Records Indexing Day
Facilitated by:: SFBAJGS Transcription Project: Pierre Hahn and Jeff Lewy, coordinators

Monday, June 24, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation Free and everyone interested is welcome.
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306
Topic:: Bring Your Own Brick Wall: One on One Help with Your Family Tree

Facilitated by:: Panel of SFBAJGS Genealogists

Bring your problems, questions, and documents (copies, please, no originals), and a panel of experienced researchers will brainstorm to provide information and suggestions that will show your next steps and may help you solve some of your family mysteries.

Sunday, May 19, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

NEW Time and Same Place:: Doors open 1:00pm, Program begins 1:30pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic:: Jewish Records Collections on Ancestry.com
Speaker:: Crista Cowan

Monday, April 29, 2019

SFBAJGS Joint Presentation

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

You are cordially invited to celebrate Adolph Sutro’s 189th Birthday

Monday, April 29, 2019, 5:30-7:45 pm
Library Events Room 121
1st floor of the J. Paul Leonard Library, SFSU

With special guests
MARC DOLLINGER. PH. D.
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility, SFSU
American Jewish Life on the Edge (of the Continent): Jews and the History of San Francisco"

JEFF LEWY
Transcription Coordinator, San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society
Transcribing Bay Area Cemetery Data: Helping Genealogists Do Long-Distance Research from Home

MARC SHAFFER
Director of American Jerusalem: Jews and the Making of San Francisco
The Making of American Jerusalem

5:30pm: Panel discussion followed by a 10-minute intermission
6:40 pm: Screening of the documentary, American Jerusalem

Birthday treats and refreshments will be provided.

Space is limited so please RSVP through Eventbrite at sutrobday2019.eventbrite.com

Monday, April 15, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation Free and everyone interested is welcome.
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306
Topic:: Jewish Genetic Diseases

Speaker:: Neil Risch

Dr. Risch will explain what we know about the origins of Ashkenazim and Sephardim from genetic data, and then why Ashkenazi Jews are the ones with a lot of genetic diseases.

Neil Risch, Ph.D., is the director of the Institute for Human Genetics and holds the Lamond Family Foundation Distinguished Professorship in Human Genetics at the University of California at San Francisco. He is also a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF. He is a human geneticist known for his work on numerous genetic diseases.

Sunday, April 14, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation Free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza Map; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: Adolph Sutro's Home and Empire
Speaker:: Allan Schwartz

Before becoming mayor of San Francisco, Adolph Sutro moved to then remote Sutro Heights. He turned his ample grounds into a manicured park, open to all San Franciscans. Adjacent to it he constructed Sutro Baths, the most classic of the Cliff Houses, and other attractions, some purchased from the Mid Winter Exposition, all of which rendered that faraway corner of the city a top pleasure destination. Later he feuded with Southern Pacific Railroad over the cost of transportation to Sutro Heights, actuating his run for office. We will chat about these things, and more like them.

Allan Schwartz, per 23andMe, has roots which trace right back to the Second Temple. He, among other interests, is a history buff and actor. He is a resident of the San Francisco's Richmond District, living not far from the site of these past glories. He has portrayed Adolph Sutro at San Francisco History Days, the San Francisco District Council of Merchants annual dinner, and Sutro Libray, among other locations.

Sunday, March 17, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

NEW Time and Same Place:: Doors open 1:00pm, Program begins 1:30pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic:: Introduction to "Jewish Genealogy"
Speaker:: Dale Friedman

Sunday, March 3, 2019

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

SPECIAL Time and Same Place:: Doors open 2:45pm, Program begins 3pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic:: Planting a Family Tree Online with MyHeritage to Share and Preserve Your Memories
Speaker:: Daniel Horowitz

Monday, February 11, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation Free and everyone interested is welcome.
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306
Topic:: My Son the Doctor: Felczers, Barber Surgeons, Misconceptions, and Reality

Speaker:: Gary Patou

This presentation will explore the Hajler family history and discoveries about their Feldsher lineages. The talk will discuss the medical care in 19th-century Eastern Europe provided by barber surgeons, the Feldshers. It will discuss misconceptions about the role of barber surgeons and show that barber surgery was a traditional Jewish occupation passed down throughgenerations, that Feldshers underwent medical training, and that barber surgeons tended to marry into other barber surgeon families. Feldshers provided important medical care for communities in the Pale of Settlement.

Gary Patou is a physician who grew up in the UK but now lives with his family in California. He is a venture capitalist and biotech drug developer. He has been passionate about genealogy for the last 15 years. He has 1,000 relatives in his family tree spanning Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Latvia, and the Netherlands and as far back as far the 1670s. Several family members were feldshers. Gary has held a number of academic appointments at University College and Middlesex School of Medicine in London and holds an M.D. degree from University College, London.

Sunday, February 10, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation Free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza Map; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: My Son the Doctor: Felczers, Barber Surgeons, Misconceptions, and Reality
Speaker:: Gary Patou

Sunday, January 13, 2019

SFBAJGS Presentation

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

NEW Time and Same Place:: Doors open 1:00pm, Program begins 1:30pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic:: Stolpersteine/Stumbling Stones: The Act of Remembering Handout
Speaker:: Judy Vasos

CANCELED due to air quality concerns. Will be rescheduled.
Sunday, November 18, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic:: Using Cluster Research to Understand Your Ancestors: When a Tree Isn't Enough
Speaker:: Anne Gillespie Mitchell

Monday, October 22, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome.
Topic:: Caring for Your Documents and Photos: Better Now than Never
Speaker:: Karen Zukor
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306

This presentation will show how to take care of important papers and what to avoid. Conservation is based on the study of what makes artifacts of all kinds age and deteriorate. Paper conservation relies on understanding paper chemistry and the media used to produce art and artifacts. By understanding the physical and chemical attributes of a wide range of papers, conservators can repair damaged items and extend the lives of those artifacts for future generations.

Karen Zukor has been a paper conservator in private practice for 38 years. Her work encompasses a full range of paper, from the 15th century to contemporary pieces. She has been responsible for many collections, including fine art, archival material, maps, historic currency, and rare books, in both private hands and institutions. Her studio is involved in both conservation and preservation; she and her staff not only repair damaged items but provide information on extending the life of an object. Karen has also trained conservation interns for more than twenty years. Zukor Art Conservation is in Oakland, California.

Sunday, October 21, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza Map; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: Home Grown Preservation: Tips for Preserving Your Historical Documents HANDOUT
Speaker:: Susan Goldstein

In this presentation, we'll explore some of the ways to prolong the life of your historical documents. We'll touch on archival housing and supplies, as well as temperature, humidity control, and storage. We'll also have a quick overview of useful resources for genealogical research at the San Francisco Public Library, from books to databases.

Susan Goldstein has served as the City Archivist of San Francisco for 22 years, documenting the city’s history in the San Francisco History Center, on the 6th floor of the San Francisco Public Library. The History Center is responsible for collecting and preserving the archives of the City and County of San Francisco, including mayoral and departmental historical materials, as well as maintaining a local history collection, extensive photograph collection, and public reading room. Previously, Goldstein worked as the archivist to Senator Alan Cranston for three years, serving on his staff in California and Washington, D.C. She also worked at the Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University, collecting labor union history.

Sunday, September 23, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA; Map
From SF via BART: Take BART to the Fruitvale Station. Exit to the left to find the AC Transit stops.
Take line 339 going to Chabot Space and Science Center. The bus runs every 30 minutes and stops at the Mormon Temple.
https://sfbaytransit.org/actransit/route/339/schedule
Topic:: A Family History Website: My Way
Speaker:: Barbara Toby Stack

Monday, August 27, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome.
Topic:: From Cottage to Estate in One Generation: A San Francisco Family
Speaker:: David Fleishhacker
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306

David Fleishhacker will describe how a Jewish immigrant (his ancestor) from Bavaria came to the U.S. in 1840 and prospered in the gold country, then in Virginia City, then by trading mining shares in San Francisco, and finally by founding a paper box company so that his sons could learn about business, which they did, becoming major investors and bankers. Like Sutro and Levi Strauss (although much less known), the family was able to prosper in the West and become important figures in California, especially in San Francisco. The San Francisco Zoo, the Hetch Hetchy water system, and Coit Tower all owe their existence partly to Aaron Fleishhacker and his sons, whose descendants still live here. As one of them, David will outline the research that revealed the triumphs and disasters of the family over the past 120 years.

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza Map; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: My Attic, Your Story: An Immigrant's Journey
Speaker:: Roslyn Sholin

My attic is a placeholder for all our stories. You will see things that might have been in your own family's attic. Through struggles and achievement, assimilation and acculturation emerge. An extraordinary journey is relived through ordinary items. Every immigrant's tale is unique, yet they are all the same. From family to family, generation to generation, and century to century we have all traveled this path. Explore your past and thank your ancestors for making your life possible.

Roslyn Sholin is a creative director. Using a multidisciplinary approach, she has become a storyteller who can transform decades of materials into educationally rich content. The Yiddish Book Center videotaped her for its oral history project.

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic:: Bring Your Own Brick Wall
Speaker:: Oakland SFBAJGS experts

Monday, June 18, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome.
Topic:: From DNA to Genetic Genealogy: Everything You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask
Speaker:: Steve Morse
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306

To understand the genealogical aspects of DNA requires an understanding of some of the basic concepts. This talk introduces genes, chromosomes, and DNA, and goes on to show how DNA is inherited. That knowledge of inheritance can be used for finding relatives you didn't know you had, learning about your very distant ancestors and the routes they traveled, and determining if you are a Jewish high priest (Kohan). Examples presented include Genghis Khan's legacy, the Thomas Jefferson affair, and the Anastasia mystery.

Sunday, June 10, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza Map; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: Jewish Genetic Diseases
Speaker:: Neil Risch

Dr. Risch will explain what we know about the origins of Ashkenazim and Sephardim from genetic data, and then why Ashkenazi Jews are the ones with a lot of genetic diseases.

Neil Risch, Ph.D., is the Director of the Institute for Human Genetics and holds the Lamond Family Foundation Distinguished Professorship in Human Genetics at the University of California at San Francisco. He is also a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF. He is a human geneticist known for his work on numerous genetic diseases.

Sunday, June 3, 2018

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Volunteers from the SFBAJGS will be on hand to help individuals with their family history research. The session includes group brainstorming, suggestions for problem solving, and research using the Jewish Community Library's extensive reference collection and Internet connections. Bring your materials and questions. Registration is requested but not required at (415) 567-3327, ext. 70

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic:: New York City Insider's Guide to Research Handout
Speaker:: Steve Harris

Monday, April 16, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome.
Topic:: Digging Deeper on FamilySearch.org
Speaker:: Kimberlee Miller
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306

Are you frustrated that you can’t find what you need on FamilySearch.org? FamilySearch has millions of records from all over the world, but how do you access them? Come to this informative presentation on how to dig deeper in FamilySearch by using some little-known tips and tricks to access the 70% of records that don't have an index. Learn about waypoints that break down the massive collections and how to find out if there are problems with the collection you are looking at.

Kim Miller has degrees in Liberal Arts and Education, plus a Family History Research certificate from BYU Idaho. She is presently on staff at the Oakland FamilySearch Library, where she is one of two people in charge of staff training.

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza Map; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: Intimate Histories: Genealogy and American Jewish Religion
Speaker:: Rachel Gross

In researching their family histories, many American Jewish genealogists engage in an emotional experience that intimately connects them to specific immigration stories. Based on interviews with genealogists around the country, observation of the New York Jewish Genealogical Society, and studies of Jewish genealogical materials, Prof. Gross finds that genealogy functions as a mitzvah, something both praiseworthy and required.

Prof. Rachel B. Gross is the John and Marcia Goldman Professor of American Jewish Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. She is currently working on a book that examines the religious nature of contemporary nostalgic representations of American Jewish immigration history. She received her Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University in 2014.

Sunday, April 8, 2018

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, March 18, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Map
Topic:: Genealogy Beyond the Y Chromosome: Autosomes Exposed Handout
Speaker:: Steve Morse

Monday, February 12, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome.
Topic:: Blogging Your Family History
Speaker:: Craig Siulinski
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim Map
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306

Blog writing can be an easy, enjoyable, and effective way to share family history content with a large audience. This presentation will offer a starting point for creating your own blog and support for learning the platform provided by blogger.com. Craig Siulinski is the author of three blogs relating to family history.

Craig Siulinski is an experienced educator and writer. He holds a Master's degree in Education from Cal State University East Bay, and a B.S. from the University of Southern Maine. Craig has taught many years as a Math educator, currently serving in the role as Learning Specialist at Stanbridge Academy in San Mateo, and has mentored teachers as an instructional coach. Researching and writing family histories have been Craig’s passions since 2007. In October 2009, he created his first blog, August Legacy, which he dedicated to his maternal grandfather, Auguste "Gus" Albert, of Westbrook, Maine.

Sunday, February 11, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza Map; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: Oral History: Interviewing Family Members
Speaker:: Basya Petnick

The interview is the most important part of any oral history project. This presentation will focus on key questions about the interview itself. We will discuss how an interview compares to a good conversation, how genealogy and oral history complement each other, strategies and techniques for interviewing older individuals, and ethnical considerations. Resource sheets with print and online resources will be provided.

Basya Petnick has studied and practiced oral history for more than 25 years. She has worked with many Bay Area families to help them preserve their histories. Petnick is the former director of the Legacy Oral History Program at the Museum of Performance & Design. She also directed the Alumni Memoir Project for the San Francisco Ballet’s 75th anniversary. She is a published journalist and the owner of Books & Lives, a company specializing in oral history and memoir (http://www.booksandlives.com/).

Sunday, February 4, 2018

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm
Oakland FamilySearch History Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Topic:: From DNA to Genetic Genealogy: Everything You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask Handout
Speaker:: Steve Morse

Sunday, January 7, 2018

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, December 3, 2017

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm
Oakland FamilySearch Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Topic:: Documenting The Vilna Ghetto Library Handout
Speaker:: Judy Baston

Sunday, November 5, 2017

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Presentation for International Jewish Genealogy Month Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 6:30 to 8:00 pm
Oakland FamilySearch Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Topic:: The Charytan-Berman Family Story: An Unintended Geneaological Quest
Speaker:: Eshel Haritan

International Jewish Genealogy Month
October 21 to November 18, 2017

Monday, October 16, 2017

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome.

Palo Alto is the new location for the Peninsula meetings:

Time and Place:
Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306
Topic:: My Family: I Could Write a Book Handout
Speaker:: Joan Adler

One large branch of the Straus family moved from the Rheinpfalz area of Germany to the northern most parts of Washington State, where their experiences differed greatly from what they had known back in Germany but also from those of their German immigrant counterparts who settled in the eastern United States. This colorful bunch showed its spunk by accepting, even embracing, the rugged and often difficult life of a Jewish immigrant in the American frontier. Using their stories I will show how to flesh out the lives of these people by writing vignettes about them and how to publish these stories in book form or post them on a family Web page with photographs where available. This is one way to truly bring these people to life and to connect with your ancestors with a novel approach. Joan Adler has been the executive director of the Straus Historical Society for the past 25 years, an organization she created. She considers her overall function to be social historian: placing the lives of the people in the Lazarus Straus family within the historical, political, and social contexts in which they lived. Genealogy provides the facts, but additional research including oral histories, writing, researching in newspapers, books, articles, and other documents provides the "color."


Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115 My Family: I Could Write a Book Handout; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

One large branch of the Straus family moved from the Rheinpfalz area of Germany to the northern most parts of Washington State, where their experiences differed greatly from what they had known back in Germany but also from those of their German immigrant counterparts who settled in the eastern United States. This colorful bunch showed its spunk by accepting, even embracing, the rugged and often difficult life of a Jewish immigrant in the American frontier. Using their stories I will show how to flesh out the lives of these people by writing vignettes about them and how to publish these stories in book form or post them on a family Web page with photographs where available. This is one way to truly bring these people to life and to connect with your ancestors with a novel approach.

Joan Adler has been the executive director of the Straus Historical Society for the past 25 years, an organization she created. She considers her overall function to be social historian: placing the lives of the people in the Lazarus Straus family within the historical, political, and social contexts in which they lived. Genealogy provides the facts, but additional research including oral histories, writing, researching in newspapers, books, articles, and other documents provides the "color."

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm
Oakland FamilySearch Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA
Topic:: Leaving Something of Who You Are
Speaker:: Kimberlee Miller

Monday, August 21, 2017

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome.
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306

Topic:: Travel and Research in Ukraine Handout
Speaker:: Janette Silverman
Using a trip I took to Ukraine in 2009 to meet my own family as a backdrop, we will discuss resources that are (or are not) available in Ukraine and why, and speak about the resources of Ukraine SIG, talk about current projects, and provide insights for the system(s) in place for discovering your ancestors’ background. As examples, we will look at some of the navigation the Ukraine SIG site and understand the resources and processes of Ukraine SIG to acquire and index data. Dr. Janette Silverman is a Senior Genealogist Research Manager at AncestyProGenealogists in Salt Lake City. She devotes her "spare" time to being the Ukraine SIG coordinator and a JewishGen moderator. The Seattle 2016 IAJGS Conference found her as the Lead Cochair. Janette began her genealogy path as a "hobby" with her dad. Today, 35 years later, it has developed into a profession and perhaps an obsession, and her dad is still her best research partner. Janette's doctoral dissertation, In Living Memory, discusses the unique attributes of Jewish genealogical research and traces the paths of four branches of her family from Europe to the United States, contextualizing their individual experiences within a larger historical framework.


Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York is often off the radar screen for many genealogists, but the library is home to almost half a million volumes including manuscripts, rare books, and archival material. The archives are a treasure yet to be explored by so many of us and yet are a rich repository of records of Jewish communities, institutions, and prominent individuals in the U.S. and Europe. Included in these archives are transcriptions of notes, memos, and correspondence between the State Department and offices in Vienna, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Bucharest from 1863-1906 that concern the legal position and persecution of Jews; and correspondence and notes about the Jewish community in France from the 1700's until after World War II.

Dr. Janette Silverman is a Senior Genealogist Research Manager at AncestyProGenealogists in Salt Lake City. She devotes her "spare" time to being the Ukraine SIG coordinator and a JewishGen moderator. The Seattle 2016 IAJGS Conference found her as the Lead Cochair. Janette began her genealogy path as a "hobby" with her dad. Today, 35 years later, it has developed into a profession and perhaps an obsession, and her dad is still her best research partner. Janette's doctoral dissertation, In Living Memory, discusses the unique attributes of Jewish genealogical research and traces the paths of four branches of her family from Europe to the United States, contextualizing their individual experiences within a larger historical framework.

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Panel of SFBAJGS experts Bring Your Own Brick Wall: One on One Help with Your Family Tree
Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm
Oakland FamilySearch Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA

Stuck on a genealogy problem while the Mavens are on summer hiatus? Bring your problems, questions, and documents (copies, please, no originals), and a panel of experienced researchers will brainstorm to provide information and suggestions that will show you your next steps and may help you solve some of your family mysteries.

Monday, June 19, 2017

Palo Alto is the new location for the Peninsula meetings:

Topic:: The Power of Digital Photography for Family History
Speaker:: Ron Madson
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306

After beginning his journey of researching his genealogy about 11 years ago, Ron realized that his 20+ years of photography experience could help with his family history research. He will share his tips so you can use a digital camera, smartphone, and other smart technology to help with your research. This class is for the novice to the experienced camera user. We’ll discuss the benefits of storing items in a digital format and getting started. This class will encompass the entire process, including:
• capturing images
• transferring them to a computer
• editing them with image editing applications
• labeling them
• and then filing them

Ron Madson's 45 years of data and image-processing experience helped him develop methods for image editing, labeling, and digital organization that greatly assisted all aspects of his family history research. With a BS and MS in math, he served seven years as the educational coordinator for the largest international IBM computer users group and ten years as the technical education coordinator for an international insurance company.

Sunday, June 18, 2017

Membership Meeting

Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome

Topic:

Ketubah: The Jewish Marriage Contract and What It Really Says

Speaker:

Steve Morse

. Time and Place:

Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm

Rhoda Goldman Plaza

2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115

Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Vital records (birth, marriage, death) have always been a valuable source of family information and sought after by genealogists. The Jewish marriage contract (ketubah) is no exception. The information in the Jewish record actually complements the information in the civil record: The civil record typically identifies the bride and groom by giving their family names, whereas the Jewish record gives their fathers’ names instead. There is a basic difference between the civil and religious marriage records in that one focuses on the union and the other on the termination of the union. This talk covers what is contained in the Jewish marriage contract, tells what it really means, and provides information that can be useful to family historians. Steve Morse is the creator of the One-Step Website, for which he has received both the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Outstanding Contribution Award from IAJGS, the Award of Merit from the National Genealogical Society, the first ever Excellence Award from the Association of Professional Genealogists, and two awards that he cannot pronounce from Polish genealogical societies. In his other life Morse is a computer professional with a doctorate degree in electrical engineering. He has held various research, development, and teaching positions, authored numerous technical papers, and written four textbooks, and holds four patents.

Sunday, June 4, 2017

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome
Topic:: Reclaim the Records: Using Freedom of Information Laws for Genealogical Research
Speaker:: Brooke Schreier Ganz

Time and Place:

Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm
Oakland FamilySearch Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA

Tired of being told by state archives or libraries that the records you want are inaccessible? Reclaim the Records is a not-for-profit group filing Freedom of Information requests to get these “off limits” genealogy records released back to the public and put online for free. Learn how we successfully challenged the NYC Municipal Archives in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, and our upcoming plans.

Brooke Schreier Ganz is a genealogist, computer programmer, and open-data activist. She works on making archival records more accessible to the general public through technological solutions and legal remedies. She is a former Vice President of Gesher Galicia, and designed and built the Gesher Galicia Web site, including its innovative and free All Galicia Database. Brooke won second place in the 2012 RootsTech Developer Challenge for the underlying search engine codebase, named LeafSeek.

Monday, April 3, 2017

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome.
Topic:: The Western Sephardim, a Minority in a Minority in a Minority
Speaker:: Harold Zvi Rabbie
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306

After their expulsion from Spain in 1492, many Sephardi Jews headed east, to the Ottoman Empire, but some chose to undergo insincere Christian conversions or head west to Portugal. Some made their way to Protestant countries of Northern Europe or to the New World, where they could revert back to Judaism. This is the story of the earliest Jewish communities in the Netherlands, England, and the Caribbean, which were founded by these Spanish and Portuguese Jews.

Educated in England and Israel, Harold participated in the explosive growth of the high-tech industry in Israel and in California and is now retired. He has been researching his Dutch Jewish ancestry for more than 25 years and is able to trace his family story back to Portugal in 1450.

Sunday, April 2, 2017 Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome Topic:: The Western Sephardim, a Minority in a Minority in a Minority
Speaker:: Harold Zvi Rabbie

Time and Place:

Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm

Rhoda Goldman Plaza

2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115

Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

After their expulsion from Spain in 1492, many Sephardi Jews headed east, to the Ottoman Empire, but some chose to undergo insincere Christian conversions or head west to Portugal. Some made their way to Protestant countries of Northern Europe or to the New World, where they could revert back to Judaism. This is the story of the earliest Jewish communities in the Netherlands, England, and the Caribbean, which were founded by these Spanish and Portuguese Jews.

Educated in England and Israel, Harold participated in the explosive growth of the high-tech industry in Israel and in California and is now retired. He has been researching his Dutch Jewish ancestry for more than 25 years and is able to trace his family story back to Portugal in 1450.

Sunday, March 26, 2017

Membership Meeting The talk is free and everyone interested is welcome.
Topic:: Digging for Gelt on JewishGen.org
Speaker:: Vivian Kahn
Time and Place:

Vivian Kahn is coordinator of JewishGen’s Hungarian SIG, moderates the Hungarian SIG discussion list, and is JewishGen's Vice President of SIG Affairs. She has presented workshops on Jewish genealogy and, especially, Hungarian Jewish family research at the IAJGS annual conference and for Jewish genealogy groups. Since she began researching her own family from pre-Trianon Hungary more than 20 years ago, she has identified and used a wide range of archival, print, and online resources and has visited Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Great Britain, and Salt Lake City to research her family and help clients searching for their Hungarian roots.

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Special Event Free and everyone interested is welcome

Topic:

Jewish Burial Records Indexing Party

Coordinator: Janice Sellers

Time and Place

Noon until 5pm
Oakland FamilySearch Library
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland, CA

Pay it forward, fellow genealogist! If you've ever enjoyed finding records easily by using a search form on JewishGen, Family Search, Ancestry, or many other genealogy sites, you have been a beneficiary of indexing. Indexing is the result of volunteers reading images of old records and typing the information into a searchable format. SFBAJGS has taken on the task of creating an index for the old burial records from San Francisco's Sherith Israel synagogue for the 1850s through 1906. We expect that these records will uncover currently unknown death dates for this period, one that is notoriously difficult to research due to record destruction after the 1906 earthquake and fire. So we need REAL PEOPLE to read the records and type the information into Excel spreadsheets.

We will provide the snacks, computers, and instruction on this valuable and essential service. The records are handwritten, but we'll help you learn how to read them. If you can't stay for the whole afternoon, we will be happy to have you for as long as you can help. We will be giving out prizes for most records entered, longest time spent working, and a few more categories we have yet to think of. Don't miss this opportunity to make burial records accessible to genealogists around the world! The ancestors you find may be your own! We would like to have an idea of how many people will be coming (so we can buy the right amount of food!), so please send a message to vicepresident@sfbajgs.org to let us

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Co-Sponsorship with The Jewish Community Library of San Francisco

The Milkhik State: The Surprising Jewish History of Wisconsin

Time and Place:

7pm
Jewish Community Library
1835 Ellis Street
San Francisco, CA
Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Speaker:Andy Muchin

Jews have lived in Wisconsin almost continuously since 1793, when Jacob Frank established a fur-trading outpost in Green Bay. Wisconsin's Jewish population peaked at more than 39,000 preceding World War II, dropping to approximately 26,000 today. Still, Wisconsin Jewry has contributed much to the world: an Israeli prime minister, the world's greatest escape artist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, elected officials (including two U.S. senators), an All-Star baseball outfielder, artists, activists, farmers, rabbis, and an honorary Winnebago tribal chief.

Andy Muchin is working as program coordinator at the Jewish Community Library. From 2003-2010, he was director of the Wisconsin Small Jewish Communities History Project, a nonprofit research effort based in Milwaukee. He wrote the Wisconsin entry for the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Second Edition (2007), and edited the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle weekly newspaper in the 1990s.

Monday, February 13, 2017

Topic:: Writing Your Family History
Speaker:: Heidi Lyss
Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm
Congregation Etz Chayim
4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto, CA 94306

As genealogists we spend much time collecting family information and organizing it into trees and notes. In this seminar, we will discuss how you can enhance the sharing of your research by writing narrative family stories, or histories. These histories may be about your relatives and/or about your own experiences, and may be as short as one paragraph or as long as a book. We will consider how to choose whom to write about, identify your audience, structure your work, address information gaps, and include photos and documents. We will look at examples of family histories and briefly touch on considerations for sharing your work in print and electronically.

Heidi Lyss has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and a Certificate in the Teaching of Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She has led creative writing workshops for adults on writing about history and on the Heroic Journey, and has taught undergraduate English composition classes. Two of her short stories received awards, and she has published creative nonfiction, poetry, and trade/academic articles. Heidi also has an MBA, works as a healthcare consultant, and serves as a board member of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society.

Sunday, February 12, 2017

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome
Topic:: From Cottage to Estate in One Generation: A San Francisco Family
Speaker:: David Fleishhacker
. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

David Fleishhacker will outline how a Jewish immigrant (his ancestor) from Bavaria came to the U.S. in 1840 and prospered in the gold country, then in Virginia City, then in trading mining shares in San Francisco, and finally by founding a paper box company so that his sons could learn about business, which they did, becoming major investors and bankers. Like Sutro and Levi Strauss (although much less known), the family was able to prosper in the West and become important figures in California, especially in San Francisco. The San Francisco Zoo, the Hetch Hetchy water system, and Coit Tower all owe their existence partly to Aaron Fleishhacker and his sons, whose descendants still live here. As one of them, David will outline the research that revealed the triumphs and disasters of the family over the past 120 years.

Sunday, February 5, 2017

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Membership Meeting The talk is free and everyone interested is welcome.
Topic:: A Kindertransport Survivor Tells His Story
Speaker:: Ralph Samuel

Sunday, January 8, 2017

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, December 4, 2016

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Presentation for International Jewish Genealogy Month The talk is free and everyone interested is welcome
Topic:: Bubbie, Who Are You?: Finding the Maiden Names in Your Family Tree
Speaker:: Janice M. Sellers
: 6:30-8:00 pm; Oakland Family History Library; 4766 Lincoln Avenue; Oakland, CA

Female relatives can be difficult to trace, but they can be found. This class introduces resources for tracing the women in your family, including oral histories, immigration, religious records, journals, newspapers, legal and court records, archives, and manuscripts. Janice is the vice president of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society. She is a professional genealogist specializing in Jewish, black, dual citizenship, and newspaper research.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

The Refugee: Fleeing Oppression from the Exodus to Modern Times
A Lehrhaus symposium open to the community


Time and Place:: 1 pm to 5pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Featuring sessions with Joel Ben Izzy, Rabbi Lee Bycel, John Efron, Jehon Grist, Eran Kaplan, Sarah Levin, Avi Rose, Fred Rosenbaum, and Mark Schapiro.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome.

Time and Place:

10am to Noon

Meet at Colma Historical Association Museum
1500 Hillside Boulevard, Colma. The museum is near Serramonte Blvd and closer to 280 than 101. It is at the corner of F St. and Hillside Blvd. It's about a half-mile walk from the Colma BART station.
http://www.colmahistory.org/

Topic:

Tour of Colma's Jewish Cemeteries

Come enjoy a tour of three of the Jewish cemeteries in Colma: Home of Peace, Hills of Eternity, and Eternal Home. The tour will begin at the museum with a 10-minute film which discusses the history of all of Colma's cemeteries, including moving burials from San Francisco. We will then visit the three Jewish cemeteries discussed and hear about some of the history and the burials, famous and perhaps some locals. There is no fee for the tour.

We will do a fair amount of walking, so you should wear comfortable shoes and a hat, bring a water bottle, and dress in layers (we may have fog). As we get closer to the date, we'll have a better idea of what type of weather to expect.

Carpooling is strongly encouraged. The fewer cars the better, as it takes time to get everyone in and out at each stop. Cameras are permitted.

Note: Rain will cancel.

International Jewish Genealogy Month
November 1 to 30, 2016

Monday, October 10, 2016

Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: 7 to 9pm; Congregation Beth Am; 26790 Arastradero Road, Room 5/6; Los Altos Hills , CA

Topic:: San Francisco's Own Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico
Speaker:: Emperor Norton (Joseph Amster)

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm; Oakland FamilySearch Library; 4766 Lincoln Avenue; Oakland, CA

Topic:: Vivian and Sandy's Excellent Adventure: Family Research Travel in Hungary and Romania
Speaker:: Vivian Kahn

Vivian Kahn will talk about the trip that she made to Hungary and Romania last year with Sandy Malek, coordinator of the H-SIG Maramaros Records project, to participate in a gathering of descendants of families from Sziget, Maramaros. Her presentation will cover their experiences doing on-the-ground research and meeting members of their extended families from eastern Hungary and the formerly Hungarian counties of Szatmar and Maramaros in Romania. Vivian will share tips for locating and learning about the places where your families lived in Hungary and Transylvania and provide an overview of resources available for research in Maramaros from JewishGen’s Hungary database and other resources.

Vivian Kahn is coordinator of JewishGen’s Hungarian SIG, moderates the Hungarian SIG discussion list, and is JewishGen's Vice President of SIG Affairs. She has presented workshops on Jewish genealogy and, especially, Hungarian Jewish family research at the IAJGS annual conference and for Jewish genealogy groups. Since she began researching her own family from pre-Trianon Hungary more than 20 years ago, she has identified and used a wide range of archival, print, and online resources and has visited Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Great Britain, and Salt Lake City to research her family and help clients searching for their Hungarian roots.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: Grow Your Family Tree: Using the Internet Archive for Genealogical Research
Speaker:: Michelle Krasowski, MLIS

The Internet Archive is a digital library that has become an excellent resource for people who are interested in genealogical research. Collections from the comprehensive holdings of institutions including Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana; Robarts Library at the University of Toronto; the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library; Brigham Young University; and more are made available for free access on your computer. Librarian Michelle Krasowski will help us explore these resources, with a particular focus on Jewish-oriented collections, as well as give a general tour of archive.org and the depths of fascinating information that are in store for users.

Michelle Krasowski is a librarian currently working on the Administration Team at the Internet Archive. She comes from the public library world, where she has provided reference, instructional, and programming services to users of all ages. She loves learning and teaching, and appreciates all opportunities to broaden her areas of knowledge.

Monday, August 22, 2016

Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: 7 to 9pm; Congregation Beth Am; 26790 Arastradero Road, Room 5/6; Los Altos Hills , CA

Topic:: Online Resources for Jewish Genealogy
Speaker:: Janice Sellers

Janice Sellers will review specialized online resources available to help in researching Jewish ancestry. Learn about the most useful sites and what information you can expect to find. Janice M. Sellers is a professional genealogist who is passionate about her work. She specializes in Jewish, black, forensic, and newspaper research, edits three genealogy publications, and serves on the boards of three genealogy societies. Her Web site is ancestraldiscoveries.com.

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm; Oakland FamilySearch Library; 4766 Lincoln Avenue; Oakland, CA

Topic:: Liberation From a Shoah Ghost: The Girl on the Wall
Speaker:: Preeva Adler Tramiel

Preeva Adler Tramiel will discuss her memoir and how it led her to genealogy and the history of her father's region of Europe, Transcarpathia. The book focuses on her search for facts about her father, Samuel Adler, also called Adler Hershi. Preeva Adler Tramiel is a second-generation Holocaust survivor and member at large of the SFBAJGS board. She writes and serves her community in Palo Alto, where she has been president of Congregation Etz Chayim and the Palo Alto High School PTA.

Sunday, July 17, 2016

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: The Power of Digital Photography for Family History
Speaker:: Ron Madson

After beginning his journey in researching his genealogy about 10 years ago, Ron quickly realized that his 20+ years of photography experience could help with his family history research. He will share his tips so you can use a digital camera, smart phone, and other smart technology to help with your research. This program is for the novice to the experienced camera user. Ron will discuss the benefits of storing items in a digital format and getting started. The presentation will encompass the entire process including:
• capturing images
• transferring them to a computer
• editing them with image editing applications
• labeling them
• and then filing them

Ron Madson's 45 years of data and image-processing experience helped him develop methods for image editing, labeling, and digital organization that greatly assisted all aspects of his family history research. With a BS and MS in math, he served seven years as the educational coordinator for the largest international IBM computer users group and ten years as the technical education coordinator for an international insurance company.

Monday, June 20, 2016

Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: 7 to 9pm; Congregation Beth Am; 26790 Arastradero Road, Room 5/6; Los Altos Hills , CA

Topic:: Researching Your Litvak Roots
Speaker:: Judy Baston

Numerous sources exist online and in various repositories to research your Litvak heritage. Judy Baston will offer an overview of these sources and will detail the best ways to use key Litvak databases and Web sites to enhance your knowledge and expand your family tree. The presentation will include how to find out what records are available, how to read and understand search results, where the records are, and how best to access the information in them. The presentation will cover LitvakSIG and its All Lithuania Database, as well as numerous resources from JewishGen, Yad Vashem, and other sources.

Judy Baston, LitvakSIG Vice President and board member of LitvakSIG and JRI-Poland, moderates the discussion groups for LitvakSIG, JRI-Poland, BialyGen, and Lodz and coordinates LitvakSIG’s Lida District Research Group. She has been involved with the Jewish Community Library in San Francisco for 24 years and coordinates its monthly genealogy clinic. Judy received the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2015 IAJGS Conference in Jerusalem.

Sunday, June 19, 2016

Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm; Oakland FamilySearch Library; 4766 Lincoln Avenue; Oakland, CA

Topic:: Bring Your Own Brick Wall

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Monday, April 18, 2016

Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: 7 to 9pm; Congregation Beth Am; 26790 Arastradero Road, Room 5/6; Los Altos Hills , CA

Topic:: Social Media for Genealogists
Speaker:: Meredith Sellers

Social media are valuable tools for connecting and communicating with relatives, potential cousins, and fellow genealogists. Navigating various social media platforms and understanding their privacy controls can be daunting, however. As a member of the Web-savvy “Millennial Generation”, Meredith will provide case studies illustrating how social media can complement your current research endeavors. She will also address the pros and cons of different social media platforms and outline ways for you to maintain a secure, controlled online presence.

Dr. Meredith Sellers holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and works as a Senior Engineer at Exponent Failure Analysis Associates. Meredith has leveraged social media since 2008 to assist her personal genealogical research in New York City, St. Louis, Eastern Europe, and the British Isles. Before relocating to the Bay Area, Meredith volunteered and taught for organizations including the Champaign Family History Center, Champaign County Genealogical Society, and Olive Branch Cemetery Restoration.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm; Oakland FamilySearch Library; 4766 Lincoln Avenue; Oakland, CA

Topic:: The Ins and Outs of IGRA's Database Collection
Speaker:: Garri Regev

Locating vital records in Israel is a challenge. IGRA is at the forefront of digitization and indexing of records in Israel. Close to 700,000 records are currently available on the IGRA site and cover three major periods of time: the Ottoman, British, and State of Israel. We'll explore the databases, look at what kinds of records are available and what is not available, and what to expect in the future.

Garri Regev has lived in Israel since 1978 and was an elementary teacher for more than 20 years there. She has been doing genealogical research for over 20 years. Garri currently volunteers at the Israel Museum, Central Zionist Archives, and National Library of Israel Genealogy Center. She was President of the Israel Genealogical Society and is currently the President of the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA). Garri serves on the IAJGS Board of Directors.

Sunday, April 3, 2016

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, March 13, 2016

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: Reclaim the Records: Using Freedom of Information Laws for Genealogical Research
Speaker:: Brook Schreier Ganz

Tired of being told by state archives or libraries that the records you want are inaccessible? Reclaim the Records is a new not-for-profit group filing Freedom of Information requests to get these "off limits" genealogy records released back to the public and put online for free. Learn how this group successfully challenged the NYC Municipal Archives in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, and their plans for 2016.

Brooke Schreier Ganz is a genealogist, computer programmer, and open data activist. She works on making archival records more accessible to the general public through technological solutions and legal remedies. She is a former vice president of Gesher Galicia and designed and built the Gesher Galicia website, including its innovative and free All Galicia Database. Brooke won second place in the 2012 Roots Tech Developer Challenge for the underlying search engine codebase, named LeafSeek.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, February 28, 2016

Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm; Oakland FamilySearch Library; 4766 Lincoln Avenue; Oakland, CA

Topic:: Case Study: Genealogy of Renee Kaufman
Speaker:: Steve Morse

This lecture presents a case study using the One-Step Webpages as well as other websites to develop a family history. It illustrates how, with a minimal amount of initial information, an entire genealogy can be obtained. It also shows how to obtain records in spite of name misspellings and how to avoid accepting wrong information.

Steve Morse is the creator of the One-Step Website, for which he has received both the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Outstanding Contribution Award from IAJGS, the Award of Merit from the National Genealogical Society, the first ever Excellence Award from the Association of Professional Genealogists, and two awards that he cannot pronounce from Polish genealogical societies. In his other life Morse is a computer professional with a doctorate degree in electrical engineering. He has held various research, development, and teaching positions, authored numerous technical papers, and written four textbooks, and holds four patents.

Monday, February 22, 2016

Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: 7 to 9pm; Congregation Beth Am; 26790 Arastradero Road, Room 5/6; Los Altos Hills , CA

Topic:: To Be Announced
Speaker:: Eshel Haritan

Come back later for more information.

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: The Heroic Journey as Inspiration for Writing Your Family History
Speaker:: Heidi Lyss

Sharing stories about our family members is one way to engage others in our genealogical studies and to deepen our understanding of our ancestors' experiences and their lives. In this presentation, we consider how to write our family members' stories using the universal framing of the Heroic Journey, described by Joseph Campbell as a core structure in tales from around the world. We will include discussion of how to use the Heroic Journey when we possess little actual information about family members, and will also talk about how to share our own genealogical explorations and life stories. You will leave this seminar with more ideas on how to write your family history. This topic is suitable for both new and more experienced family history writers.

Heidi Lyss has an MFA in Creative Writing and a Certificate in the Teaching of Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She has taught English composition at a Bay Area digital arts college and creative writing via Sierra College's Community Education program. She has received awards for two of her short stories and has published creative nonfiction, poetry, and trade/academic articles. She also has an MBA and works as a consultant, aiding organizations with communications and process improvement projects. Heidi started her genealogical research in 2009 and is a board member of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society. She is currently writing a novel set in ancient Turkey.

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, December 6, 2015

Brainstorming with the Mavens
Time and Place:: Noon to 2pm; Jewish Community Library; 1835 Ellis Street; San Francisco, CA; Free parking: enter parking garage from Pierce Street

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: San Francisco's Own Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico
Speaker:: Joseph Amster

A Jewish businessman originally from England and South Africa, Joshua Abraham Norton arrived in San Francisco in 1849 with $40,000, which after some shrewd investing increased to $250,000 (about $3 million today). After losing his fortune to a bad rice investment, Norton disappeared, returning to San Francisco in 1859 and declaring himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. In any other city, he would have been dismissed as a madman, but the people of San Francisco embraced his reign. He ate for free in restaurants and had the best seats in the theater, the police saluted him, and he even printed his own money, which was accepted as legal tender throughout the city. He issued numerous proclamations, calling for a bridge to be built across San Francisco Bay—in the exact spot where the Bay Bridge stands today. Other proclamations called for the founding of a league of nations to promote world peace, and the United Nations was founded in San Francisco in 1945; the erection of a Christmas tree in Union Square, where one has stood ever since he called for it; and banning use of the word "Frisco", punishable by a $25 fine. When he died on January 8, 1880, he was given the biggest funeral the city has seen to this day.

Amster, a displaced journalist with an acting background, wanted to create a walking tour with a twist, offering his patrons a unique experience. “I decided early on that I wanted to do my tour in character and researched the historical figures from San Francisco’s past,” says Amster. “The more I read about Emperor Norton, the more fascinated I became with him.” After completing his research, Amster took on the character of Emperor Norton, complete with uniform, beard, and plumed top hat. He now offers his tour to anyone with an interest in history (http://www.emperornortontour.com).

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Extra Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: 6:30 to 8:30pm; Oakland FamilySearch Library; 4766 Lincoln Avenue; Oakland, CA

Topic:: Online Resources for Jewish Genealogy
Speaker:: Janice M. Sellers

Researching Jewish ancestry is in many respects like researching any other family history, but in addition some specialized online sources are unique to Jewish research. Learn about the most useful of these sites and what information you can expect to find.

Janice M. Sellers is a professional genealogist specializing in Jewish, forensic, and newspaper research. She edits three genealogy journals and serves on the boards of San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society, African American Genealogical Society of Northern California, and CSGA. She is also a member of Association of Professional Genealogists, Council for the Advancement of Forensic Genealogy, Genealogical Speakers Guild, California Genealogical Society, and Gesher Galicia. Her Web site is http://www.ancestraldiscoveries.com/.

Monday, October 19, 2015

Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 7pm, Program begins 7:30pm; Congregation Beth Am Rm. 5/6; 26790 Arastradero Road; Los Altos Hills, CA
Topic:: Chasing Portraits: A Great-granddaughter’s Search for Her Lost Art Legacy
Speaker:: Elizabeth Rynecki

Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943) painted the Polish-Jewish community in the 1920's and 1930's. Although he perished in the Holocaust, many of his 800 works survived, and the Rynecki family has about 100. The artist’s great-granddaughter will speak about her great-grandfather, her quest to find the missing pieces, and where the family’s story rests within the larger story of Holocaust art restitution. Read more.

Elizabeth Rynecki attended Bates College ('91), where she studied Rhetoric, and received a Master's degree in Rhetoric and Speech Communication at U.C. Davis ('94), where her graduate work focused on children of Holocaust survivors and the voice and role of the second generation within Holocaust discourse. Elizabeth is passionate about sharing her great-grandfather’s paintings with others and searching for the lost and missing pieces from the original collection.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 12:30pm, Program begins 1pm; Oakland FamilySearch Library; 4766 Lincoln Avenue; Oakland, CA

Topic:: JRI-Poland: Go for the Record!
Speaker:: Robinn Magid

Jewish Records Indexing-Poland (http://www.jri-poland.org) has the motto "Go for the Record!", and its day has truly arrived. Now you can not only search its online index of approximately 5 million Jewish vital records housed in Poland today, but in many cases, it's possible to click a button, view, and even download your ancestors' vital records without charge. JRI-Poland makes genealogy dreams come true, and this presentation will show you what may be possible for your family from Poland, Galicia/Ukraine, and even Belarus and Lithuania if your ancestors' vital records survive in Polish archives today.

Robinn Magid is a long-time member of the SFBAJGS, a board member of JRI-Poland, and a compulsive genealogist since her retirement from Management Consulting with an international CPA firm in 1991. In 2001 she realized her childhood dream of visiting Poland and “walking a mile in her grandmother’s moccasins.” She has four children, a loving husband, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from UCLA. Her family genealogy research includes tracing Jews in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Galicia.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Extra Membership Meeting
Meetings are free and anyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: 3 to 5pm; Oakland FamilySearch Library; 4766 Lincoln Avenue; Oakland, CA

Topic:: Beyond Passenger Lists: Documenting 20th-century Immigrant Lives
Speaker:: Zack Wilske, USCIS

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Historian Zack Wilske will use case studies to introduce researchers to a variety of historical federal immigration and naturalization records available through the USCIS Genealogy Program and from the National Archives. Topics will include naturalization records, alien registration records, immigrant visa files, and other records documenting lives of Jewish immigrants during the first half of the twentieth century. Researchers will see example files, hear tips on connecting the records to each other, and learn how to advance their immigration research beyond the basics.

Zack Wilske is Historian for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). His research interests include the history of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the development of federal immigration and nationality policies, and the uses of INS records for historians and genealogists. He speaks regularly at academic and genealogy conferences and has published several articles on research with federal immigration and naturalization records.

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Membership Meeting Meetings are free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place:: Doors open 1pm, Program begins 1:30pm; Rhoda Goldman Plaza; 2180 Post Street, San Francisco 94115; Parking Information: Rhoda Goldman Plaza has a private, locked garage on Sutter, between Pierce and Scott. It is in the middle of the block and large writing on the building says "Parking for Rhoda Goldman Plaza". Pull up to the gate, press the RGP button on the box on the driver's side, say you are there for the genealogy society meeting, and the gate will be opened. Then drive down the ramp to RGP's visitor parking. Take the RGP elevator to the first floor, then make a right and a quick left turn, and walk down the hallway to the lobby. There you register and the front desk staff will direct you to the Olive Room on the same floor.

Topic:: Researching Your Litvak Roots
Speaker:: Judy Baston

Numerous sources exist online and in various repositories for researching your Litvak heritage. Judy Baston will offer an overview of these sources and will detail the best ways to use key Litvak databases and websites to enhance your knowledge and expand your family tree. The presentation will include how to find out what records are available, how to read and understand search results, where the records are, and how best to access the information in them. The presentation will cover LitvakSIG and its All Lithuania Database, as well as numerous resources from JewishGen, Yad Vashem, and other sources.

Judy Baston, Vice President of LitvakSIG, has been researching her family history from Lithuania and Poland for more than 25 years. She has visited her ancestral shtetls in Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus and was involved in the filming of “There Once Was a Town”, about her father’s town of Eishishok (now Eisiskes in Lithuania). She moderates the discussion groups of LitvakSIG, JRI-Poland, BialyGen, and the Lodz Area Research Group and serves on the Board of Directors of JRI-Poland and of LitvakSIG, for which she coordinates the Lida District Research Group. She has been involved with the Jewish Community Library in San Francisco for 22 years and coordinates the Brainstorming with the Mavens Genealogy Clinic at the Library.

Return to the Home of the SFBAJGS (San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society)

SFBAJGS - Past Programs

Sunday, December 8, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Monday, November 4, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

5:00 pm until 6:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Sunday, October 20, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Monday, September 9, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

5:00 pm until 6:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Sunday, August 4, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Sunday, June 2, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Monday, May 6, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

4:00 pm until 5:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome. co-sponsored with Jewish Community Library

7:00 pm until ? pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Sunday, April 14, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Monday, March 11, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

4:00 pm until 5:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Sunday, February 11, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Monday, January 22, 2024

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome.

4:30 pm until 6:00 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Sunday, December 3, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

Free and everyone interested is welcome. Copresented with Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon

11:30 am until 1:00 pm, Pacific Time Note earlier time At Your Home

Sunday, November 19, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Monday, October 23, 2023 POSTPONED

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

4:00 pm until 5:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Sunday, September 24, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

11:00 am until 12:30 pm, Pacific Time Note earlier time At Your Home

** This is a members-only presentation, per the request of the speaker. ** Co-presented with Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon

Monday, August 14, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

5:00 pm until 6:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Sunday, July 16, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Sunday, June 25, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Monday, May 22, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

4:00 pm until 5:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Sunday, April 23, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

1:30 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home

Sunday, February 26, 2023

SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

5:00 pm until 6:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

5:00 pm until 6:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

4:00 pm until 5:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Free and everyone interested is welcome.
co-sponsored with Jewish Community Library

7:00 pm until ? pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

4:00 pm until 5:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

4:30 pm until 6:00 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

Free and everyone interested is welcome.
Copresented with Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon

11:30 am until 1:00 pm, Pacific Time Note earlier time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

4:00 pm until 5:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

11:00 am until 12:30 pm, Pacific Time Note earlier time
At Your Home

This is a members-only presentation, per the request of the speaker.
Co-presented with Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon

5:00 pm until 6:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

4:00 pm until 5:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:30 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

3:30 pm until 5:00 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

4:30 pm until 6 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

11:00 am until 12:45 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

4:30 pm until 6:00 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

11:00 am until 12:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

5:00 pm until ? pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

4:00 pm until ? pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 pm until 2:30 pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

5:00 until ?, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 until 2:30pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

2:00 until 3:00pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

1:00 until 2:30pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

4:00 until 5:30, Pacific Time NEW TIME!
At Your Home

1:00 until 2:30pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

3:30 until 5:30, Pacific Time NEW TIME!
At Your Home

1:00 until 2:30pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

4:00 until 5:30, Pacific Time NEW TIME!
At Your Home

1:00 until 2:30pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home

4:00 until 5:30, Pacific Time NEW TIME!
At Your Home

1:00 until 2:30pm, Pacific Time
At Your Home