Sep

19 2021

Jewish Genealogical Society of Toronto. You too can create a family tree!

10:30AM - 12:00PM  

Les Kelman P.O. Box 91006 2901 Bayview Avenue
Toronto, ON M2K 2Y6
647-247-6414 lkelman@jgstoronto.ca
https://jgstoronto.ca/

Contact Les Kelman
info@jgstoronto.ca
647-247-6414
lkelman@jgstoronto.ca
https://jgstoronto.ca/

JEWISH GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY OF TORONTO

If the shyest person in a family can
create a family tree, you can too!

Speaker: David Price

VIRTUAL MEETING: Join from Home

Sunday, 19 September 2021, at 10:30 a.m.

When I was a teenager five people came up to me claiming that they were my relatives. My father never told me about the Price family history other than he was from Kielts, Poland. I did hear some stories from my four aunts but I forgot about them until I was forty. Then I made up my mind to interview my aunts and those strangers in order to once and for all make a Price family tree. Using LDS films, JRI-Poland, JewishGen, Yad Vashem, Yizkor Books, birth certificates, naturalization forms, Form 30A, 1920 Lodz registration cards, passenger records, maps of Poland, phone directories, Beider’s surname reference of Poland, synagogue references, social media to find people, DNA, other family trees and, the most difficult thing of all for a shy person, interviews, I created a four branch Price family tree. I found out that there were forty-five relatives killed in the holocaust. I interviewed one holocaust survivor my aunts thought was killed in the holocaust seventy-five years earlier and found the only known photograph of his parents (I did a talk on him earlier this year)! I finally found out the age of my late father, z”l. And of course, what everyone wants to hear when looking up their tree, I found the possibility of being related to famous rabbis, including Rashi!

David Price Bio:
One day my beloved wife Marilyn made a fateful mistake. Knowing my hobby was doing a family tree, she pointed out an ad in the Canadian Jewish News about membership in the Toronto JGS. I joined. This was how I learned about LDS films of the Jewish birth, marriage and death records of Poland, which I could obtain at the Toronto Reference Library. One snag: the records were hand written in Polish and Russian. I could read difficult handwriting from my experience as a math teacher but I was warned by Gert Rogers that Russian was in Cyrillic, a script that was hard to learn. Luckily I was able to use my math powers since Cyrillic uses the Greek alphabet, often used in my math lessons. I decided to extract the films of Chmielnik for the Kielce-Radom SIG Journal. That publication ceased at about the same time Stan Diamond created JRI-Poland. Talk about luck! I could still enjoy extracting Jewish records of other towns and have a website to submit transcriptions to, which I have done for the last twenty years.

To register, please go to the link https://jgstoronto.ca/register/. You will then receive an immediate acknowledgement plus the link to access the event on 19 September.

The presentation will be recorded. It will be available to JGS Toronto members in the “Members Only” section of the Society website, a few days after the event. It will also be available to non-member registrants for one week after the event in the “Registration” location.

To our guests, consider joining our membership for only $40.00 per year by going to the link
https://jgstoronto.ca/membership/ or consider a donation by going to the link
https://jgstoronto.ca/donate/ to assist us in continuing our mission providing a forum for the exchange of genealogical knowledge and information. (Canadians receive a CRA tax receipt.)

info@jgstoronto.ca www.jgstoronto.ca Tel: 647-247-6414

Sponsor: Jewish Genealogical Society of Toronto

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