Memorial Plaques

New Memorial Plaque Database

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In the the run up to next week’s IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Boston, expect various groups to be releasing new databases to help Jewish genealogists. One new database that was just released is JewishGen’s Memorial Plaque Database. Organized by Nolan Altman, the database is an attempt to gather all the information on memorial plaques found in synagogues and other Jewish institutions. Many synagogues plague a plaque on their wall for each member who dies, to record their yahrzeit date (the day a family member says kaddish for them). These plaques contain very important information for Jewish genealogists, including the person’s name (in the US usually in English and Hebrew), and in most cases the name of the father of the deceased (at least in Hebrew).

When synagogues close, these plaques with their unique information are frequently thrown out, although sometimes are put up in other synagogues or institutes. Collecting the information from these plaques now is a great effort, and something whose time has come. There has been discussion for years about collecting this information from various people involved in Jewish genealogy, so kudos to JewishGen for taking up the gauntlet and getting the project started.

Memorial Plaques
Section of a memorial wall from Lowell, MA

For the launch of the database, there are nearly 30,000 names listed. These come from the US, Israel and Canada. About half of the names collected so far come from the Boston area, whose local Jewish genealogy group made an effort to collect the names in the run up to the conference, and collected 16,000 names from 30 different institutions.

If you’re interested in photographing and indexing the memorial plaques in your local synagogue, you can do so and contribute the data to this effort. Synagogues who want to contribute this information to the database can add information about their synagogue to the memorial plaque web site, in order to get traffic from those people searching for family members.

My only concern with the database right now is that the images they provide are not big enough to read the information directly from the photographs. Many times relatives are grouped together in these memorial walls, and it would be useful to see the images in higher resolution so one could read all the plaques and see who is located nearby on the wall. Hopefully this can be remedied in the future.

For more information, go to the web site, or contact the project coordinator, Nolan Altman.

Evidence-based Genealogy

Technical,
Most people who research their family carry out conclusion-based genealogy. Entire family trees are built solely based on conclusions, i.e. who a person was, when they were born, where they died, etc. sometimes with little evidence to back up the conclusions being made. While building a tree without sources does not necessarily mean the tree has faulty information, it is impossible to show what is right and wrong. Where we especially run into trouble is when we try to collaborate with others in our research. Most of the popular genealogy programs that people use (Family Tree Maker, Legacy Family Tree, MacFamilyTree, Master Genealogist, Reunion, RootsMagic, etc.) are conclusion-based. One can use them to build a 10,000-person tree without entering a single piece of evidence. That’s not to say anything bad about these programs, they all have the ability to cite sources for each piece of data added to their databases. The problem is they do not require citations.

There is another model for genealogy research – evidence-based genealogy. This model starts with the sources. Instead of the individual being the core of the tree, the sources become the core. In most cases these programs are designed as a kind of companion app for conclusion-based apps like those mentioned above. The focus of these apps are not producing nice charts, but create a solid chain of evidence to back up each piece of information you are researching.

One of the ways evidence-based applications work is by developing a series of source templates for all kinds of sources, insuring you extract all the information out of a source when entering it into the system. One example of this are templates for each year of a census having their own templates, as each year the questions were slightly different.

In general the applications available for doing evidence-based genealogy seem to be intended as companion apps to traditional conclusion-based apps like those mentioned above. Below I’ve linked to the evidence-based applications I was able to find under active development, with blurbs from their web sites describing their applications. My observations follow this listing.

What is Clooz 3?

  • A Program to Consolidate, Index, Analyze and Report Document and Image Data
  • A Family History and Genealogy Research And Analysis Tool
  • A Windows Desktop Application

Why Should I Use Clooz 3?

  • Gather, Analyze and Validate Clues and Evidence About Potential or Suspected Ancestors
  • Analyze Family History Challenges Using Factual Document-based Research Strategies
  • Organize and Index Collected Documents and Images
  • Support “One Name” Surname Studies (large or small)

Welcome to Custodian 3, the database software which helps you to store, index and organise the information you have gathered from all kinds of family history records.

Use Custodian for general family history research, one-name studies, indexing projects, local history and one-place studies. Keep a computer-based version of all your paper records, documents and lists in one place and minimise endless searching for paperwork.

A New Kind of Genealogy Tool

  • Evidentia is genealogy software created from the ground up for the user who wants to take their research to the next level. It turns what you know into evidence you can use.
  • Too many conflicting sources about Grandpa William’s birth? Evidentia presents all your evidence on one screen, making it easier for you to separate fact from fiction.
  • Not sure how strong your evidence about when and where your great grandparents were married is? Evidentia’s reports help you to identify the gaps in your sources.
  • Evidentia is the software program that will help you feel confident in your research.

The Family Pack is an ambitious open source project to create a new cross platform genealogy program. The project will involve designing a new genealogical database, creating a program to make use of it, and finally, organising ways of providing some standard universal data sets. 

The database design owes much to the impressive GenTech Genealogical Data Model. One idea taken directly from the GenTech GDM is that of Personas. A personas is a small separate particles of information that relates to a person. We can collect these personas from separate sources and then build them up to create individual person. The database uses the concept of a Reference Statement to link together Personas, Events, Dates, Places and Attributes (Characteristics) records. This idea is loosely based on the GenTech’s Assertion record. The Reference Statement is the heart of the new database and provides a very flexible way of entering and organizing evidence. It can consist of any typed statement and could be a simple statement by the researcher reviewing other statements, a transcription of a historical documents (certificates, census, parish records etc.), a description of a photograph or transcribed tape recording.

What is GenQuiry? 

GenQuiry is designed to help you manage your family history research. It was born through my own experience of researching families in Wales, trying to make sure that I made the most of my visits to archives 300 miles away, keeping track of the searches I had done and the clues I still had to follow up, and recording my reasoning for deciding which was my ancestor out of three “John James” all living in the same small Pembrokeshire parish around 1800! 

If you’ve ever had problems:

  • keeping track of searches you’ve made — and their results, positive or negative — and the searches that you plan to make
  • planning what to do on a visit to some archives, making sure you don’t forget anything vital at the far end of that long trip
  • keeping track of which sources are relevant for a particular place and how to access them, so that you don’t overlook an important clue because the existence of a source slipped your mind
  • citing your sources consistently, so that you always know where a particular piece of information came from
  • recording how you reached a conclusion from a variety of conflicting evidence

then GenQuiry may help you. 

GenQuiry can support: family history research, one-name studies, one-place studies or research into more general topics. You can use any or all of the features, to suit the way you choose to work, and integrate it with your existing physical or electronic filing system.

While some of these applications have been around for a long time, more of them are new. This category is emerging, and I suspect there will be more applications and services that will enter this space in the future. Ideally the features of these apps would be combined with a mainstream conclusions-based application, to allow one to carry out both aspects of genealogy – person-centric conclusion-based genealogy, and document-centric evidence-based genealogy.

Clooz has been around since 1997, and is available for Windows only. Originally developed by Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, it was sold in 2011 to Ancestral System LLC, which developed version 3 in 2012. Clooz has a mailing list, Facebook page and a separate Rootsweb mailing list.

Custodian has been around almost as long as Clooz, coming on the market in 1998. It is also Windows-only. Developed by husband-wife team Sonja and Phil Smith, the latest major version, Custodian 3, was released in 2003. Developed in the UK, it is my impression the application is a bit skewed towards UK sources, but it does provide many templates for sources in the US and elsewhere. I couldn’t find any community forum or social media page for Custodian.

Evidentia is a relatively new application, released in December 2012. Its developer, Ed Thompson, previously developed a WordPress plugin called RootsPersona for publishing family trees online. Developed using JavaFX, the application can run on Mac, Windows and even Linux. Evidentia is under very active development, and it is evolving quickly. One thing the author has tried to do recently is bring his templates in line with the formats from Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Evidence Explained. Evidentia is also designed to support the Genealogical Proof Standard. Lastly, Evidentia has a very active Google+ Community where the author interacts directly with users. It has been interesting to see the fast evolution of Evidentia, and I’m looking forward to see how it continues to evolve. One thing the author recently mentioned in the Google+ community is that version 2 will directly support images of sources, something it does not currently do.

The Family Pack is an open-source evidence-based genealogy program being developed by Nick Matthews. The application is roughly based on the GenTech Genealogical Data Model which was developed by NGS. Currently it is in pre-alpha, meaning it’s not ready for regular use. It’s also currently only being released for Windows, although it is being designed to be compiled for Linux and Mac as well (it is written using the cross-platform framework wxWidgets). The first version released was only a few months ago in March. It is still a long way from reaching production stage, but it’s worth keeping track of…

GenQuiry is a Windows application being developed by Helen Wright. It is based on Microsoft Access, and thus is unlikely to make it to another platform. It is currently in beta testing, and supported by donations. It’s not clear if that model will continue after the program reaches production. The first beta was released in January 2012. One can communicate with the author in the applications’ forum. GenQuiry was a finalist in the Rootstech 2012 Developer’s Challenge.

I haven’t used any of these applications, but I hope to work evidence-based genealogy into my genealogy workflow soon. Have you used any of these programs? Do you know of others? What do you think of them? The authors mentioned are certainly welcome to chime in as well.

Heredis for Mac and PC, on sale for $10.99 until July 7

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I’ve mentioned Heredis before, which is a genealogy application for Mac and PC (with free companion app available for iOS) created by a company in France. I haven’t used it extensively, so I can’t write a full review, but there are aspects of the application that seem very interesting to me, such as the illustrated charts (i.e. family trees that actually look like trees) and book publishing.

Selecting a chart type in Heredis

Normally the price for Heredis for Mac or PC is $59.99, but for the next 4 days (through July 7) the price has been dropped to $10.99. That price is available if you buy it from their own online store (Mac/PC) or if you buy the Mac version through Apple’s Mac App Store. For that price, one might be convinced to buy it just to use some of the features like the charts or book publishing. If you’ve used Heredis, let other know what you like about it in the comments.

The Ring of Trust

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Illustration from 1891 article describing Jewish wedding in Pennsylvania

For those who have never looked at my bio on the right side of this page, my last name is Trauring. I’ve written a bit about the name change from Traurig (German for ‘sad’) to Trauring (German for ‘wedding ring’). While Trauring is a fairly unique name (show me a Trauring and it’s 99% likely I’ll show you how they’re related to me), it has an interesting quirk in doing online research. When researching online databases of newspapers, the name Trauring for some reason is commonly confused with the word Training. Depending on the quality of the scanned newspapers, the the quality of the optical-character-recognition (OCR) done on the scans, you’d be amazed how many hits are for the word Training and how few are for Trauring.

While skimming my Google+ feed recently, I came across an article by Kenneth Marks about the newspaper search site Elephind. Elephind is a newspaper search aggregator created by digital library developer DL Consulting in New Zealand. It provides a single search interface to multiple newspaper search sites, including the US Library of Congress’ Chronicling America site, and Australia’s Trove site. Currently the site claims access to 1,034 newspaper titles (and 1,099,175 newspaper issues). Most of those newspapers come from the two sites already mentioned (845 from Chronicling America and 111 from Trove), with other smaller local newspaper search sites included from the US, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.

One of the annoying things about Chronicling America is that the search results don’t show the context of the hit, but rather just show a thumbnail of the page. Combine that with the unfortunately low level of OCR in the Chronicling America database, you spend a lot of time looking through false hits. For example, here is a search on Chronicling America for ‘trauring’:

Chronicling America search results for ‘trauring’ (Click to Enlarge)

You might notice the red highlighting which is supposed to show where the hit occurs on the page, but I defy you to actually read any of that text. In order to figure out the context you need to click on the image and load the full version of the page and find the text on the page. With 2,060 results, you can imagine how much time it would take to go through all those pages.

Now let’s take a look at the Elephind results:

Elephind search results for Chronicling America for ‘trauring’

The search was specifically restricted to Chronicling America, to try to get the same results. Oddly, instead of 2,060 results there are only two. If you take a close look at both sets of results you’ll notice that the two results are the same as the first two results on the Chronicling America site, although in reverse order. You’ll also notice that the first result on the Elephind site illustrates the general problem with searching OCRed databases for the name Trauring:

.. t ilio lowest possible cost. IT is today, with a fhcnltv of 83. a boarding patronage of 308, a student body of -138, and a plant worth $160,000, The Leading Trauring School for Girl;-, in Virginia. PAYS all charges for the y? ar, Including Tnblo Board, Room, Lights, 8leam Meat, I .au miry, Medie.il Atton tentiorr, Physical Culture and Tiiltlon …

Besides the general incomprehensibility of the text, you’ll notice the phrase ‘The Leading Trauring School for Girl’ is clearly supposed to have the word Training, not Trauring. Of course, the important thing to notice here is that the user interface actually does show you the context. I don’t need to load the image and look, I can immediately dismiss the search result, which is very welcome. Why there are only two results is a mystery, however.

Page found in The Evening Herald (click to load on Chronicling America)

The text recognition on the second result (from The Evening Herald of Shenandoah, PA) is a bit more readable, and while the story is not about my family, it is interesting in that it mentions Trauring in the following context:

After pronouncing two benedictions the Rabbi took in his hand the wedding ring, saying, as the ring was one entire mass, not separated but continuous, so their lives in the future should be one–a combination of love and faithfulness and unity. The ring is called in German “trauring,”–trau meaning trust, it ought to remind them that it was the ring of trust.

A very interesting interpretation of the word trauring, giving it more meaning that the simple definition ‘wedding ring’. The story is something very common in newspapers of the day (this article is from May 28, 1891), chronicling the big local social events, this one being a Jewish wedding in Shenandoah, PA, described as “one of the most brilliant affairs of the kind ever celebrated in this section of the country”. This wedding, between Lena Friedman and Simon Yedinsky, is described in great detail, has two illustrations, and even lists which guests gave which gifts. From a genealogical point of view these kinds of articles are sometimes goldmines. In my own research I’ve come across wedding descriptions that listed many relatives as guests, sometimes specifying them as such, and sometimes not, but all the information is useful.

Illustration from 1891 article describing Jewish wedding in Pennsylvania

Anyone have a good story on the meaning of their name? Share your story in the comments.

Racism and Commonality as Reasons for Name Changes

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Back in May 2011 I discussed a book Petitions for Name Changes in New York City 1848-1899 as part of a broader article on the myth of Ellis Island name changes. The book transcribes 890 name change petitions that were made in New York City in the 52 years between 1848 and 1899. In my original article, I discuss many of the reasons people changed their names. In this post I want to go back to take a look from a slightly different perspective.

That names changed due to racism and antisemitism is not hard to show. While not every name change says it explicitly, without a doubt many of the name changes that are for ‘pecuniary benefit’ or similar reasons are due to the petitioners believing (perhaps rightly for the time) that their names were too ethnic sounding to allow them to flourish without discrimination.

Some, however, were explicit. Indeed, the first two petitions listed in the book are:

Petition (11 July 1892) of William Abraham, aged over 21, residing at 323 E. 3rd St., unmarried. His father, Morris Rogozinski, came to the U.S. in 1866 from Russia and assumed the name Abraham. Petitioner’s father is dead. His mother’s name is Sarah. He states that as the name Rogozinski and Abraham are of Semitic origin, it will be to his material and pecuniary advantage to bear a name that will not be so distinctive. He wishes to assume legally the name William Abraham Rodgers.

Petition (25 Mar. 1891) of Joseph Abrahamson, age 21 on 2 Nov. 1890, residing at 2093 Third Ave. He was employed about 8 years by one Russak, now deceased, who had 3 other Josephs in his employ and called the petitioner Edson. The petitioner has become a Christian and is about to marry an Episcopalian young lady. He and his bride desire that ‘all semblance of a Jewish surname shall be removed from the petitioner.’ He wishes to assume legally the name Joseph Abraham Edson.

Looking at patterns in the names, however, we can learn some more. For example, which names were changed the most?

It may not surprise anyone to know that the most commonly changed name is also the most common name in the United States, Smith. Consider for a moment over a hundred years ago how people found each other. New York City had city directories, pre-cursors to phone books, which listed people by name – but what happened when there were 50 other John Smiths? What if 10 of those John Smiths were in the same business as you? It’s not hard to see why someone with the name Smith might want to change their name to something more unique. According to the 2000 US Census, there were 2,376,206 people in the US with the last name Smith. I don’t know how many people in the US, or even just New York City, had the name Smith in the years covered in this book, but there is no question even then it was a very common name. Take a look at the following chart that looks at the name changes from Smith, and the reasons given for each change:

Name changes from Smith, with reasons. (Click to enlarge)

Note that more than half of the petitions were due to commonality of the name, and even more were probably for that reason (although not explicitly shown in the petitions). The next most often petitioned names, however, were not among the most common US surnames, but rather of the most obviously Jewish surnames – Levy and Cohen. I’ve created charts of the name changes from Levy and Cohen (with Cohn) that illustrate the changes made, and why the changes were made:

Name changes from Levy, with reasons. (Click to enlarge)

Among the people who changed their names from Levy, while none explicitly point out the removal of ‘Semitic origin’ like the example above, it is implicit in almost all of them (one says it is because the name is too common).

Name change from Cohen and Cohn, with reasons. (Click to enlarge)

In the changes from Cohen and Cohn, there is a similar implicit pattern. Only two petitions list commonality as a reason (the Keene and Spahn petitions). Compare that to Smith where more than half of the name changes are attributed to the commonness of the name.

Clearly something else is going on that causes these name changes to occur, and if we can’t know that the names changed for the reasons in the first two petitions from the book, we can certainly infer that the reasons are fairly similar. The desire to ‘not be so distinctive’ was strong among many immigrants, and changing ones name to fit in better was an easy way to remove distinctiveness.

The reasons behind these name changes are very different from some of the other reasons I’ve discussed in the past, such as children having to take their mother’s surnames because it was difficult for Jews to be civilly married in places like Austria in the 19th century. While the circumstances are very different, it’s no less complicated for family members try to research their family when names change. Moreover, the circumstances, while different, still emanate from racism. In the case of mother’s surnames, discrimination against Jewish families in the civil registration process, and in the case of these NYC name changes, discrimination that causes the petitioners to want to change their surnames to fit in better.

Interestingly, the fact that many Jews did not have surnames until just over 200 years ago probably contributes to the lack of commonness as a reason for changing one’s surname. Other reasons are more common, however, such as changing a name that was derogatory (assigned by antisemitic bureaucrats) when possible, changing from a mother’s surname to a father’s surname (common when coming to the US where name changes were easier), and changes to try to prevent discrimination. Name changes of Jewish immigrants to Israel is a whole different topic, but encompassed a whole different set of reasons, including a desire to Hebraize one’s surname – in some cases this was not a choice but a requirement if the person worked in the government or military in Israel.

What interesting name change stories do you have in your family?