Monday morning sessions
In the first session block, I caught the tail end of I caught the tail e the presentation on "Townwide Research: Bringing Your Shtetl to Life." It was a fascinating account of how a group came together to advance knowledge of the Lithuanian town Ariogala, which is about 20 miles outside of Kaunas. The presenter was supposed to be David Hoffman, but a woman whose name I did not catch filled in for him. With great photos and anecdotes, she told the story of how a group of descendants from this town put together its history, culminating in a group expedition that turned up important new information at the cemetery and other local sites.
"Recreating the shtetl is a never-ending project," she said, wrapping up the presentation with a story about a new member who discovered the group's work online and then added important new knowledge. "The key to success is in organizing people and bringing them together over the Internet," she concluded.
In the next session block, I worked in parts of two sessions. The first, "The Oceanic Journey to America: Traveling in Steerage Class," presented by Nancy C. Levin, provided rich details about the conditions under which most Jews reached America. Levin cautioned that the talk would be mostly on the substance, not about search methods, yet in the part of the talk I heard, she offered a number of interesting tips and source repositories that I will take advantage of as we get serious about finding the ship manifests for our Tulbowitz and Rabinowitz ancestors who made the uncomforable journey.
I rushed next to catch the Mac Users birds of a feather meeting, hoping to find like-minded researchers with useful tips about doing genealogy on a minority computer platform. Attendees ranged from expert to newbie both on the Macintosh and genealogy scales. Most of the discussion had to do with the leading genealogy program available for the Mac, Reunion. I use Reunion, but mostly because there are relatively few choices, as I find it fairly clunky and non-standard. One man in the audience seemed to be a Reunion expert, and he offered useful tips and hints.
Several other tools and resources were mentioned as the 40 or so people in attendance introduced themselves. I mentioned PAW2X, which I've been playing with the last few weeks and am quite pleased with. We all signed a sheet for future followup, and the moderator indicated that a JewishGen Mac user group will be formed as a follow up. I said I would be willing to get involved.
In the 11:00 block, I decided to sit still for the full session on "Litvak Migratory Decisions in the 19th century. It proved to be a very popular session, and was booked into too small a room. Despite arriving early, I was wedged into a seat in the back corner of the room.
Ruth Leiserowitz is an expert on at University of Klaipeda (Memel)
