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Jewish Records from "Kiev" Exist? The Changing Face of Ukrainian Jewish Research

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When I started my genealogical adventures, all I knew about my grandfather's father's origins was that he was "from Kiev." I had no idea whether he was from the city  of Kiev or a nearby shtetl. I also was working with a remarkably common name: Louis Levine. Was the surname originally Levine? Did it change from something else? We did not know. Where Was Louis Born? The first important step was determining through US records where my great-grandfather had come from. The best sources to identify the birth place of an immigrant who came to the US in the late 1800s to early 1900s and who was born in the 1890s is one of three sources: (1) naturalization papers, (2) military registrations, and (3) ship records. Ship records are of course crucial to understanding an immigrant's background, but often times, finding the ship record without the first two steps listed above becomes more challenging (especially with a name like Levine , and without knowing the town of origin)...
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We Thought They Died in the Holocaust: How Genealogy Research Found What My Grandmother Never Knew

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My grandmother's mother came from a very large Hungarian family. Her grandfather Samuel Hirschmann was born in Csóngrad in 1855 and married Netti Steiner of Abony in 1880 in the town of Tiszaföldvár. Between 1880 and 1907, Samuel and Netti lived in three different towns and had 12 children. My grandmother's mother Anna was the youngest, born in Kiskunfélegyháza in 1907. In 1909, the Hirschmann family left Hungary and relocated to Vienna, where my great-grandmother Anna grew up. In 1925, Anna met a strapping young Galician Jew from Lemberg named Lonek. They married within a few months of his arrival in Vienna, and one week after their marriage, they left Vienna for Mandate Palestine. Lonek was 20, Anna was 17. My grandmother was born the next year in Haifa. The rest of the Hirschmanns took different paths. Some came to Mandate Palestine like Anna, some remained in Vienna, another went to Budapest and yet another went to Prague. In 1943, when my grandmother was 16, her mother die...
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When DNA Fills in What Records Don't Show: Solving Dead Ends Through DNA Matches

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This post is the first of a two-part series on how DNA matches pieced together longstanding unanswered dead ends in my family tree. While many use commercial DNA tests as a kitschy way to see one's ancestral heritage, for a genealogist, reviewing other DNA matches' trees may result in major breakthroughs in understanding one's own family tree. Here is a case study highlighting this result in Ukrainian records from the former Russian Empire. The next post will cover records from the historical region of Galicia in the former Austrian Empire. Grandma Tillie My great-great-grandmother was named Tillie Levine. When I started my research many years ago, all that was known in the family was that she died in New York in the 1950s and that she was in her 80s or 90s. After digging into the research, I acquired a copy of her 1956 death certificate from the New York City Department of Health and viewed her grave. Both gave me the detail that her father's name was Jacob. I also lea...
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