JewishGen Inc

“Daddy, I’m going with my class to Ellis Island to see where the immigrants came to America. Did we have any relatives that came through Ellis Island?” Summoning up all my fatherly intellect and experience, I responded, “Jessica, I have no idea!” This simple question, from my 6th grade daughter, started me on a journey to find my roots, subsequently write my family history and begin my involvement with JewishGen and adult genealogy education. Undoubtedly, the most valuable resource available to Jewish genealogists is JewishGen, (www.JewishGen.org). Since I was relatively uninformed about genealogy and the particulars of Jewish genealogy, I found the website incredibly helpful. I used the Info Files extensively when I started my planning and made use of many of the other databases and mailing lists. There came a time that I realized that if not for volunteers around the world, the availability of all this information would not be possible. I therefore became involved with JewishGen and other organizations as a volunteer. My JewishGen “career” started as a data entry volunteer on the Dachau Indexing project, then became a validator and ultimately coordinated the project. I had the honor and pleasure of coordinating work with over 150 different volunteers around the world…some with nothing more than the same desire to help the larger Jewish genealogical community and some with direct links to Dachau itself. Currently, I serve as JewishGen's Vice President of Data Acquisition and coordinate their Holocaust Database and JOWBR (JewishGen’s Online Worldwide Burial Registry) Project. I continue to work with other volunteers worldwide and as a team, we are responsible for making over 3.2 million records available to researchers and family members. I invite you to browse our site and if you should have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at NAltman@jewishgen.org