Television: Friday night at the Goodmans

It's not quite "Who Do You Think You Are" but "Friday Night Dinner" may strike some familiar chords with Tracing the Tribe's readers.

The new UK series will premiere on BBC America tonight (Saturday, July 30).

Read an interview on Collider.com with actor Simon Bird and creator/producer Robert Popper as they describe their own childhoods and the differences between American and UK Jewish families.

According to the interview, there's a creepy neighbor, a grandmother in a bikini, embarassing parents and more.

Here's one bit offered by Bird who plays one of the two brothers who get together with their family every Shabbat evening.

"I don’t think Robert is out to specifically write a Jewish sitcom. I think he wanted to write a sitcom about his family, and his family just happens to be Jewish, but they’re quite relaxed Jews. Some of the Jewish customs don’t really come into it, just because they’re not a big deal for Robert’s family. But, I’m a massive fan of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. I don’t know if they’re over-the-top, though. On Seinfeld, Judaism didn’t really come up much. It does more in Curb, only for the occasional storyline, here and there. In America, you’ve had decades of humor being fused with Jewish humor. In England, we just don’t have that. Our humor is not infused with Jewish humor. It’s completely different. So, whenever I see Jewish people depicted, they’ve always been done in either an over-the-top way, or a sentimental way. This family is Jewish, and they meet on Friday night. Their candles are lit, but they’re not going to do the whole thing. The way they talk is modern British. It’s second generation and third generation Jewish people. Jewish people will recognize they’re Jewish, but non-Jewish people might not. They might, if they know some Jewish people, but it’s not an issue. If you get it, you get it. If you don’t, you just enjoy it.

Read the rest of the interview at the link above.
There's another short review here.

Family reunion contest: Winners named

When you read about contests, what do you do? Do you think you'll never win and forget about it?

What if the grand prize is a free family reunion?

For one lucky winner, her entry means she will soon meet with a cousin from Denmark, while two runners-up also received recognition for connections to family in South Africa and Norway.

MyHeritage.com and Family Tree Magazine partnered for the free family reunion contest in June.

Winners were recently named in a post on the Family Tree Magazine blog.

Patricia Skubis was the grand prize winner of the free family reunion. Her long-lost Danish relative Tage will travel to the United States so they can meet in person for the first time.

She will also receive a year-long VIP membership to Family Tree Magazine and a three-year Premium-Plus subscription with MyHeritage.com.

Skubis' Danish family immigrated to the US in 1888, while another branch had settled in Australia in 1873. Skubis made contact nearly three decades ago with someone from the down-under branch, but they couldn't find the connection.

 However, that was then, and today we have the power of technology.

There will be more detailed coverage in a future issue of the magazine, but here's some of it.

In March 2011, a Danish family researching THYGESEN posted information on MyHeritage.com and Skubis received a Smart Match notice. She wasn't sure about it because the parents' names were the same, but not the children. She asked for more details and was then able to confirm the match.

I went online to the Danish Church Records [on the Danish archives’ website] and found Tyge Jørgensen’s children between Neils Madsen Thygesen, born in 1794, and my great-great-grandfather Martin, born in 1805. What a great surprise I received when I found that the next son after Neils was Peder Andersen Thygesen, the great-great-grandfather of Alison Rogers.

Tage and I are fourth cousins once removed. Our great-great-grandfathers, along with Alison’s, were brothers.

Runners-up were Linda Mehlinger and Pam Ingermanson, who will each receive a digital subscription to Family Tree Magazine and a three-year Premium-plus subscription on MyHeritage.com. Read some details at the link above about a Zulu warrior pulling five schoolgirls in a rickshaw and Norwegians in Idaho and Ohio.

According to Diane Haddad of Family Tree Magazine:

Thank you to everyone who entered this contest. Both our team at Family Tree Magazine and our contest partners MyHeritage.com were touched by your stories of reconnecting with family, and we're impressed by your diligent research. You’re truly an inspiration to your fellow family historians!

The next time you read about a family reunion contest, what will YOU do?

Boston: Finding lost families, Dec. 12

Tracing the Tribe has - over the years - discovered Talalay relatives in St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Mogilev, Moscow, as well as those in the US, Germany and Israel.

It is always an interesting experience to reconnect with "lost" relatives, who each provide details previously unknown.

Finding and reconnecting lost relatives in the FSU and Russian Empire is the focus of the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston, on Sunday, December 12.

The program, featuring a panel of experts, begins at 1.30pm at Temple Emanuel, Newton Centre. There is no admission fee.

US descendants of immigrants from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union report on finding relatives from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and a recent Soviet émigré reports on finding descendants of his family who came to the US in the earlier waves of immigration.

Speakers include:

-- Aaron Ginsburg: A first-generation American; founder and president of The Friends of Jewish Dokshitsy. He spearheaded an international effort to help the local government of Dokshitsy, Belarus restore and re-dedicate the town’s Jewish cemetery. He recently organized a Dokshitsy reunion in Rhode Island (documented at Tracing the Tribe). He has been involved with cemetery restoration, shtetl and family history since 1995.

-- Yefim Kogan: Born in Kishinev, Moldova; emigrated from Moscow in 1989. Since then, his extensive genealogical research has enabled him to trace part of his family to the mid-18th century and to find relatives in the US who left Russia in 1906. Currently a graduate student at Hebrew College with a focus in Eastern European Jewish cultural history, he has presented on Jewish history in Bessarabia and genealogy at IAJGS conferences. He is a volunteer JewishGen coordinator.

-- Carol Clingan: A third-generation American, her grandparents came from Belarus and Ukraine. Over nearly 20 years of research, she has traced family back to the early-19th century and discovered relatives still living in the FSU. She is JGSGB vice-president and Program Committee co-chair.

For directions, click here.

Boston-area readers should mark this upcoming date:
-- January 16: Robert Weinberg, "DNA of the Jewish People, Similarities and Differences."

For more information on JGSGB programs, click here.

Family Traditions: Mr. Turkey Day

Tracing the Tribe wishes its readers a wonderful holiday with friends and family.

We hope you take this opportunity to talk about family history and to preserve holiday traditions.

Our family's Thanksgiving Day tradition is to retell The Story of Mr. Turkey.

When we lived in Iran long ago, we made a real effort to celebrate our favorite - well, my favorite - holidays.

The first year there, I decided to do a proper Thanksgiving.

It wasn't as easy as it seems. Turkeys there were rarely sold whole, even harder was trying to get a kosher one. Cranberry sauce? Libby's Pumpkin Puree? Miracle Whip for leftover sandwiches? Those were all black-market items, found only in a handful of specialized shops.

We invited a bunch of our friends, mostly Americans married to Persians, and I set off on my quest.

Actually, the accompaniments (cranberry, pumpkin puree and Miracle Whip) were relatively easy as there was a very large US contingent in Teheran in those days, with a steady demand for such items.

Number one was Mr. Turkey. I visited a supermarket where we knew the owner and asked him to get me a whole, kosher-slaughtered turkey, cleaned and ready for the oven, and it had to be at my house on Wednesday morning.

It didn't come in the morning, or the afternoon or the evening, despite repeated calls and promises from the other end. Early Thursday morning, the doorbell rang and a large brown-paper wrapped parcel was thrust into my eager hands.

As I took it from the deliveryman, it did feel somewhat warm, which set off a vague alarm. I placed it on the kitchen counter and started to unwrap it. The first piece out was the neck with head - and eyes - attached to the body, which was still feathered. The turkey was intact inside and out - everything but the gobble - and I stood there, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

My husband heard the commotion, came in and started laughing. He called my mother-in-law who agreed to send over her housekeeper/cook to clean up the bird. They were both laughing hysterically on the phone during this conversation. The woman arrived and efficiently cleaned Mr. Turkey inside and out and cut off the parts I didn't want to see. Most disturbing were its eyes. I think I can understand why there are vegetarians!

Need I remind anyone that where I came from - New York City - turkeys came cleaned in plastic bags and ready for the ovens. I don't think even my grandmother had to defeather a turkey. How was I supposed to know what to do?

Mr. Turkey was soon ready to be stuffed, roasted and basted to a golden brown. Our guests said it was delicious.

But each year we act out the story of Mr. Turkey.

Of course, we don't mention my first attempt - many years earlier - at duckling a l'orange, where a perfectly cooked and delicious bird held a surprise in its tummy - the plastic bag containing the giblets. THAT was embarrassing.

Oh well, no one is perfect.

Enjoy your feast with family and friends!

Facebook: Finding family

Tracing the Tribe remembers when Thomas MacEntee of Geneabloggers.com encouraged all geneabloggers to join Facebook.

I did and, to my surprise, two sets of Russian cousins living in different European cities found me within the first few days. For one group - in Mainz, Germany - I knew their names but not where they lived and certainly not that they were in Germany.

While we were happily shocked at that time, we weren't the only ones. Facebook is an excellent tool for rooting out relatives used by many genealogists and family history researchers.

The Montreal Gazette's story on "The new face of genealogy," by Danielle Murray, covers the experiences of several Canadian researchers and what they found on Facebook, including the experiences of Murray herself.

Forty years ago, long before genealogy became trendy, my great Uncle Milt put together our family tree. He spent years scouring census reports, pouring over church and military records and ship passenger lists, reading old newspapers and searching through graveyards. He even travelled overseas. When it was done, he presented my grandmother and their siblings with a complete database and chart of the entire family going back some 300 years.

Last year, I received a message on Facebook from a long-lost Murray on my grandfather's side, the only side of my family I never knew. "Are we related?" he asked. Could be, I thought, seeing as he lived in my father's hometown. In the next email, we determined our connection -his dad and my grandfather were brothers.

Jay soon drove to Montreal to see us. Not only did he and my dad share a resemblance, they had the same dry sense of humour. The day passed quickly, and we heard lots of stories. The only thing missing was the rest of the family.

Murray found even more. Within one month she connected with 50 first and second cousins, and by the end of the year, some 178 direct descendants of her paternal grandfather and siblings had been charted. During this summer, the family held  a reunion.

Of course, Facebook research is a bunny slipper activity, Murray explains:

And I know had it not been for Facebook, it just wouldn't have happened. Sure, I could have done it on my own, but the thing is, I wouldn't have. With Facebook, all I did was plug names into a computer. I paid nothing. I never left the house. I barely lifted a finger.

There are other internet family history sites, of course, to help find living relatives.

A Facebook spokesperson is quoted as saying the site doesn't keep statistics on the number of actual and virtual family reunion groups created. Perhaps they should?

The story detailed the experiences of several "Facebook Family Finders" (Murray's term) who have created family pages, discovered relatives in cyberspace and held real-time reunions.

Are you looking for family? Another great site for connecting with relatives is MyHeritage.com. Do try it! While Facebook is a general social networking site, MyHeritage is a genealogy social networking site, raising your targeted search by several levels.

Tracing the Tribe is back!!!

Hello, loyal readers.

Tracing the Tribe arrived back in the early hours of Friday morning and has spent two days recovering from jet lag.

Tons of things piled up to work on, so expect a busy week - despite the holiday!

Enjoy your Passover holiday with your family and friends.

-- Make your favorite ethnic Passover dishes.

-- Remember to talk about your own family's unique journey geographically to where you live today. Recall your ancestors, talk about their experiences.

-- Involve the younger generations.

-- When you gather for your seders, also make time to go over family photographs.

-- Ask your seder guests to each bring an old family photo (a copy, please, as wine stains don't really improve old photos) for "show and tell."

-- Try various means to transmit your family's journey: Maps, photos, names, dates, countries, photos of ships that your family traveled on to wherever they went, funny stories and more.

-- Tell Tracing the Tribe about your seder experiences in the comment section. Share your nostalgia, the good times and the sad.

-- Remember to take pictures of your seders and everyone who attends them, video as well as still photos. It's a good holiday habit to get into!

With best wishes to all my readers
at this very special time of year,

Schelly

Place of space: Our ancestors' homes

How do our surroundings, our living spaces impact our families, our thoughts, our history?

Isn't this what our pursuit of genealogy helps to reconstruct? To make sure that our family history remains alive and known and preserved?

In a poem by Leib Borisovich Talalai, a young Yiddish poet whose family was from our shtetl of Vorotinschtina, who later lived in Baranovich and in Minsk, and who was ultimately murdered in the Minsk Ghetto in 1941, he writes about his family house in our shtetl, "If the walls of this house could talk. ..."

What do you know about the spaces in which your ancestors lived? At left are steep steps in the old Jewish quarter of Girona, Spain.

On Yom Kippur, I usually read for a good portion of the day. This year, it was "Sepharad," by Antonio Munoz Molina, one of Spain's most famous writers, who draws on the Sephardic diaspora and touches on the Holocaust and even the purges of Stalin while telling this story I couldn't put down.

The book, praised as "a masterpiece" by "The Lost" author Daniel Mendelsohn, offers some insights into what I'm terming "the place of space" in our lives and in our family history. Mendelsohn wrote in the New York Review of Books:

"Shame and guilt, homelands and exile, ceaseless wanderings and bitter alienations both internal and external, metaphorical and real, are persistent motifs...."

Writes Munoz Molina:

"What is the minimal portion of country, what does of roots or hearth, that a human being requires?" Jean Amery asked himself, remembering his flight from Austria in 1938, perhaps the night of March 15, on the express train that left Vienna at 11:15 for Prague, his troubled, clandestine journey across European borders toward the provisional refuge of Antwerp, where he knew the endless insecurity of exiled Jews, the native's hostility toward foreigners, humiliation from the police and officials who examine papers and certify or deny permits and make you come back the next day and the next and who look at the refugee as someone suspected of a crime. The worst is to be stripped of the nationality you thought was yours inalienably. You need at least a home in which you can feel safe, Amery says, a room that you can't be dragged from in the middle of the night, that you don't have to run from as fast as you can when you hear police whistles and footsteps on the stairs.

Later on he asks the reader:

What do you do if you know that from one day to the next you can be driven from your home, that all it takes is a signature and a lacquer seal at the bottom of a decree for the work of your entire life to be demolished, for you to lose everything, house and goods, for you to find yourself out on the street exposed to shame, forced to part with everything you considered yours and to board a ship that will take you to a country where you will also be pointed at and rejected, or not even that far, to a disaster at sea, the frightening sea you have never seen?

He describes an old Jewish house with a low door, on a narrow street in a neighborhood of 15th century houses. On the two ends of the large stone lintel are two Stars of David, inscribed in a circle. The author adds:

The two Stars of David testify to the existence of a large community, like the fossilized impression of an exquisite leaf that fell in the immensity of a forest erased by a cataclysm thousands of years ago. They couldn't believe that they would actually be driven out, that within a few months they would have to abandon the land they had been born in and where their ancestors had lived. The house has a door with rusted studs and an iron knocker, and small Gothic moldings in the angles of the lintel. Maybe the people who have gone carried with the key that fit this large keyhole, maybe they handed it down from father to son through generations of exile, just as the language and sonorous Spanish names were perpetuated, and the poems and children's songs that the Jews of Salonica and Rhodes would carry with them on the long hellish journey to Auschwitz. It was a house like this that the family of Baruch Spinoza or Primo Levi would leave behind forever.

Quite by coincidence, a Google alert this morning led me to the Genealogy Blog's post which also commented on "the place of space" in our family histories.

This leads me to a thought: what part do places hold in our family histories? It would seem places (like houses) take on a character of their own, a spirit, if you will. They facilitate gathering and celebrating and memories. When they are taken away, it seems there is a disruption in our gatherings until we can find another substitute. In our transient society where we uproot every two years, are we constantly severing these vital ties with the past and memory.

Is there a difference between taking away a house, or taking away the family that lived there? What happens to the generations and centuries of memories? How long do they remain to be passed on to younger generations?

When do those memories disappear?

When does the disconnect occur between history and youth?

Breaking News: Best Web Sites for 2009

The 101 Best Web Sites for 2009 are now at Family Tree Magazine.

If our ancestors had swung down from the trees with six fingers on each hand, we'd probably be counting by dozens. But thanks to humanity's development of 10 fingers and 10 toes, we count things in 10s, group the years in decades and celebrate anniversaries ending in 0—such as this 10th annual installment of Family Tree Magazine's 101 Best Web Sites.

We're marking the occasion by honoring 10 categories of 10 noteworthy sites each (plus one to make 101, of course). With this 10th roundup of meritorious sites, we've also sought to break the mold a bit and encompass more of the "Web 2.0" sites that are paving the way for changes in online genealogy over the next 10 years. Something had to give, however, to keep our count at a manageable 101, so we've omitted some old favorites—still worth bookmarking, nonetheless—and several excellent foreign research sites of interest to genealogists with that particular ancestry.

This year the categories are (see the lists here):

10 Best Web Sites to See Dead People:Use these sites to find obituaries, cemeteries and other traces of your departed ancestors.

10 Best Web Sites for Vital Records:These are the best searchable databases of vital records from health departments, historical societies and state archives.

10 Best Web Sites for Storing and Sharing: Sharing your family history just got easier with these Web sites that let you create a family tree, store pictures and more.

10 Best Big Web Sites: You're sure to find information about your family in these stellar genealogy Web sites.

10 Best Web Sites for Maps: Trace your family's paths, find your ancestors' homes and explore the old country.

10 Best Web Sites for Local Searches:You can thank your lucky stars if your ancestors resided in the areas these Web sites cover.

10 Best Web Sites for International Searches: Tracking down immigrant ancestors has never been easier.

10 Best Cutting-edge Web Sites: Stay informed about the latest technology for genealogists with these sites.

10 Best Web Sites for Military Research: Find ancestors who served their country in these databases.

10 Best Virtual Library Web Sites: Powerful search tools let you explore great library collections in the comfort of your own home.

There are numerous new sites in each category.