Logo SFBAJGS--Officers, Board Members, and Addresses


Election of Officers

Current Officers and other members of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society:

Jeremy Frankel
President
president@sfbajgs.org

Jeremy's foray into his family genealogy began during the 2nd night of Passover 1985 when his maternal grandfather asked him what he knew about the Levy family. After making some inroads, real life and work intervened and the project was placed on a back-burner until the arrival of the internet and online databases. Jeremy's work in England as a cartographer for 14 years brought together two passions, history and geography. This helped enormously when studying families and migration patterns. Thirty-five years later and the tree is burgeoning with 7000+ people.
Jeremy has been a member of the board since 2001 and like a number of experienced genealogists has offered his services as a professional genealogist with his partner Victoria Fisch, president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento. Jeremy is a member of several genealogical societies and is a frequent contributor to many online discussion groups. He has written extensively and lectured and taught classes throughout the bay area.

Preeva Tramiel
Vice-President
Secretary
vicepresident@sfbajgs.org
secretary@sfbajgs.org



Preeva Tramiel is an amateur genealogist and author of a memoir, The Girl On The Wall, who has been researching the Adler family of Mukacheve since 2008, including going back to Transcarpathia and Hungary to see where her family lived. She runs the meetings on the South Peninsula.

Shellie Wiener
At-Large

Wiener

Dana Kurtz
(8/27/2023-)
Treasurer
treasurer@sfbajgs.org

An IT project management consultant, Dana returns to the Board after a long hiatus. In more than 30 years of membership, Dana has held almost every Board and Officer position: President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Membership, ZichronNote Editor, Webmaster, Publicity, Librarian, Family Finder/Roster producer, Annual Workshop Coordinator, Elections Chair; and brought cookies to meetings.
Dana’s interest in genealogy really took off in the late 1980s when searching for her grandmother’s birth certificate to ensure a proper 90th birthday celebration. To everyone’s surprise, that birthday had come and gone, her grandmother was already 93.
Putting her genealogical skills to work, Dana provided research for her brother Glenn, author of the highly acclaimed book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film. The story traces Glenn’s journey to identify people in movie film shot by their grandfather in a return visit to the town of his birth. The book and film inspired the award-winning documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening.
Dana continues researching her ancestors and descendants, still excited to find and connect with “new” family after all these years.

Ellen Diamond
(9/11/2024-)
At-Large

 

Stephen G. Harris, Ph.D.
At-Large
steve@sfbajgs.org

I was born in New York City, and received a Ph.D.in Research Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. I have been a consulting genealogist since 1991. My academic background, and post-doctoral teaching of courses in research methods and statistics, have proven helpful in my genealogy practice, where proving hypotheses and weighing the probabilities of purported facts are central to solid research outcomes.

My research engagements have most often focused on American genealogy, but past projects have involved research in the British Isles, Greece, Italy, France and Eastern Europe.
https://www.genresearch.net/

I have enjoyed serving the profession as past president of the California Genealogical Society and through genealogy lecturing and pro-bono coaching throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. I also enjoy solving historical mysteries using genealogical methods.

Roy Ogus
At-Large (8/27/2023-)

Roy Ogus has been researching his family history since 1985. He has documented his family worldwide, and has traced his ancestors back to Lithuania and Belarus in the early 18th century. Roy was born in South Africa, and has been living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1970s. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area JGS for nearly 30 years, he has published articles in the journals Avotaynu, ZichronNote (JGS San Francisco), Shemot (JGS Great Britain), and Roots-Key (JGS Los Angeles), and has given presentations at numerous IAJGS annual genealogy conferences. Roy is the Vice-President and Journal Editor of the JewishGen Southern African Research Division, a LitvakSIG District Coordinator, and an Avotaynu Contributing Editor. He is a computer engineer by profession.

Janice Sellers
At-Large (10/12/2008-)
Chair, Publicity
Chair, Program
publicity@sfbajgs.org

Sellers

Janice M. Sellers is a professional genealogist specializing in Jewish, Black, forensic, and newspaper research. She began researching her family history at the tender age of 13 and soon will mark 50 years of research.  She is the president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon and is also a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, Council for the Advancement of Forensic Genealogy, Genealogical Speakers Guild, and Genealogical Forum of Oregon, where she leads the African American Special Interest group. She has been on staff at LDS FamilySearch centers and libraries since 2000 and gives presentations on many genealogical topics at events ranging from local to international.  Janice worked for many years in the publishing industry as an editor, indexer, and compositor and has edited several genealogy journals and newsletters.
More information

Mona Siegel
Chair, Membership
membership@sfbajgs.org

Mona Bache Siegel has been doing genealogy research for about 30 years, and started by ordering microfilm at her local Family History Center. She is still discovering family records in the online records from Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine. Most of her ancestors arrived in the United States in the mid-to-late-1800s, but she has the Ellis Island inspection card for her great-great grandmother, who arrived in 1921. Mona is a graduate of Stanford, and was the academic technology specialist and webmaster at Palo Alto High School before retiring. She and her husband, Dave, have been married since 1985 and have two adult daughters.

Barbara Stack
Webmaster
ZichronNote Editor
webmaster@sfbajgs.org
newsletter@sfbajgs.org
zn@sfbajgs.org

Barbara has been researching her family roots in Poland and Ukraine since the late 1980s when her sister met a maternal cousin, Joseph Chandler, of Portland, Maine, who had made an enormous hand-written family tree. Joe passed along a copy, and Barbara began to map it into Reunion. She also started exchanging letters with far-flung aunts and uncles. Many busy years passed. In late 2009, a mutual friend introduced her to Jeremy, who pointed to the LDS Family History Library in Oakland and to the SFBAJGS. A website became necessary to organize and share the mounting piles of research. Repeated gentle inquiries of the Chandler family led to a revised tree, a narrative history, a scrapbook and the hope of discovery of correspondence. And then there’s her mother’s father’s family and her father’s family from Nowy Dwor. A long story. If you do genealogy long enough it becomes something other than what it seemed at the outset. Barbara's most recent pleasures have been in reintroducing members of long-separated branches of the family. 1969: BA, Brandeis University, Economics; 1975: MA, U. Massachusetts Amherst, Linguistics. In her professional life Barbara has been a systems analyst, a fiddler, a youth orchestra ED, and most recently a database manager, archivist, editor, and writing coach.

Newsletter exchange-- For other JGS chapters wishing to exchange emailed copies of their newsletters for emailed copies of ZichronNote:   ZNexchange@sfbajgs.org

To contact the SFBAJGS by U.S. Mail, address your letter to:
SFBAJGS
P. O. Box 318214
San Francisco, CA 94131-8214

Past Board Members


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