Look no further than the Internet to begin a search for long-lost relatives. A lecture titled “Genealogy: Why and How To Do It” was recently presented at the South Brunswick library.
The lecture, delivered by Jewish History Society of Central New Jersey President Dr. Nathan Reiss, focused on where to begin a genealogical search and how to collect preliminary research on one’s own personal history.
Reiss used his own search for family — which led to finding thousands of relatives — as an example of how to successfully trace family roots. The first step, as it turns out, does not involve turning to the Internet at all.
“The first thing to do is talk to your relatives, particularly older relatives who may not be around much longer, and question them as much as you can,” Reiss said. “Talking to close relatives will give you a lot of information to get you started.”
Even if a relative does not know the answer to a question right away, Reiss suggests repeating the questions until something jogs a memory.
“I would take what they told me, write it down and graph it into a family tree,” Reiss said. “I would go back to that same elderly relative and ask them if it was right. When I did that, I found that putting the tree together would jog new memories that they had about other people on the tree, as well as correcting mistakes I made.”
Tracing records in the United States and in Europe are two completely different realms of information gathering.
Nowadays, Reiss said, looking at records from Europe does not involve an initial trip to the area like it used to. With the Internet, he said, it would be a waste to travel to Europe first. It is better to be prepared with a wealth of information before the trip. “The Mormon church is very strong on identifying your ancestors and has a procedure where people can be converted to their church after their death,” Reiss said. “They have a strong database, because the idea is that people will collect the names of their ancestors [when they convert] so they can be converted.”
The Mormons, Reiss said, hold many records from Europe for this purpose and will allow the public to request records.
Reiss recommended the church’s website, www.familysearch.org, and a Mormon church in East Brunswick that allows researchers to come in and request records from Utah, where the Mormon efforts are based.
“They even have research aides,” Reiss said. “They will send whatever records you ask for, and all for a very small fee.”
For overseas records, Reiss recommends examining church books in areas where family hails from. Both Christians and Jews were marked in these books, Reiss explained.
“Oftentimes, Jewish records are found in a church book because the person who kept the records was connected to the church,” Reiss said.
In the United States, genealogy research is easier because of accessibility and language. Reiss cited telephone directories — booklets in nearly every town in America that predated phone books — as great sources of information.
“It’s a list of practically every adult and even some children in that town,” Reiss said. “Sometimes it even includes where a person moved to.”
Telephone directories were typically updated annually and are available at most libraries.
“Almost every library will have the city directory for that city,” Reiss said. “It’s worth a trip to that city if you have a lot of relatives there.”
Reiss also recommended examining obituaries, death notices, marriage certificates and older census records to find information, including hard-to-find information such as maiden names of female relatives.
“The great thing about the [older] census is that it is the main document that we have at our disposal that actually shows what people’s relationships are to each other,” Reiss said.
Reiss said citizenship certificates, common for those who immigrated from Europe, are not tremendously helpful documents because of their simplistic nature. But ship manifests through Ellis Island or other ports are of tremendous significance for those looking to find out where their European relatives came from.
For those who will be searching mostly on the Internet, Reiss said there is not one website or another that is “better” or more “trustworthy,” since the context of the records are the same, but some sites will ask for a fee to access records.
“Some sites where there might be problems are those who use computers to just generate information on anyone with that particular name,” Reiss said. “I wouldn’t call those sites illegitimate, but I would call them unreliable.”