Landsmanshaftn were organizations started by Jewish immigrants as a multi-purpose fraternal organization, health insurance, death benefits, and aid society. There were two New York landsmanshaftn for Przedbórz, the First Przedborzer Benevolent Association and the Independent Przedborzer Friends Society. The former has sections at three cemeteries in New York, at Floral…
Mike Schackowitz, Satanover Benevolent Society
Michael Schackowitz is the reason I started photographing the Satanover Benevolent Society. My elusive great great grandfather Moses Schechowitz or Scheckowitz (or indeed, about 30 other spellings of this name) was registered in the nearby town of Volochisk, so when I saw that there were several Scheckowitzs and Shackowitzs buried…
Taube Spilka Scheckowitz, Satanover Benevolent Society
Last year I visited Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens, New York and spent a few hours taking photos of every headstone in the section for the Satanover Benevolent Association landsmanshaft. Mount Hebron has a very useful website where you can search for people by name or by burial society, and…
The Przedbórz synagogue
The wooden synagogues of Poland, with elaborate carvings and brightly colored interiors were a “truly original and organic manifestation of artistic expression—the only real Jewish folk art in history,” according to art historian Stephen S. Kayser in Wooden Synagogues by Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka, a Polish couple who were the…
But which Catherine Stack and Tom Collins?
In the 1800s in rural Ireland, people weren’t about to get creative with their children’s names. They drew on a very small number of popular names when baptizing their children, often using an Irish naming convention that named the children after their parents and older siblings. It’s not uncommon to…
The Przedbórz Jewish cemetery
Right now I’m writing up a collection of information for those researching their Przedbórz Jewish roots, and once all of the sections are done I’ll combine it into a larger guide. But for now, here’s more on the Przedbórz Jewish cemetery. The Przedbórz Jewish cemetery has been neglected and has…
IAJGS Cleveland highlights
I’m just back from the IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Cleveland and wanted to share a brief recap of some of my favorite sessions. This isn’t all of them, of course, but it is as many as I could write up on the flight to New York. Debra…
IAJGS2019: JRI Poland and Congress Poland Records
I’m at IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Cleveland this week, and was lucky to catch two sessions this morning from JRI (Jewish Records Indexing) Poland. If you aren’t familiar with JRI Poland, they are the go-to site for Jewish genealogy in Poland, with more than 5 million records…
In the beginning
I first got interested in genealogy a few years ago when I began researching my eligibility for Italian citizenship, jure sanguinis, by blood. Italy is one of the only European countries that will grant citizenship to family members further removed than grandchildren. But qualifying hinges on quite a lot of…