Meetings
JGSWS meets in the auditorium of the Stroum JCC on the second Monday of each month, September through June, at 7 PM, unless noted otherwise. Admission is free for JGSWS members, $5 for nonmembers. Members may bring one guest per year at no charge.
NEXT MEETING: Monday, May 13, 2013
Please note: Doors open EARLY at 6:30 PM
and presentations start promptly at 7:00 PM
Meredith Hoffman presents two topics:
"My Grandfather Came from Poison” – AND –
“Who the Heck Is
Ida Gerskill: Some Challenges of Researching Jewish Names"
ABOUT OUR PROGRAM
In this pair of talks, Meredith Hoffman uses real examples to explore the difficulties we encounter when working with Jewish personal, family, and place names as they morphed through time and space.
In "Who the Heck Is Ida Gerskill," she surveys the many ways in which we can stumble over names we find in researching Jewish ancestors and provides strategies for puzzling them out.
In "My Grandfather Came from Poison," she explores three online resources that can help you find people and their communities by their changing names: the Jewish Given Names Databases and Communities Database/ Gazetteer on JewishGen, and Avotaynu's Consolidated Jewish Surname Index. She shows how these databases can help determine how personal names varied across countries and cultures (is Hirsch the same as Gersh? could Becky be Rivka? what nicknames could we find for Eliezer?), figure out how surnames were spelled as they moved with your ancestors (how might Zukerman be spelled in Poland? in Galicia?), and pin down the name of your grandfather's town (when they said Poison, what did they mean?).
ABOUT OUR SPEAKER
Meredith Hoffman is a professional genealogist and popular lecturer who specializes in researching Jewish immigrant ancestors and particularly enjoys solving difficult Jewish name problems. She has degrees in Linguistics from UC-Berkeley and is a graduate of the Boston University Genealogical Research Program and Institute for Genealogical and Historical Research. She is Syllabus Chair for the 2013 New England Regional Genealogical Conference and Publicity Chair for the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston. She is the founding editor of the Success! Stories webzine, and she is the Town Leader & KehilaLinks coordinator for Berezno, Ukraine, both on JewishGen.org. She retired from her career as a technical writer, editor, and publishing consultant to devote her time to genealogy. Meredith will be a presenter at the International Association of International Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) Conference in Boston, August 4-9, 2013.
For more information, please e-mail programs@jgsws.org.
The JGSWS library will be available before and after the presentation.
WiFi will be available—bring your laptops.
HANDOUTS:
Download handouts from past meetings.
FUTURE MEETINGS
June 10 , 2013: TBD
September 9, 2013: TBD
OTHER LOCAL EVENTS
See the Events page.