Lecture descriptions Susan Weinberg, FEEFHS 2021

Crossing the Ocean: Finding Your European History (Jewish track)

This presentation will explore how you can use US records to locate records in Eastern Europe, connecting American family documents to parents and siblings in Europe. The talk will first explore sources to verify your ancestral town. Using finding aids, it will explore a variety of useful databases such as JRI-Poland and the All-Lithuanian Database to uncover birth records and revision records. Through case studies, it will weave together records from these databases with Holocaust records, US marriage records, tombstones and immigration records to document connections between American family members and those who remained in Eastern Europe.

Immigration History: Laws, Documents and the Story Within (Jewish track)

This talk looks at immigration through the lens of laws, documents and family story. It examines the period from the late 1880s through the 1900s, a period of significant Jewish immigration. This multi-media presentation incorporates experiences drawn from oral histories with Jewish elders who grew up in early immigrant communities, Holocaust survivors immigrating during 1940s-50s and immigrants from the former Soviet Union from the 1970s-90s. Using video clips from those interviews, I will tell a lively story of Jewish immigration to the United States and the life of an immigrant juxtaposed with the documents and laws that framed that experience.