Untangling your Jewish Roots: a Genealogy Guide

Exploring one’s Jewish roots presents some challenges unique to immigrants, unlike American-born ancestors. Since few Jews lived in the United States before the mid 1800s, Jewish genealogy requires pursuing documents and databases from Europe and other continents, which can be more difficult to locate and understand than those in the US; additionally, many of these are written in German, Polish Russian, Hungarian, or Yiddish. Many of these records are now online, but some extra skill is required to know how to use them. Untangling your Jewish Roots will help you get started with some basics about genealogy in general and a few specifics for those with Jewish ancestry.