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This photograph was taken in Iasi, Romania, according to the stamp on the back. Could this be a mother, father, and their daughter? My penciled notation reads: "oldest Goldstein cousin in Romania" which is what my mother-in-law told me. However, the surname of the family would not have been Goldstein, as only the siblings who came to America took that surname. I don't know any more about the family in Romania except that the surnames might have been Iancu or Moskowitz (the surnames of my husband's great-grandparents). If you think you know this family, please leave a comment or send me ..read more

I have been blogging at A Jewish Genealogy Journey for nine years, but sadly, not very much in the past year. The few posts that I wrote this year actually didn't involve much writing! I shared several photographs from my mother-in-law's Romanian-Israeli family. I had a brief email conversation with a relative in Israel who is my husband's fourth closest DNA match at AncestryDNA sharing 184 cM, which is a lot of shared DNA, even in an endogamous Ashkenazic Jewish population. I hope he sees this message and gets back to me - his mother recognized some of the names from my 1960s snapshots from ..read more

Last week I shared a photo of Betty and Izu from 1937. Here is another one from fourteen years later. This one is a 2" x 3" snapshot. The left is Romanian [thank you to Theo Rafael in the Genealogical Translations Group]: To the parents With all our longing From Izu Beti Marcel Buc [bucharest] 27 February 1951 The right (sideways) is Yiddish [thank you to Esther Chanie Dushinsky in the Genealogical Translations Group]: This is my oldest daughter and her husband and one child from Romania. If you have an additional comment about the translation or you know who this family is, please let ..read more

So who was the cousin whom Josef Handler was going to meet when he arrived from Hungary on April 14, 1910? Morris Stern, of 193 East 3rd Street was enumerated on April 25, 1910, at 191-3 Third Street in Manhattan, New York, New York. 1910 U.S. Census, New York County, New York, population schedule, Manhattan Ward 17, enumeration district 919, sheet XVIIIA, dwelling 38, family 470, Morris Stern; image, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 26 April 2020); citing NARA microfilm publication T624, roll 1033. Detail from above census record. Details of the Morris Stern ..read more

I have recently been spending time researching the descendants of Rose (Levitt) Goldstein's half-sister, Rebecca (Levitt) Reisner. I do this to help me possibly identify second cousin and third cousin DNA matches if they don't happen to reply to my messages. Rebecca Levitt arrived in America in 1891 or 1892 and was living in New Jersey by 1900 with her father, Max Levitt, and his second wife, Goldie Segal. See Levitts in Woodbine for several early census records and Jacob Reisner in the Census, 1910-1920 for the Reisner family. Jacob Reisner, after living in New Jersey in 1910 as a boarder i ..read more

At first, we didn't know exactly where Uncle Stanley lived when the 1950 federal census enumeration took place. It could have been Philadelphia or New Jersey. Stanley's sister, my mother-in-law, was able to remember the street name which helped me identify the enumeration district where I paged through looking for her brother. Stanley and his English bride, Betty, were living at 26 Robinson Street, Philadelphia, next to a cousin of his mother's, Albert Nappen.  Albert's father was Barnett Napadensky and his mother was Hannah Segal. I have shared their family information from earlier cens ..read more

Another image of unidentified people from my mother-in-law's collection that she believes is from her Romanian side (Goldstein, a.k.a. Yancu from Iasi, Romania). It looks like a wedding photo (bride in white, with a veil, groom in a suit with white bow tie and top hat), but they look so serious. Could this be in the early 1930s and times were tough? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.  Unfortunately, the photo appears to have been cropped and the back doesn't provide much information at all, except that it's more likely Romanian than Hebrew or Yiddish ..read more

I have not had any luck finding my late father-in-law, Harry Handler, in the 1950 census. It is believed that he had moved from his hometown of Akron, Ohio, to live in the Atlantic City, New Jersey, area where his oldest brother, Arthur had moved in the late 1930s. But I can't find Uncle Arthur and his family either. In 1940, Harry was living with his parents and other siblings in Akron, and Arthur, his wife, and two daughters, were living in Ventnor, New Jersey. I thought perhaps Harry had returned to Akron, and I easily found Harry's mother, known to my husband as Bubbie Lena, living, as ex ..read more

We genealogy bloggers often talk about blogs being cousin bait, meaning that relatives (known and unknown) search their ancestors' names on the Internet and our blog posts appear in the search results. They connect with the blogger and family history information is excitedly shared. Well, blogs can be "bait" for those who may not be relatives but may have something of interest to share with us. Years ago, I blogged about my husband's great-uncle Sam Handler, who ran several businesses in Cleveland, Ohio, over the years. At Workday Wednesday ~ Sam Handler, I shared what I had found in census re ..read more