Tag Archives: facebook

A little known Facebook feature (for genealogy)…

[Note that the feature described in this article has subsequently been removed by Facebook.]

I just ran across an interesting Facebook feature that is fairly helpful for genealogy. I don’t know if this has been around a long time, or if this is something they recently introduced.

Simply, if you go to facebook.com/family you can search all Facebook profiles by surname. Not only that, but the search is created using an easy to remember web address, so you can share a search result page. For example, searching for the surname Zylberman would send you to the page:

facebook.com/family/Zylberman/1

which is the first page of search results for the surname Zylberman. Similarly, if you changed the 1 to a 3 at the end of the web address, you would be taken to the third page of results. Of course, these search result pages will change as new accounts are created, or old accounts are deleted, etc. so sending a result page might show the names you want to show someone in the short term, but may not show the same names later.

In addition to searching in English, you can search in other character sets, such as Hebrew:

facebook.com/family/זילברמן

There are actually more Zylbermans listed in Hebrew than in English, but that’s likely because there are less alternate spellings in Hebrew. For the same name in Hebrew, it could be Zylberman, Zilberman, Zylbermann, Zilbermann, Sylberman, Silberman or Silbermann in English (only the variation Sylbermann does not show up on Facebook).

You can also browse surnames which is interesting. One thing you can see is how many surnames are fake on Facebook. Besides that you can see lots of variations of surnames you may not have thought to search. Like in searching, you can also browse in other character sets. When browsing, Hebrew started on page 14893 of the ‘Other’ character set listings when I tried to find it, which you can jump to by going to this page:

facebook.com/family/directory.php?q=Other&p=14893

It may or may not be where Hebrew names start when you read this, but it’s probably not too far off if you’re reading this post not long after it was written. I could be mistaken, but it looks like Hebrew follows Armenian and is followed by maybe Farsi? When I searched, Hebrew names ended on page 17611, which means there are currently over 2700 pages of Hebrew names, or with 96 names shown per page, over a quarter of a million surnames in Hebrew on Facebook. I suppose its possible some of those names are actually in Yiddish and not Hebrew, but presumably the majority of them are Israeli users who have listed their names in Hebrew.

What if you want to search for names in Hebrew (or Yiddish) and don’t know enough Hebrew to spell the name in Hebrew, or have a Hebrew keyboard to type it out? Try using Stephen Morse’s Transliterating English to Hebrew in One Step web page, where you can type the name in English, and receive the text in Hebrew. There are slight differences in the transliteration in some cases if you choose onto the options: Sephardic, Ashkenazi or Yiddish. In the case of Zylberman, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi options return the same result (the same spelling I guessed above). Yiddish is less likely to be useful (and in this case no search results were found using the Yiddish tranliteration) for the simple reason that anyone who uses a Yiddish spelling for their name (as opposed to English or Hebrew) is not very likely to be on Facebook altogether. Once you get the text in Hebrew letters, you can copy that text and paste it into the Facebook search box.

So there you go, a super-easy way to search and browse surnames on Facebook, even using foreign alphabets.

Some observations from the IAJGS Conference

So last week I attended the IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Washington, DC.

As mentioned in a previous post I also spoke at the event, on the topic of Utilizing Belgian Archives for Jewish Research. I’ve posted a page on this site with the links mentioned in my presentation, although the page is not fully fleshed out yet. The page has a link to it in the tabs at the top of the page. It has all the links and e-mail addresses I mention in my presentation, but without hearing the lecture, not everything on that page will make sense. I plan to flesh out the page into a full article, and perhaps to take the actual presentation I used and put it up as a video with voice-over. If readers of this site express an interest in such a video, I’ll try to get it done sooner.

This was the second IAJGS conference I attended, and it was definitely interesting. I can’t speak about everything I saw at the conference, but I thought I would mention a few small things I noticed.

The Resource Room and ProQuest

The conference Resource Room had a large number of commercial databases available for searching during the conference. Most of them I either pay for already or didn’t have much information on my family. ProQuest allowed the conference to have access to their database (normally only available through libraries and other institutions) for one day only in the middle of the conference, and indeed that database with its numerous newspapers had quite a bit of interesting information on my family. I haven’t had time to sort through everything yet, but I tried to copy as many of the articles as I could to a flash drive for later review (since computer usage was limited to one hour on the day the ProQuest databases were available).

Many thanks to Suzan Wynne (I’ve mentioned her book on Galicia in a previous article) who organized the Resource Room at the conference and did a great job.

The 2014 Conference Will Not Be in Jerusalem

I mentioned this was my second conference. My first was in Jerusalem, Israel in 2004. I actually did the page layout for the souvenir booklet for that conference. It has been a tradition that every ten years the conference is held in Jerusalem (on the 4s) but this year it was announced that the 2014 conference, while previously announced to be held in Jerusalem, would instead be held in Salt Lake City. There was a lot of chatter at the conference about this change. Many people were disappointed as they had planned to come to Israel for the conference. The reason for the change were not clearly given at the conference, but for those familiar with the Israel Genealogical Society (IGS), the reason was quite simple. The IGS underwent a leadership change a couple of months before a major deadline imposed by the IAJGS for the 2014 conference. The new leadership did not have enough time to complete the work required by the IAJGS for the conference and had to give it up. There is the potential to have the conference in Jerusalem in 2015 instead, so hopefully the IGS will have a formal submission ready in time to get the 2015 slot.

In the meantime, the next conferences will be held in Paris in 2012, followed by Boston in 2013. Paris is a bit closer for me here in Israel, and Boston is where I grew up, so I will hopefully be able to attend both conferences. While Salt Lake City is the Mecca of the genealogy world, 2014 is a bit too far out for me to determine if I’d be able to go or not.

Younger Genealogists

One interesting aspect of the conference was the group of younger participants who got together at various times, sometimes officially but mostly unofficially. In the world of genealogy it seems ‘younger’ is defined as under 50. Certainly the vast majority of attendees at the conference were over 50, indeed probably over 60. The group of 20s, 30s and 40s got together and discussed their approaches to genealogy. There was a general consensus that the conference planners had not geared the conference for younger people, and indeed perhaps did not understand how to do so since none of the planners were young. The group will try to stay in contact and influence upcoming conferences and events to be more appropriate for younger genealogists, to encourage more younger genealogists to present at these events, etc.

Many thanks to Elise Friedman, who it seemed at times to be running multiple events at once, who organized almost all the events targeted at younger genealogists (dubbed appropriately for a genealogy conference – next-gen genealogists).

Mac Genealogy

As many of you know, I use a Mac for my computer. I attended the Mac BOF (Birds Of a Feather) meeting at the conference, where there were about 50 other Mac users. An informal show of hands indicated that the vast majority of those there used Reunion for their genealogy research. For a program that hasn’t had a major upgrade in over four years, that’s pretty amazing. Indeed I use Reunion also, and so far I haven’t found anything as easy to use as it even though I’ve looked over the years. My first post on this blog was actually a look at Family Tree Maker for Mac. One feature added in the past four years to Reunion was the ability to sync with versions of their program on the iPhone and the iPad (sold separately). Yesterday was a year since Reunion for iPad was launched, so hopefully in he meantime they’ve been working to update their Mac product.

iPad Genealogy

One very noticeable trend at the conference was that large number of iPads being used, and every one that I saw was running Reunion for iPad. Presumably those people were syncing with Macs, but it’s possible they were just using it on the iPad, I’m not sure. There is no Windows program for the Reunion for iPad program to sync to, so they either were syncing to a Mac or not syncing at all. There were many iPads around. I don’t currently have an iPad, but it’s usefulness at the conference was clear. I was constantly looking for a place to plug in my computer, something those with iPads didn’t need to do (at least not as often).

An Interesting Encounter

I thought I would share one interesting encounter from the conference (although there were many). A woman who attended my lecture approached my afterwards and said she remembered her father had some connection to a man whose last name was Trauring (my last name). They both had lived in Belgium at the same time (which was clear to her from my lecture), and both were involved in the diamond business in New York (which she confirmed by asking me after the lecture), but she didn’t know what the connection was. While searching the ProQuest databases (mentioned above) I came across an announcement of a business lease for an office which mentioned both the name Trauring and her father’s name. Pretty amazing since a day earlier I hadn’t even heard of her father. Just minutes after I left the Resource Room with the article on my flash drive I bumped into the same woman and showed her what I had found. She was (as I was) amazed at the coincidence of finding the article that confirmed the connection so soon after she mentioned it.

While talking to her while copying the file, she noticed that I was also researching Kleinhaus (the name badges at the conference listed surnames being researched by the wearer) and she told me she had a photo of a woman which it turned out was my grandmother. Small world indeed. My 96 year old grandfather was able to confirm that his brother had been in business with this woman’s father (not my grandfather) but he had known him well. The moral of this story is sometimes personal contact is the only way to find connections, and that there are non-relatives out there with information on your families (such as the photo of my grandmother) that you wouldn’t normally think of when doing your research. This is one of the reasons that attending conferences like this one can lead to breakthroughs in your research.

Conclusion

At the conference I also came up with several ideas for new articles for this site, so I hope to get those written and posted soon. I am expecting an addition to my own family tree soon, however, so my time to write may be curtailed. Please be patient if I am slow to post new articles. Even while I may be slow to post articles in the near future, I will be trying to answer questions on the Facebook page. ‘Like’ the Facebook page for this site at facebook.com/jewishgenealogy to join this site’s page and participate. Everyone is also welcome to answer research questions on Facebook. I’m trying to build the Facebook page into an interactive community where people can ask and answer questions on Jewish genealogy, so if you are on Facebook (or have been looking for an excuse to join) then go to the Facebook page, press the ‘Like’ button and join the conversation.

If you attended the conference in DC and want to share your experiences, please post them in the comments below.

2000 Fans on Facebook!

I’d just like to thank everyone who has become a fan of this site on Facebook. Today we reached 2000 fans!

I also wanted to let everyone else who follows this blog know about the Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/jewishgenealogy) and invite everyone to become a Fan. Fans on Facebook can post their genealogy questions to the wall, and I and now 2000 other interested people can respond to your questions.

If you’re logged into Facebook now, you can Like this blog by clicking on the Like button below:

1000 Fans on Facebook!

I want to thank all the fans of this site on Facebook, which now number 1000!

If you’re also interested in being a Fan on Facebook, you can click the Like button above (if you are logged into Facebook) or you can go to the Facebook page at:

http://www.facebook.com/jewishgenealogy 

If you’re interested in following this blog a different way, check out the Follow This Blog page, which is always accessible from one of the tabs at the top of the page.

Lastly, if you like this blog and think the information provided is useful, please tell a friend about it!

Ways to Follow This Blog

If you’re interested in following this blog, there are a number of ways you can do so other than just coming back to the blog to see what’s new.

If you use Facebook, then go to our fan page and click Like.

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Lastly, all of the methods above have a way to share this site with others, such as tweeting about it on Twitter, or sharing our page on Facebook. I would be very grateful if those of you who enjoy this blog could help promote it to others. This blog is still relatively new, and I’m look to build up readership and would appreciate all the help I can get.

Thank you.