LECTURE TITLE: New Strategies in German Research with an Emphasis on Jewish Research

SESSION: F304

DATE & TIME: Friday, May 4, 8:00am

SPONSOR: Leo Baeck Institute, New York, N.Y.

Beginners and experts alike can benefit from learning and sharing creative ways to seek out resources to assist them with their German research. Genealogy is not new to families from Germany, so researchers must be more like “general contractors” rather than “plumbers.”

Anywhere along the research path, we should be exploring new resources before “plunging” into new archival research that might have already been completed by others. Existing family trees on a multitude of sites and documentation outside archives can be hidden in the most unusual places, but may now be more easily found.

In this lecture, Karen Franklin will explore the explosion of new databases and trees on sites we know well (Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.com, Geni.com) and some not-so-well known sites. New general resources, Jewish and non-Jewish, include a trove of business directories, a network of researchers in Germany, new kinds of archives in Germany, and other specifically Jewish resources — German Jewish DNA groups, DigiBaeck of the Leo Baeck Institute, Judaica Europeana, and the new GERSIG website on JewishGen.

The session will highlight several case studies, in which participants will join with Karen to strategize how specific problems – including identifying where in Germany a family was from –can be addressed.

ABOUT: Karen S. Franklin is Director of Family Research at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, a research library devoted to German-Jewish History. She has served as president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, co-chair of the Board of Governors of JewishGen.org, chair of the Council of American Jewish Museums, and chair of the Memorial Museums Committee of the International Council of Museums. She is currently president of the Obermayer German Jewish History Awards.