The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) presented its 2021 awards and grants Aug 4 at its virtual 41st International Conference on Jewish Genealogy.

Recipients are:

Lifetime Achievement Award – Nolan Altman

In addition to his Lifetime Achievement Award, his local Society, the Jewish Genealogy Society of Long Island (JGSLI), with President Bonnie Birns, was recognized as the IAJGS Member of the Year, and JewishGen’s Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR) was recognized as Outstanding Resource. Nolan is Coordinator of JOWBR and Avraham Groll is JewishGen Executive Director.

Altman was recognized for his decades of commitment to excellence in the field of Jewish Genealogy. In leadership roles, he has served the Jewish Genealogy Society of Long Island as President and Treasurer, and for more than a decade, as Vice President and Board Member-at-Large of the IAJGS. Most recently, Nolan was the go-to person for new JGS presidents seeking mentorship. In these roles Nolan has guided many rising leaders in the field of Jewish Genealogy.

Nolan is admired and honored for his countless days, months and years leading major projects for JewishGen as a key member of its Leadership Team. Currently, as Director of Data Acquisition, Nolan coordinates JewishGen’s Holocaust Database, JOWBR (Burial) Database Project and Memorial Plaques Database. All of these endeavors have advanced the research opportunities for Jewish genealogists across the globe. Additionally, recognizing his lifetime work, IAJGS’s Volunteer of the Year Award was renamed in his honor.

Nolan Altman Volunteer of the Year: Russ Maurer

Russ’ accomplishments in support of Jewish genealogy are international in scope. Russ took on the position of Coordinator for Records Acquisitions and Translations for LitvakSIG, a complicated and multi-faceted job. He accepted the challenge of the Vilnius Household Registers of the LitvakSIG knowing that it was an enormous and complicated project. He managed and made outstanding progress overcoming a multitude of obstacles and challenges in this endeavor. Russ also has worked tirelessly for JRI-Poland, Gesher Galicia, the Jewish Tarnow Facebook group, projects related to his ancestral villages, and his home base, the Jewish Genealogy Society of Cleveland.

His certificate points out, “Russ Maurer’s outstanding efforts in support of Jewish genealogy exemplify volunteerism at its finest.”

Society Member of the Year: Jewish Genealogy Society of Long Island, Bonnie Birns, President

The IAJGS Member of the Year award recognizes a member Society for excellence in the following areas: innovative programming, Jewish genealogical research, use of social media, partnering with other organizations, membership growth, utilizing and advancing technology.

Examples of some of the many JGSLI accomplishments that led to this award were: doubling the number of its public presentations in spite of limitations on in-person meetings; expanding the capability to make presentations available through Facebook Live and YouTube; increasing Facebook membership by 53%, to more than 1,000 members; increasing membership to its award-winning YouTube channel by 50%; recording nearly 50,000 hits by making its YouTube library of more than 40 videos readily available to groups and individuals; providing 12 presenters for the 40th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy; photographing and indexing more than 10,000 headstones from a local Long Island Jewish cemetery for JOWBR; increasing membership from 234 to 273, a growth of 17%, including many new out-of-town members who were able to participate through the use of Zoom technology.

Outstanding Project: JewishGen’s Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR), Avraham Groll, JewishGen Executive Director; Nolan Altman, Coordinator of JOWBR

Founded in 2003 and international in scope, JewishGen’s Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR) provides an accessible database covering Jewish cemeteries and burial records worldwide. JOWBR links burial records, headstones and information about each cemetery where burial records exist. JOWBR currently contains more than 4 million burial records and 806,000 photos from more than 9,000 cemeteries in 136 countries.

With deteriorating headstones, rampant vandalism, and people moving far from home, the links to our past that JOWBR provides are vital in maintaining our connection to our ancestors and preserving our Jewish heritage.

JewishGen was founded in 1987 and serves as the global home for Jewish genealogy. Featuring unparalleled access to 30+ million records, it offers unique search tools, along with opportunities for researchers to connect with others who share similar interests. JewishGen is an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Find JewishGen at: www.jewishgen.org and the JOWBR database at: https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Cemetery/

Outstanding Publication: Australian Jewish Genealogical Society for Kosher Koala, Dani Hashki, editor; Barbara Simon, President, AJGS

The quarterly publication was recognized for its efforts to promote passion for Jewish Genealogy, recognize and encourage engagement in research and educate its members.

Kosher Koala includes both original historical, anecdotal and research related articles by its members and news articles gleaned from other sources related to the field of Jewish Genealogy. It also provides timely information about events of interest to the AJGS community. This quarterly magazine is available digitally on the AJGS website.

The chosen name “we decided to walk a different track, an Australian bush track, with a name reflecting that we are Australian, we are Jewish, and that we live up a familiar gum tree, a menorah with pungent eucalyptus leaves.”. The distinctive logo – that koala hanging off its eucalyptus menorah -- was designed by Robert Klein.

Rabbi Malcolm Stern Grant: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Global Archives, Names Indexing Project, Linda Levi, director of JDC Global Archives, and Jeff Edelstein, JDC Archives Digital Initiatives Manager

Under this grant, the JDC Archives will create database records of Jews who fled Czechoslovakia in 1968-1969 and will index 70,000 case files of Jews who were helped by JDC, the global Jewish humanitarian organization, as they left the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc countries, and North Africa in the period 1946-1988

“We’re incredibly proud to accept the Rabbi Stern Grant. Not only will it enable us to further our indexing work and increase the chronological reach of our available resources, it will benefit countless researchers looking to connect with their family histories, especially those in the Russian-speaking Jewish community,” said Linda Levi.

John Stedman Memorial Grant: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Landsmanshaftn Collection Portal, Hallel Yadin, Archivist, Dr. Stefanie Halpern, Director of YIVO Archives

The John Stedman Memorial Grant, matched in-kind by YIVO, will support the work of two advanced interns to increase online access to YIVO’s landsmanshaftn collections. Landsmanshaftn were Jewish benevolent societies that were formed to aid new immigrants in their transition from Eastern Europe to America. The YIVO Institute stewards about 1,400 collections of landsmanshaftn records and receives more every year. While most of these records are from organizations that operated in New York City, there are also records from across the United States and the world.

The grant will enable YIVO to create a single finding aid consolidating all the landsmanshaftn collections making them more accessible to the public. The finding aid will include the town of origin, its variant spellings, and other genealogical resources from the town, as well as a description of the contents of each individual collection. Individual collections may include links to other landsmanshaftn collections at YIVO, materials which have been digitized through remote reference and digitization on demand, yizkor book links and translations from outside sources like the New York Public Library and JewishGen, and other relevant material

IAJGS is an umbrella organization of more than 95 Jewish genealogical organizations worldwide. The IAJGS coordinates and organizes activities such as its annual International Conference on Jewish Genealogy and provides a unified voice as the spokesperson on behalf of its members. The IAJGS’s vision is of a worldwide network of Jewish genealogical research organizations and partners working together as one coherent, effective and respected community, enabling people to succeed in researching Jewish ancestry and heritage. Find the IAJGS at: www.iajgs.org and like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/iajgsjewishgenealogy.

Thanks to funding from an IDEA grant from UNC Libraries, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center is pleased to now have the full run of 1951 issues of the Carolina Times digitized. The issues from 1951 were never microfilmed, so they were not included in previous projects to digitize the newspaper which were done from film.

The Carolina Times, edited by Louis Austin from 1927 to 1971, was a paper of national significance. Targeted primarily to the African American community in Durham, the Times covered the long struggle for equal rights for all Americans. The newspaper’s motto was “The Truth Unbridled,” an accurate description of Austin’s honest and forthright depiction of racial injustice in North Carolina and beyond. It ceased publication in 2020, after just over a century of being the voice of the African American community in Durham and the wider state and South.

You can read more at https://www.digitalnc.org/blog/issues-from-1951-of-the-carolina-times-are-now-on-digitalnc/.

The University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries has reached a significant milestone, with the millionth digitised version of an item held in its collections now having been uploaded for free public access anywhere in the world.

Launched in 2015, the Digital Bodleian website is a free resource providing unfettered access to a vast array of items housed in the institution’s wide-ranging collections.

The digital archive of images has steadily grown throughout the six years since its launch, with an original notebook belonging to poet Jenny Joseph, a former student at St Hilda’s College, now having become the one millionth item digitised and made available for public access.

“Whether you are a student, a researcher or someone who has a personal passion, we are delighted to be able to make our collections, built up over the last 400 years, for all to be able to view, download and use,” says Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian at the Bodleian Libraries.

“We invite everyone to explore the diversity, interest and sheer beauty of these manuscripts, books, archives, photographs and paintings. Many of the collections we have digitised were gifted to the Bodleian, and the costs have often come from generous donors and funding bodies who share our desire to make these materials widely available.”

Having blazed a trail by digitising content as far back as the early 1990s, the Bodleian Libraries was the first library outside the USA to partner with Google as part of their ongoing mass-digitisation programme.

You can learn more at https://advisor.museumsandheritage.com/news/one-millionth-item-digitised-made-freely-available-via-bodleian-libraries-website/.

The Bodleian Libraries and Oxford college libraries web site may be found at: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.

The National Archives of Australia may have won funding to cover the backlog of at-risk records in need of digitisation but its greater ambitions to take a more commanding role in preserving and protecting documents across government will have to wait.

In July, the Federal Government granted the National Archives of Australia the $67.7 million recommended by former Finance secretary David Tune to address immediate needs after a vocal campaign from the agency and its supporters.

The government has now released its response to the Tune review, agreeing to or agreeing in principle to all 20 recommendations.

But key proposals will be sent off to a committee or await the justification of a business case.

You can read the full story in an article by Ian Bushnell that has been published in the The Riot Act web site at https://the-riotact.com/key-national-archives-reforms-on-the-backburner/488356.

Ancestry has introduced a new collection of more than 3.5 million searchable record. The Freedmen’s Bureau collection can provide details of your African American ancestors’ lives before 1870—giving you a more complete picture of your past. With this free collection, you can discover the names of your African American ancestors, read their personal letters, see where they settled after the Civil War, and much more.

Established in 1865 to help the nearly four million newly freedmen and women manage their transition from enslavement to citizenship, the Freedmen’s Bureau assisted with land and property, relief programs, medical care, and educational support—among many other important endeavors.

You can read more and also access the collection at: https://www.ancestry.com/cs/freedmens?o_iid=116311&o_lid=116311&o_sch=Web+Property.

The Tennessee State Library and Archives reopened in April at a new location in downtown Nashville. Check online at sos.tn.gov/tsla for all the details about where it is, the new parking arrangement and to take the virtual tours.

For anyone with Tennessee roots, it’s a great resource.

This is unique: I don't often get to publish political announcements in this newsletter. However, if you have family members from Belarus, you might find information about your relatives in this group of records:

Opponents of the Belarus government said they have pulled off an audacious hack that has compromised dozens of police and interior ministry databases as part of a broad effort to overthrow President Alexander Lukashenko's regime.

From a report:The Belarusian Cyber Partisans, as the hackers call themselves, have in recent weeks released portions of a huge data trove they say includes some of the country's most secret police and government databases. The information contains lists of alleged police informants, personal information about top government officials and spies, video footage gathered from police drones and detention centers and secret recordings of phone calls from a government wiretapping system, according to interviews with the hackers and documents reviewed by Bloomberg News.

Among the pilfered documents are personal details about Lukashenko's inner circle and intelligence officers. In addition, there are mortality statistics indicating that thousands more people in Belarus died from Covid-19 than the government has publicly acknowledged, the documents suggest. In an interview and on social media, the hackers said they also sabotaged more than 240 surveillance cameras in Belarus and are preparing to shut down government computers with malicious software named X-App.

The following is an announcement from the Genealogical Forum of Oregon:

(Portland, Oregon, 08/24/2021)-- The Genealogical Forum of Oregonhas received a $1,400 federal American Rescue Plan Act grant for digitizing our holdings. The money will permit the purchase of a much-needed scanner that can be used by our trained volunteers. Records will then be made available to members at home via the GFO website. Prior to the pandemic, digitization was done on a modest basis, mainly to protect our periodicals. Patrons only had access to the digitized images onsite at our library. In the past year, due to the pandemic, a team of dedicated volunteers moved more than 150 annual classes online and has transferred more than 334,000 pages of records onto the GFO’s website. This grant will increase that effort. The GFO received the grant in a highly competitive process; less than a third of the total funding requested was approved. Grants were made possible thanks to the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and provided by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, through the Library Services and Technology Act. The grants application process was administered by the State Library of Oregon. The federal funds were included in the American Rescue Plan Act to help libraries, museums, and related nonprofits promote digital inclusion and connectivity, address needs arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, and support efforts to provide equitable service to communities. GFO Vice President Susie Chodorow, who secured the grant, says, “The majority of our members identify as 65 years and older. Many are living with disabilities, especially mobility concerns. It’s imperative that we continue to offer online services. This grant will help us work towards our goal of making our collections accessible online as quickly as possible for use by our members.” We greatly appreciate Congress’s support of the American Rescue Plan Act. It is directly benefiting the residents ofOregon. For more information about the federal library grants, please visit the Institute of Museum and Library Services athttps://imls.gov. More information about AmericanRescue Plan Act grants awarded by the State Library of Oregon, is available athttps://libguides.osl.state.or.us/lstagrants/arpaawards.

The following is a press release written by the National Genealogical Society:

FALLS CHURCH, VA, 23 AUGUST 2021— The National Genealogical Society (NGS) is pleased to announce the publication of two new books as part of its Research in the States series, which now covers research in thirty states and the tribal records of Oklahoma’s American Indians. The newest volumes are Research in Alabama by LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson, JD, LLM, CG, CGL, and a new edition of Research in Maryland, by Rebecca Whitman Koford, CG, CGL, and Debra A. Hoffman, PLCGS. The books are available in the NGS store in both PDF and print versions.

Both guidebooks provide detailed information on a wealth of resources, including:

• Archives, Libraries, and Societies
• Atlases, Gazetteers, and Maps
• Bible, Cemetery, and Census Records
• Court and other Jurisdictional Records
• Directories and Newspapers
• Ethnic, Land, Probate, and Religious Records
• Military, Naturalization, State, Tax, Vital Records, and more

The guide books include the website address, physical address, and telephone number for each repository.

In Research in Alabama, Garrett-Nelson also reviews archival documentation regarding the state’s enslaved people and its free people of color, including non-traditional repositories. The author covers information on pertinent digital collections and databases such as bills of sale, estate inventories, and letters as well as postbellum records.

Alabama was one of the few states to grant property rights to married women prior to the Civil War. Historical records of testamentary documents, deeds, bills of sale, and more offer a possible pathway for tracing maternal ancestors. These topics and more are thoroughly addressed in Research in Alabama.

Garrett-Nelson is an author, lecturer, and a trustee and president of the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG). She is the registrar general of the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage. Her articles have appeared in NGS Quarterly and the Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society.

Research in Maryland, New Edition, is an invaluable guide for family historians who seek to trace ancestors who lived in Maryland as well as lands that were once part of the “Maryland Colony,” including Delaware, the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania as far north as Philadelphia, and parts of what are Virginia and West Virginia. Koford and Hoffman explain the system of land grants during the colonial period as well as after America’s independence. They also discuss Maryland’s court system and its numerous name and jurisdictional changes during and after the colonial period.

Maryland’s state and local governments did not begin to keep records of births and deaths until the late nineteenth century. Research in Maryland reviews other sources including religious records for Anglican/Episcopalian, Baptist, Lutheran and Reformed, Methodist, Roman Catholic, and Quaker religions; and source material for several ethnic groups, including African American, German, Irish, Jewish, and Native American. The authors also describe the resources at Maryland State Archives (MSA) and its Archives of Maryland Online, which includes more than 471,000 historical documents.

Koford is an author and lecturer and Course One coordinator at the Institute of Genealogical and Historical Records (IGHR). She serves on the Board of the ProGen Study Groups, is the executive director of the BCG, and is director of the Genealogical Institute on Federal Records.

Hoffman specializes in Maryland and German research. An author and lecturer, she has presented at IGHR and coordinated the Maryland course at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. She is past co-director of Gen-Fed and recording secretary for the Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society.

Research in the States series is edited by Barbara Vines Little, CG, FNGS, FUGA, FVGS, a former NGS president and editor of the Magazine of Virginia Genealogy. Research in Alabama and Research in Maryland are available for purchase in the NGS online store in both PDF and print versions.

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.

Perhaps you have spent a lot of effort studying your family's history. However, have you ever considered studying the history of the family's home – either the home in which you live or perhaps the ancestral home in which your parents or grandparents lived? To be sure, many families may have lived in the same house, sharing the joys and tragedies of family life throughout the years. Are you curious who they were and perhaps what their experiences were? Who built your house? When was it built, and by whom? What did it cost? Who were the previous owners and residents? What did the interior and exterior originally look like? Those questions can usually be answered by a bit of investigation. In fact, you can create a social genealogy: facts about the owners and residents of the house.

House research is quite similar to genealogy research, often looking at the same records: old maps, deeds, and books. Through research, you can discover who lived in your home and probably what they did for a living. In short, you become a house detective.

The most important stage in tracing the history of your house will be preparing a research plan. Adopting a methodical approach will yield far better results and allow you to pursue key facts. The search is much like a genealogy research project: always start with yourself. Gather the paperwork from your purchase of the home. What are the names of the former owners? How long did they live there?

Next, talk to local people. Your neighbors can be valuable sources of information if they lived in the neighborhood before your arrival. They may even have photographs of the house, possibly including photographs of previous owners. Real estate agents can be valuable sources of information; they almost always have photographs of properties they have listed in past years. However, you need to be sensitive that the real estate agent's job is to sell houses, not to answer questions from hobbyists. Keep your questions brief so as to minimize your intrusion into the real estate agent's work day.

Next, you can move to official records. The local Registry of Deeds can provide the names of previous owners as well as descriptions or drawings of the property lines. Look in the lists of Grantors and Grantees. (Grantors are those who sold the property; grantees are the buyers.) You also may need to find out more about the local community. Village and town lines may have been redrawn as areas were developed. Has the street or house changed its name (or number)? Do street names reflect an important event or landowner?

As in genealogy work, census records will provide valuable information. In many cases, you can identify the residents of a house in 1940 or before in the U.S. census records. In older records, house numbers are not common, and the enumerators (census takers) did not always record street names. You may want to study the enumeration districts; even where street names are absent, each enumerator provided geographic descriptions of the districts covered.

City Directories are perhaps even better than census records, when available. Unlike the federal censuses, city directories were typically published annually or biannually. They always list the street, as well as the house number if house numbering had been created.

The remainder of this article is reserved for Plus Edition subscribers only. If you have a Plus Edition subscription, you may read the full article at: https://eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/10944452.

If you are not yet a Plus Edition subscriber, you can learn more about such subscriptions and even upgrade to a Plus Edition subscription immediately at https://eogn.com/page-18077.