Genealogy

My interest in genealogy started with two things: a 2nd grade school project and the discovery of my father's school genealogy project. I remember making a family tree on Geni.com, since that's where a lot of my relatives had already started a tree, but my interest got left at the wayside for a couple years. My serious interest picked back up a couple years later with another two events: my Bar Mitzvah and an email from a distant cousin. This email was from a relative on my mother's side living in Israel who had built an extensive family tree on MyHeritage.com.

Inspired by that level of research dedication, I devoted a lot of time that summer gleaning information from my relatives, especially when seeing them all at my Bar Mitzvah. As I progressed through searching up all of these names and clues my family had given me on some online databases, I learned the intricacies of source citations and quickly built up a list of databases that catered specifically to Jewish genealogy (something that I've since formalized). In accessing records of my family, I learned about the intricate process of getting them into the shape that would benefit the amateur researcher.

Each record was pulled from old record-keeping books, usually more than a century old. These books often represented a single year in the birth, marriage, divorce, death, and sometimes censuses or revision lists in a particular city and its surrounding "shtetls" (little towns). After being meticulously catalogued from books, they're translated into English before finally being put on a website. There are often records that are still sitting undisturbed in the books, existing only as scans that need translating on internet forums. Learning how to read cursive Russian, Polish, and Hebrew handwriting has greatly helped my investigative process.

In researching my family, I find it often rewards in spurts. There are long stretches of time when I just can't find anything new. As much as I try to not leave any stones unturned, there's something that I might miss for months that was staring me in the face. With so many lulls, I started to ask my friends if I could look into their family histories, which was usually met with a bemused "ok" from them. I wanted to help other people who were more interested in uncovering their roots. That's why I joined the Association of Professional Genealogists (APGen) in 2023. I am now available for hire for any genealogical help you or friends/family might have, especially in the field of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish genealogy. It has become a fairly successful side hustle for me and a great lesson in self-enterprising.