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Jewish headstone inscriptions and burial records can provide crucial information to family historians. Hebrew name inscriptions that are based on patronymics can link together two generations of Hebrew names unlike any other source document. This can be especially helpful when trying to connect first generation American ancestors with their European families.

Using photographs and case studies, Nolan Altman will explain the symbols and details found on headstones and describe how this information can provide important data and context for your family research. He will also direct you to the major websites that can help you locate the burial sites of your ancestors.

Naturalization is the process by which an alien becomes an American citizen. These records can provide a researcher with valuable information such as an ancestor’s person‘s birth date, birth location in the old country, occupation , immigration year, marital status, spouse information, witnesses‘ names and addresses. Naturalization and the individual steps to citizenship could be done at any “court of record” of which there were 5,000 in the United States.

Doing family research for records in Israel can be daunting. More records are available now than ever before. Much of your research can now be done online. Understand the kinds of records possible to locate and where you may want to focus your efforts. Consider alternatives to vital records and learn how you can create a vivid picture of how your ancestors lived in Israel. Zoom presentation

Join TJGS founder Debbie Long in a discussion of how hometowns shaped you and your ancestors PLUS a special movie about Debbie‘s hometown. The discussion will also include a review of Kehilalinks.

"How to Get Your Documents Translated: Free Resources!"

Mike will demonstrate how to translate your documents with a variety of Internet resources. He will also discuss translation vs. transliteration, major translation projects such as the Yizkor Book project, and other related topics.

Finding Semi-Distant Cousins by Mining Your DNA Matches
Herb Weisberg, Ph.D.

For Ashkenazi Jews, conventional advice about DNA Matches is quite conservative. We are admonished to focus only on strong matches and to attribute most weak matches to measurement error or endogamy. For instance, I have often been advised that a DNA match much less than 100 cM is hardly worth considering, and a shared segment much less than 20 cM may just be endogamy or “noise.” Ironically, however, ignoring modest DNA matches all but precludes finding the most genealogically relevant (third and fourth?) cousins. After all, such semi-distant cousins are apt to share at most a small amount of DNA distributed in a few short segments, resulting in a Catch-22 situation. So, how can we distinguish the few promising DNA matches from the vast majority whose ancestors are so remote as to be essentially irrelevant? I will start by walking through the basics of DNA matching and triangulated DNA segments. Then, I will suggest a surprisingly simple alternative to conventional DNA triangulation and an associated “data-mining” technique. This new method can efficiently identify the best DNA matches to pursue. To illustrate this approach, I will share some relevant applications from my own genealogical research.