Upcoming Meetings and Events - Future Events View

This is the premier screening of Fioretta, a two-hour documentary by Randy Schoenberg. Randy(grandson of the famous composer) and his 18-year-old son Joey journey through Europe and the centuries to reclaim 500 years of family history. Guest appearance: Randy Schoenberg via Zoom!

GenealogyIndexer.org is a free website for searching 2 million+ pages of historical European directories (business, address, telephone), yizkor books, Galician secondary school reports, Polish and Russian military documents, community histories, and more. Containing tens of millions of personal names – often with towns, street addresses, and occupations, and sometimes with genealogical details such as patronymics, maiden names, or vital dates – most of the 4,000+ sources are not searchable elsewhere. This talk will provide an overview of all sources, with a focus on recently added sources and search techniques. The use of directories in the Warsaw property restitution process will also be discussed briefly.





The site has always been completely free to use with no advertising. It is operated as a service to the genealogy community.

Recipient of the IAJGS 2012 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Jewish Genealogy via the Internet, Print or Electronic Product. One of Family Tree Magazine‘s 101 Best Websites for 2015–2023.

Genealogists use all kinds of tools to help with their genealogy research. One of the best tools to understand and use when working with manuscript collections is a finding aid. Archivists develop finding aids to help researchers navigate through manuscript collections to find information. This presentation will help genealogists read, follow, and use finding aids to discover their ancestors in archives.

Clued-In: The Stories are in the Details

How often have you looked at a family photograph and wondered how much more you could learn about your family from this photo? Beyond who is in the photo and when it was taken are the subtler clues that give us a deeper appreciation of the people who came before us. What are the relationships of the people in the photos? What were their personal and religious choices? Why was this photo taken? What messages were they trying to convey when they sat before the photographer? There is a wealth of information to be gleaned from the visual records of our mishpocha. Coupled with our handed-down family oral traditions and our found documentation, these photo discoveries can become the basis for our family stories. But is the detail we’ve found in our photo what Sherlock calls a bisl (something to ignore) or the gantze megilla (something that tells us the whole story)? In this informative talk, part of the “Clued-In” series on photo analysis from Sherlock Cohn, The Photo Genealogist, we’ll learn how to differentiate between a clue that is useful and furthers our study of genealogy and one that gives us little or no usable information.