Category Archives: This Site

New web server, so let me know if anything looks off.

June 6, 2025This Siteadmin

This site’s web server has long needed an upgrade, and I’ve finally moved everything to a new server. To those who have had to endure the site being offline frequently, that will hopefully come to and end. Having had to do this several times over the years, I know there are always small problems that pop up, so if you notice anything wrong, please send me a message.

I should add that as part of upgrading the server I noticed I wasn’t getting all the emails sent to me, so if you sent an email to me and didn’t get a response, please send it to me again.

Updates to Polish archive links

June 17, 2021Compendium, Technical, This Sitecompendium, insta, poland, Polish State ArchivesPhilip

A change mentioned previously has finally happened, and the Polish State Archives (PSA) site szukajwarchiwach.pl has started redirecting links to it to the new site szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl. I wrote about the differences between these two sites previously in Figuring out the Polish State Archive changes. Now that the change has happened I’ve taken some time to go through over 5000 links in the Compendium that go to the PSA web sites, and correct them. If you’re not interested in the technical details, just go look at the archival links for Polish towns in the Compendium. If you want to understand more about how and why these were added, see my original introduction to these links in Introducing archival records info in the Compendium. For more information about the B&F Compendium of Jewish Genealogy in general, see About the Compendium.

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Watching my Rootstech Session

February 28, 2021This Siteinsta, rootstechPhilip

I’d like to thank the hundreds of people who viewed my session (Using the B&F Compendium of Jewish Genealogy) during the three-day Rootstech Connect Conference. The session will be available until next year’s conference, so if you missed it you can still watch it. As the conference itself is over now, I am directly linking to the video here. If you do like the video, you can still go to the Rootstech session page and like it by clicking the thumbs up button. You can watch the video on this page, or click on the title to load it in YouTube, where it should show up larger.

Thank you to Rootstech for accepting my presentation, and for including it in the General Jewish Genealogy Overview series.

Speaking at Rootstech Connect

February 14, 2021Compendium, Instruction, This Sitecompendium, conference, insta, rootstechPhilip

I am speaking at Rootstech Connect (February 25-27), the online conference sponsored by FamilySearch, that has over 500,000 registered attendees. Rootstech started out as a conference focused on the convergence of genealogy and technology, but over the past ten years has become the largest genealogy conference of any kind worldwide. This year’s conference is only online, and will be by far the biggest genealogy conference ever held.

I will be speaking about how best to utilize this site , in particular the B&F Compendium of Jewish Genealogy (the link is available now: Using the B&F Compendium of Jewish Genealogy). Like most of the lectures, mine will be available as video-on-demand, so you can watch it anytime during the 3-day conference, and should also be available for the next year online.

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Ten Year Site Anniversary

November 25, 2020This Siteblog, genealogy, insta, jewish genealogyPhilip

Ten years ago today, I posted my first article on this site, then a blog on Google’s Blogger platform. The post itself was thinking aloud about whether to switch genealogy programs from Reunion 9 to Family Tree Maker, which had just been introduced on the Mac for the first time (in case you’re wondering what I decided back then, I’m using Reunion 13 now).