Genealogy with a Jewish twist




SHARING THE PAST—Jan Meisels Allen, an Agoura Hill resident and president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley and Ventura County, created a display of photos, artifacts and documents that trace the past of local residents. The exhibit at the Agoura Hills Library is in celebration of International Jewish Genealogy Month. STEPHANIE BERTHOLDO/Acorn Newspapers

SHARING THE PAST—Jan Meisels Allen, an Agoura Hill resident and president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley and Ventura County, created a display of photos, artifacts and documents that trace the past of local residents. The exhibit at the Agoura Hills Library is in celebration of International Jewish Genealogy Month. STEPHANIE BERTHOLDO/Acorn Newspapers

Finding your family roots can be a passionate pursuit, and for Jewish families with kin either lost or splintered because of the Holocaust, the tracing of relational bonds can be especially poignant—and sometimes surprising.

A display celebrating International Jewish Genealogy Month, which was Oct. 10 to Nov. 8 this year, has been extended through December at the Friends of the Agoura Hills Library reading room next to City Hall. The observance was extended because the library was closed for several days due to the Woolsey fire.

Jan Meisels Allen, an Agoura Hills resident and president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley and Ventura County, said members of the group provided family books, photographs and documents with tidbits of historical lore for the display.

Meisels Allen has delved deep into her own family tree, a journey that started in 1998 at a family reunion in Chicago and continues to this day.

She discovered that her grandmother had come to America to help out in a New York family bakery.

“(Relatives) saw that my grandmother was beautiful and wanted her to immigrate to the United States to work in the bakery— she could sell a lot of baked goods,” Meisels Allen said.

But Meisels Allen’s great-grandmother wouldn’t allow her lovely daughter Pessa to travel alone, so she arranged for Pessa’s sister, Rose, to immigrate with her.

“(Rose) wasn’t as beautiful,” Meisels Allen joked. “She worked in the kitchen.”

Meisels Allen said she became enamored with the stories told by family members at the three-day reunion, and by the time she returned to California she was determined to dig deep into her genealogy to fill in the gaps of her family’s history.

She started her personal quest with a computer program, Family Tree Maker, and the online Jewish genealogy site, jewishgen.org.

After attending a meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society in Los Angeles, Meisels Allen said, she became “addicted.”

Her research into her family background led her to search records in Argentina, Poland, Israel and the U.S.

“My biggest and best genealogical find was my cousin Alissa,” she said, “We were living 20 minutes from each other.”

Meisels Allen also found an interesting family artifact on eBay. After learning that her descendants owned a dairy farm in the Catskill Mountains of New York, she went on the online auction site and bought a 1920s milk bottle from the Meisels Dairy Farm.

“It was the best $15 investment I ever made,” she said.

The Agoura Hills Library offers resources for researching Jewish family history. Meisels Allen said there is a traveling library, which is available at the genealogical society meetings and by appointment, with 100 books and another 350 books in the permanent collection at the library.

“We also have journals from around the world,” she said, adding that many of the books have been donated by patrons of the library.

Also the book “In Their Words: A Genealogist’s Translation Guide” is a helpful resource. The library has three volumes of the guide, which translates documents from Poland, Germany and Russia, including birth, death and marriage records.

A dictionary is available in the library that allows genealogists to find out the meaning of their surnames. Names can be traced from Yiddish, Spanish, Italian, Polish, German and other nationalities.

Meisels Allen said that, except for rabbinical families, Jewish surnames didn’t actually come into vogue until the early 1800s. Rather than a surname, people were generally identified by the town in which they lived or the trade that they practiced.

For instance, the names Kravitz (Polish), Schneider (German/ Yiddish) and Portnoy (Russian) translate to “tailor.”

For more information on the Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley, visit jgscv.org.