Finding Your Families

Finding Ancestors in Jerusalem in the Late 19th Century www.tree-sleuths.co.uk The Jaffa Gate, towards the end of the 19th-century, photo: Bonfils House How _do_ you perform genealogical research into late 19th century Jerusalem, from a desk in lockdown Britain? This is the story of an unusually productive attempt to do just that. Why? The later 19th century was a difficult time for Jews in Eastern European countries like Romania, with the introduction of laws effectively depriving them of their livelihoods and forcing them to move elsewhere. It had long been rumoured that my great grandfather was from Romania so, as a lockdown project, I set out to unearth more about this part of my family. My own father had believed, until only three years before his death at the age of 89, that his grandfather had been English. Why would he not be? His grandfather’s family spoke English at home. His grandfather ran a pastoral care centre for British soldiers during WW1 (this was before the days of

Using Digital Media Files for Genealogy Introduction A lot of people ask how best to handle digital media in their genealogy research. This blog post explains some of the benefits of using digital media, and highlights some important aspects to bear in mind. This blog post does not address how to best cite digital sources; that will be the topic of a future post. What is different about digital media? There are big differences between what you might call traditional paper sources (I will call these physical sources) and what most people predominantly use today: online digital sources. First, the physical sources exist, you can touch them. They don ’t disappear overnight (unless there is a fire). Digital sources can disappear overnight, they can be duplicated with no effort so may appear in many places at the same time, they are essentially ephemeral. Second, digital sources are either copies of physical sources that already exist, or they are databases that you

  The Nuremberg Trials Friday, 20 November 2020, is the 75th anniversary of the start of the International Tribunal in Nuremberg, usually called the Nuremberg Trials. These were so important to the future of Europe that I want to tell the story of one man. Birth Just over 27 years before this, in 1918, a boy was born in Alexandria, Egypt. His parents were Irish and Romanian by birth. His father’s family had come from rural Ireland in Queen’s County (now County Laois), migrating over generations to County Westmeath from where great uncles fled the Great Hunger (known as the Irish Potato Famine) to the USA, to County Carlow, and finally to Dublin where his father was born. His father became a lieutenant in the Egypt Labour Corps (ELC) where he met his future wife in Alexandria through one of her brothers who was also an officer in the ELC. His mother’s family had come from Romania where they were originally of Ashkenazi Jewish extraction. Her father had been baptised a Christian while re

Annie Jean Eastley 1933 - 2011   Continuing with Black History Month this blog post celebrates the life and work of Annie Easley (1933-2011) . Annie Jean Easley helped make modern spaceflight possible. Her work at NASA (and its predecessor NACA) as a computer scientist, mathematician, and rocket scientist laid the technological foundations that future space launches, including the Cassini satellite destined to explore Saturn, relied upon. She was born on 23 Apr 1933 in Birmingham Alabama. This was before the US Civil Rights Act, which meant that, as a black person, her education and career opportunities were very limited, and she had to make the best of every chance she got. She was raised by a single mother who encouraged her that she could do anything she wanted as long as she worked at it. After graduating top of her year at high school, she studied pharmacy in New Orleans (she did not graduate), returning to Birmingham when she was 21 to work as a supply teacher. In between teachi