Category Archives: Blog information

Comments and Replies

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I’ve gotten a few questions from readers about whether I am receiving their comments.  I think I am seeing all comments that are sent (they are moderated first before they appear on the blog to prevent spam, privacy matters, etc.)  And I almost always will reply with at least a thank you for the comment.  So if you do not receive a reply, it means either (1) your comment did not go through for some reason (don’t forget to click on Post Comment) or (2) you did not ask to be notified of follow-up comments (again, you need to click on the box under the comment box that asks whether you want to receive that notification).

If you are doing this and still not receiving a notification that I replied, then please let me know.  I will contact WordPress to report the problem.

Thanks!

Amy

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Happy New Year!

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Happy New Year to all my family and friends and followers and readers from all over! I can’t believe I’ve had readers from not only the United States, but Canada, Great Britain, Germany, New Zealand, Bulgaria, Sweden, Turkey, Ireland, Greece, Australia, Russia, Poland, and Israel.  Thanks to all of you for stopping by, whether you have been here once or many times.  May 2014 bring everyone peace, happiness, and good health.

I am grateful to you all for your support and your readership, and I look forward to making new discoveries and new connections in the year ahead.  I hope to learn more both from my relatives and from my fellow genealogy bloggers and others about genealogy, my family, and myself.

Amy

Can you help?

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I know that I have asked for help before, and many of you have responded by sending some pictures and other documents.  Those contributions have really been helpful in learning about our family and the various personalities and relationships.  For example, one wedding picture helped us figure out that Judy and I were both talking about the same Uncle Sam.  One bar mitzvah picture showed that as of 1957,  Gussie’s children and Hyman’s children were still connected.  One hand-written family tree helped to confirm that Abraham’s children and Max’s children had met.

But now I am asking you all to try and find pictures, letters, journals, any documents that may also shed light on our grandparents and great-grandparents as well as our parents and ourselves.  I know that somewhere some of you must have old family pictures like I had.  Maybe you have a wedding album or bar mitzvah album, a box of random old photos or letters.  Maybe someone even has a photo of Frieda or Joseph or another relative, but you had no idea who they were.  Maybe there’s an old newspaper clipping or a birth certificate or draft card or some other document buried in your attic or basement.

I know that you are all busy, and I know that the thought of digging through dusty, musty boxes and albums is not that pleasant.  I just am asking that you perhaps make a resolution for 2014 that you will spend one or two hours seeing if you can find anything.  If you don’t have a scanner, you can mail whatever you have to me, and I will scan it.  I promise to return all the originals once I have scanned them.  If you can scan documents, that would be wonderful also.

No one likes a nag, and I don’t want to be one, but we will all benefit from your efforts.  I hope you will consider spending a little time engaged in a hunt for these things.  From my own experience, I can tell you that I have found great joy and satisfaction in looking at the faces of our relatives in those old pictures.  I hope you will also.

Looking forward: Skiing on the Blue Trails

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Having looked back to see what I have learned, I have also gained some insight into to what I still want to learn and what I need to do to get there.

There are a number of unresolved questions.  For me, the most important issue remains determining where our family lived in Galicia.  I am currently assuming that our family came from Dzikow Tarnobrzeg, but it’s only based on two forms completed by Hyman, one referring to Jeekief as his birthplace, the other referring to Giga as his birthplace.  Hyman’s forms had so many inconsistencies in terms of birth date and other facts that I do not want to rely too heavily on it being Dzikow Tarnobrzeg since, as my last post said, forms are not necessarily reliable.  Plus I am speculating that Jeekief/Giga is a phonetic spelling of Dzikow.  Plus there was another Dzikow in Galicia.  But I have to start somewhere, so that’s my current focus.

I am just starting to work with the sources available for documents from Galicia, and I need to devote a lot more time to learning how to search and how to interpret those forms.  I am networking with some other researchers who are also searching in that region or who are also searching for the surname Brotman.  So far nothing relevant has turned up.  I plan to take an online course in May that may help me become a better researcher with respect to these resources and documents.

The second goal I have for my research is trying to locate any other children or siblings of Joseph and/or Bessie.  My brother recalls that my aunt thought that Joseph had four older children in the United States—that is, four who were older than the five children he had with Bessie.  We have found two of those four—Abraham and Max.  There is another Brotman family from Passaic, New Jersey, that I am trying to learn more about.  From what I can tell, it seems there were two brothers, Jacob and Benjamin, who could possibly be sons of Joseph, born after Abraham but before Max.  I have been in touch with relatives of theirs, but as with the Brotmanville Brotmans, I can’t seem to find anything that links their family to ours.  I need to learn the name of the Passaic brothers’ parents before I can begin to determine if there is a connection.  I have the same goal with Brotmanville Brotmans, but without more research of European records for Moses Brotman, I cannot get any further.

So those are my two research goals: go further back in time to learn more about Joseph and Bessie’s families and to find links to other possible families in the United States or elsewhere.

I think that this process has a learning curve similar to learning many other new skills.  It reminds me of learning to ski.  At first it goes very slowly; you don’t know what you are doing and figure that you never will.  You find yourself on the ground as much as you are moving on the skis.  It seems like you will never make progress.  Then suddenly you figure it out—you know how to get down a novice trail pretty easily.  You even start to look like you are skiing, and you think, “Wow, I am actually making progress.  I am skiing.”

But then you decide to try a steeper trail, a blue trail.  If you are a skier like I was, you suddenly find you are stuck somewhere on that trail, staring down and thinking, “Whoa! That’s really scary.  I can’t do that!” And you feel like a beginner all over again.  You start falling, your turns get more awkward, and you look like a klutz compared to everyone else.  You start to think that maybe you will never get off those easy green trails.[1]

That’s what I feel like now.  I am standing at the top of a steeper trail, knowing that getting to the bottom will take a lot longer than it did with the green trail.   I don’t expect to find as many pieces of evidence as quickly as I did while looking for US documents.  But I have to start down this trail—I can’t just stay at the top or return to the green trails.  I need to jump off and start the next part of the adventure.  The rewards may not come as quickly, but when they do, I will once again have that feeling of accomplishment.

I hope you will follow me as I go.  I am not sure what I will find or whether I will find anything, but I am ready to try.

[1][1] I have to admit that as a skier, I never actually made much progress getting off the green trails.  I am hoping that I can get further in my genealogy skills than I ever got with skiing.  At least I won’t have to worry about breaking any bones.

Related articles

Blog Stuff

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I have made a change in the privacy settings on the blog.  As you know, the blog is a public blog.  When we first started the blog, I did not know whether anyone would ever read it at all, inside or outside of the family, but over the last few months, I have found that I am seeing some visits from people outside of the family.  For me, this is a good thing. Most of these other readers are also doing genealogy work.  I want feedback, I want interaction with others who are doing genealogy research so that I can do a better job, and I want to be able to share my experiences and what I’ve learned about doing this research with others doing similar work.  So I am happy to have as many readers as are interested in checking in.

On the other hand, I have always been and will continue to be careful about protecting the privacy of the members of my family.  For that reason, I have not included birth dates or any other information about living individuals aside from occasional references to a name, usually by first name only.  All the information I have about deceased individuals is available from public records (and a frightening amount of information is also publicly available about living individuals).  In today’s internet environment, our ideas about privacy have had to shift (and that’s without even considering whether or not the NSA is reading our email or listening to our phone calls).  Nevertheless, I do want to respect the privacy interests of my relatives as best I can.

In order to ensure that I continue to protect the privacy of my relatives, I’ve made one new adjustment to the blog.  The family trees are no longer publicly available. The trees do not have much personal information anyway, but I decided that no one outside the family needs to have access to that information.  In order to access those trees, you will now need a password.  I am happy to share that password with anyone who is on the family tree.  If you want the password, please email me directly.  In the future, if I have a post that I consider to be directed only to family members, I will also protect it with that same password.

It’s sad that we cannot be more trusting, but I guess better safe than sorry.

Thank you.

What’s next?

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I am currently waiting for three more documents that I am hoping will provide some clues to where our family lived in Galicia: Hyman and Sophie’s marriage certificate, Tilly’s death certificate, and Max’s naturalization papers. It may be quite a while before I get these three documents since (1) the FHL is currently not processing requests because it is upgrading its system; (2) I just ordered Tilly’s death certificate from NYC, and that will take at least a few weeks, and (3) USCIS estimates a 90 day wait for naturalization records, and I only made that request four weeks ago.  Thus, I may not have any new information for quite a while. From my experience with marriage and death certificates, I am not too hopeful that I will get anything too helpful from the first two; I have no idea what the naturalization papers may provide, but they may be our best chance for finding another clue as to the hometown.  I remain determined to find the answer to the question of where our family lived.

I also may not soon have an answer for the other big question: are we related to the Brotmanville Brotmans, and if so, how? Without some way to learn more about Moses Brotman’s parents, I can’t make a connection between Moses and Joseph. Even though I was able to find two of Moses’ living descendants, neither can answer any questions about his parents, and the other living descendants have been unwilling to respond to my inquiries.  To be honest, I doubt they would have that information anyway.

To answer either of these questions will require access to documents from Galicia that date back before 1890, documents that are obviously not in English.  Although many Galician records exist and are indexed on various websites, I have not been able yet to find anything that relates to our ancestors or Moses’ Brotman’s ancestors.  I need more help, more training, more experience before I can do that effectively.  I will be consulting with some others with more experience to see how to get the education I need. I have just joined a Yahoo Group for people interested in genealogy research in the Tarnozbreg region of Poland, which is where Dzikow is located, the town I think may be the most likely place our family lived in Galicia. I just have to be patient and willing to work hard, and I believe I will find the answers to these questions.

That does not mean that there is nothing to do until then.  There is still a lot to do to make the blog a real resource for our family and for future generations.  I need your help for that.  Yes, more photos and documents would be great.  But I’ve been thinking that it would also be nice to add more personal information about some of the family members I never knew. I’ve added some personal touches to the descriptions of my grandparents, aunt and uncle, but I didn’t know Abraham, Max, Hyman, Tilly or any of their children.  I need help from the rest of you to add a personal dimension to their portraits. Right now I am working on a portrait of Tilly and her life, for example.  Even a brief description of a person’s career, interests, or personality will add some “flesh” to the facts and dates that are currently reported on the blog pages. Are any of you are interested in writing either a “guest post” or in providing a few words to add to the page about your parents or grandparents?  What would you like future generations of Brotmans to know about their ancestors?

A Brief Introduction to Genealogical Research

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Some of you might be interested in how to do genealogical research yourselves, so I thought I’d provide a very brief introduction for those who might want to try.

I would start (and did start) with ancestry.com.   You can get a short free trial subscription (14 days) just to see if you are intrigued. (And no, I don’t get a kickback from ancestry if you subscribe!) Ancestry provides digital copies of many documents including all US census reports up through the 1940  census (the later census reports are not yet available), except for the 1890 census which was destroyed in a fire. (That is particularly frustrating and sad for people researching ancestors who arrived in the 1880s.  We will likely never know where Joseph, Abraham and Max first settled, although it appears that all three arrived sometime between 1888 and 1890. )

Ancestry also has many other records available in digital form: some naturalization papers, some draft registration forms, some yearbooks, phone books, directories, and ship manifests.  Many records, however, are not directly accessible through ancestry.  For example, NYC birth, death and marriage certificates are not viewable through ancestry; you may find a record that indicates some of the information found on such certificates, but not the entire certificate.  For that, you have to order a digital copy or a photocopy elsewhere.

I have found the Family History Library to be a great resource for this.  The FHL is run by the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City; apparently the Mormons are trying to collect the names of anyone who ever lived as part of a religious mission to save everyone’s souls.  Fortunately, you don’t have to be a Mormon or support their mission in order to be able to use their services.  I guess the Church sees helping others find their relatives to be part of that overall mission.

At any rate, to request documents from the FHL, you need to find the NYC certificate number[1] and then the FHL film number.  Sometimes ancestry.com will have the certificate numbers, but usually I go to another website, http://www.germangenealogygroup.com/records-search/, to locate the certificate number.  It provides an index of NYC birth, death, and marriage certificates, but only for those years for which NYC has made them accessible to the general public.  For example, death certificates only run up to 1948; birth certificates are even more limited in terms of availability.  (I assume this is for privacy reasons, just as with the census reports.)  If, however, the certificate you are seeking falls within the date range, you can find the certificate number and dates through the germangenealogy website.

Once I have that information, I then go to another website, http://stevemorse.org/vital/filmnotes.html, where I can enter the information into the appropriate boxes, and then obtain FHL film number.  That website also includes a link to the FHL Photoduplication Request form.  By filling out that form with the numbers I now have, I can make a request to FHL for the certificates I am seeking.  There is a limit of five per month, and it can take several weeks to receive them, but it is free.  Amazing, it is free!

For other documents, for example, more recent death certificates and other documents like Social Security applications or immigration papers, the process can be more complicated, involving notarized documents, some fees, and much longer waits.  But starting with ancestry.com and using the FHL process can give you a good start on finding out more about your ancestors.  I found most of the documents that I have used in my research and reported here through those two sources and have only turned to the less efficient means of obtaining information more recently.

Of course, there have been lots of other sources of information: all of you who gave me clues and information, my mentor Renee and other experienced genealogists who helped me dig up clues, and many other websites like http://www.jewishgen.org/ and Findagrave.com.  There are still lots of other sources I have yet to explore, but those will require more time and more training before I can use them very effectively.

[1] This website only indexes NYC documents and some Nassau/Suffolk County documents.  For other locations in New York State and other states, you need to check the appropriate website for vital records for that county or state.

Related articles

Family Trees: Blog Tip

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It seems that some people are having trouble locating the family trees on the blog.  If you click [1]on the words “Joseph’s Descendants: Family Trees” near the top of the page (under the blog title), a page will open that has a list of family trees. There is one for Joseph, which goes only to the third generation (Joseph’s grandchildren).  Then there are separate trees for each of Joseph’s children, following through a few more generations.  The trees are all quite large, so you will need to zoom in to read the names, but then you can move around that page to see the various relationships.  You can also save the trees to your own computer.  They are in PDF format.

Hope that helps.

[1] If you just let your mouse hover over those words, a dropdown menu displays the names of Joseph’s seven children.  If you click on one of those names, it will open that person’s page.  You need to click on “Joseph’s Descendants: Family Trees” to open the family tree page.

Research update

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I am once again in a holding pattern, waiting for a few more documents to arrive: Max’s naturalization papers (which take 90 days for USCIS to process, so another 75 days to wait for those), Max’s death certificate, Abraham’s death certificate, and a few others from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. My principal research goal right now is to find out where our family came from in Galicia.

I’ve been trying to search for European records, but that is much more complicated than searching for US documents. JewishGen.com offers a course online that provides instruction on how to do that, and I plan to take that course when it is next offered in May, 2014. That’s a long way off for someone who is as impatient a researcher as I am. I am meanwhile making inquiries of other researchers who are researching Galicia and searching several genealogy websites, but so far, I’ve still come up empty.
So I figured that while I was waiting, I would learn what I can about life in Galicia in the 19th century and life on the Lower East Side in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. I’ve ordered some books and will provide whatever information or reviews I find interesting and helpful once I have read them. If anyone has any recommendations on books on either of those topics, please provide them in the comment box below.

Meanwhile, I would still love some pictures (hint, hint!) from other members of the family.

Hope you all are well, and I will report back when I get some new documents or have anything else to report.

Blog Updates

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I’ve made some changes to the blog that will hopefully make it easier to find subjects discussed here.  For example, I’ve added a Search Box on the sidebar at the bottom.  Now if you want to search for specific people, for example, put their name in and all the pages or posts where their name is mentioned will pop up.

Also, I’ve arranged the posts into categories and added a menu for those categories.  So, for example, if you want to see all posts in the category of Family Information and Updates, just click on that category in the menu, and all posts in that category will be listed on the page.

I am still learning how to do this (thank you again, Judy, for getting me started!), so I will continue to fiddle with this.  I am open to suggestions—just add your thoughts in the comments.  I’d prefer receiving comments about the blog on the blog rather than in my email because my email box gets so overloaded with all the research I am doing that sometimes I lose track of what’s where!

Thanks!

Amy