L ifestyles /C ulture
Genealogist Asks: ‘Who’s Your Daddy?’
GENEALOGY SOPHIE PANZER | JE STAFF
JOEL SPECTOR IS a self-
described genealogy addict.

The director of the Jewish
Genealogical and Archival
Society of Greater Philadelphia
has compiled a family tree
consisting of close to 1,000
members. For him, it’s about much
more than identifying names
and dates.

“You don’t just create a tree,
but you create all of the data that
goes with a particular person:
family stories, documents, all
kinds of things that are fasci-
nating,” Spector said. Through
his research, he was even able to
find a third cousin he never knew
who lived just five miles away.

On Dec. 20, Spector gave
a Zoom presentation for the
Germantown Jewish Centre
called “Who’s Your Daddy? or
How to Research Your Family
Background” and outlined the
best research methods for Jews
looking to explore their ancestry.

Spector said records that
might seem mundane at first
can yield surprising amounts
of information. He found his
grandfather’s occupation on a
federal census, the Canadian
address of an aunt who died
in Montreal on a death certif-
icate and the town where his
great-grandmother used to live
in Russia on his uncle’s draft
registration card.

He said that the best place to
start when compiling a family
tree is with yourself and the
information you know about
your immediate family, such
as birthdays, places of birth,
marriage dates and informa-
tion about spouses. You also
may have letters and photos
from family members or
newspaper articles about
important events in their lives.

“Sometimes you know who
you are named after, which is
a fascinating thing in Jewish
genealogy because, in Ashkenazi
18 DECEMBER 24, 2020
Joel Spector (third from top) presents a death certificate for one of his relatives.
practice, people were named
after deceased ancestors, which
usually alternated through
generations,” Spector said.

The next step is to interview
your living relatives, especially
the older family members. This
is even more important if you
have immigrant ancestry, as
these relatives may be the only
people who have information
about how their branch of the
family tree ended up in the
United States, and as well as
information about relatives
in the old country. Spector
advised researchers to keep the
conversations informal, but to
be sure to get details like places
of birth, marriage dates and
port of entry into the U.S.

Once you’ve gleaned as
much information as you can
from yourself and your family
members, it’s time to turn to
archives and documentation.

This was a much more compli-
cated process before the rise of
the internet, which made many
of these records available in
digital forms.

Spector recommends-
JewishGen, the main Jewish
genealogy website, where users
can look up family names
and find contact information
for other people researching
the same ones. They can also
look up town names and join
research divisions for specific
areas, including Belarus,
Scandinavia, Ukraine, France
and Britain. The group is usually
quick to respond to questions.

He also recommended Ancestry,
a paid family history site with an
extensive library of records, and
FamilySearch, a research library
based in Salt Lake City and run
by the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints.

“When I visited them last
about five years ago, they had
two-and-a-half million reels of
microfilm. They probably have
more now,” he said.

JEWISH EXPONENT
For local families, Spector
recommended his own organi-
zation, which he said is 40 years
old and the third-oldest Jewish
genealogy society in the country
after the groups in New York and
Los Angeles. He recommended
the archives at local universi-
ties, such as Temple University’s
Urban Archives, especially for
newspaper records.

He added that the City
of Philadelphia
houses marriage documents at City
Hall and birth certificates
at the City Archives. Death
certificates are maintained
by the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania in Carlisle.

There is a certain type of
information that is especially
difficult for even the most
thorough researchers to find:
birthdays. “People put down different
birth dates so they could get
married legally, so they could
work legally and for various
Courtesy of Joel Spector
other reasons,” Spector said.

His own great-uncle kept
his birthday private because
his parents had paid a customs
agent to add six years to his
age to make him beyond the
reach of the draft in Russia.

His younger brother had years
subtracted from his birthday
to make him too young for the
draft in the United States.

Dick Menin, president of the
Germantown Jewish Centre’s
Men’s Club, has done his own
research into his family’s
Russian ancestry.

“I do recommend that
if you have any older living
relatives, this is the time to
talk, ask questions,” he said.

“Unfortunately, all of my
relatives that I’d like to have
had more information on are
now available only on a Ouija
board.” l
spanzer@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0729
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM