Category Archives: This Site

Updates to Polish archive links

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.

Continue reading Updates to Polish archive links

Watching my Rootstech Session

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

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.

Continue reading Speaking at Rootstech Connect

Ten Year Site Anniversary

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).

How the first post on this site looked back then (more or less)
Continue reading Ten Year Site Anniversary
Hebrew Resources

A look at Hebrew resources on this site

As many of you know, I live in Israel, and while I do not speak Hebrew fluently, I have tried to offer Hebrew resources for genealogy. This is both for Israeli genealogists, and for Jewish genealogists everywhere who almost always need some Hebrew skills, whether to transcribe a gravestone or read old documents. For Hebrew-language genealogy I’ve created Hebrew Genealogy Forms, as well as researched and put together the list (and chart) Hebrew family and genealogy terms.

In the B&F Compendium of Jewish Genealogy, there are many Hebrew-language resources spread across the thousands of locations. Some resources are things like Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos articles (only available online in Hebrew), or the web sites of Israeli landsmanshaftn.

As a Mac user, I also have worked through using Hebrew on my Mac when it wasn’t the language I use everyday. For Mac users, I’ve put together Using Nikud (Vowels) in Hebrew on a Mac and Trick to use Hebrew and Yiddish in Adobe InDesign. For all computer users, there is also my article Finding Hebrew Fonts.

Lastly, I have been regularly publishing the top 101 Israeli Jewish boys and girls names when they are released. Most recently these were 101 Most Popular Jewish Boys Names in Israel in 2017 and 2018 and 101 Most Popular Jewish Girls Names in Israel in 2017 and 2018. I’ve also published the 101 Most Common Surnames in Israel (in 2016).

To make it easier to find all of these posts, I have added a page that is simply located at bloodandfrogs.com/hebrew.

I’ve also consolidated several of the site features and categories into a single menu, called Features. So along with the new page on Hebrew Resources, there is also Forms, Search, Names, Naturalization, and Belgium. For a short description of each of these just go to the Features page itself, which gives brief descriptions of each page.