Joel Weintraub to present two Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois talks on Oct. 24

Joel Weintraub, one of the contributors to the Steve Morse One-Step website, will give two genealogy talks, one called “Here Comes The 1950 Census: What To Expect” and one called “Finding Difficult Passengers on the Ellis Island Manifests,” for the Sunday, Oct. 24, 2021, meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois, starting at 1 p.m. CDT.

Registration/RSVP for the virtual webinar by clicking on the button at left.

In “Here Comes The 1950 Census: What To Expect,” Joel will prepare us for when the U.S. 1950 census will become public on April 1, 2022. He will cover what is a census, who uses the census, census caveats, how the 1950 census was taken, training of enumerators, enumerator instruction manuals, census sampling, 1950 population and housing forms, census questions, post enumeration codes, 1950 undercount, and a summary of the results.

He will conclude this talk with a discussion of his and Steve Morse’s 1950 census locational tools, already online at the stevemorse.org website. Those 1950 utilities took almost eight years to produce with help from 69 volunteers, involve 230,000 or so searchable 1950 census district definitions with about 79,000 more small community names added, and street indexes for over 2,400 urban areas that correlate with 1950 census district numbers.

In “Finding Difficult Passengers on the Ellis Island Manifests,” Joel will demonstrate 10 different strategies to help you locate the records of your elusive immigrant ancestors. He will start with a 12-year-old boy on his 1907 voyage from Hamburg, Germany, to New York, and then find out why some search strategies cannot find his record (including the Ellis Island search database), and, surprisingly, why some other strategies can find his record! There will be several take-home messages here for researchers, even those who have done many such searches, so be prepared to be learn about the assumptions behind the databases we use for immigration searches including some lesser-known ones.

Joel Weintraub, a New Yorker by birth, is an emeritus biology professor at California State University, Fullerton. He became interested in genealogy over 20 years ago and volunteered for nine years at the National Archives in southern California. Joel helped produce location tools for the 1900 through 1950 federal censuses, and the New York State censuses for New York City (1905, 1915, 1925) for the Steve Morse “One-Step” website.  He has published articles on the U.S. census and the 72-year rule, the name change belief and finding difficult passenger records at Ellis Island, and searching NYC census records with the problems of NYC geography. He has a YouTube channel “JDW Talks” that has recordings of his genealogy (and biology) talks.

The Jewish Genealogical Societyof Illinois is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping members collect, preserve, and perpetuate the records and history of their ancestors. JGSI is a resource for the worldwide Jewish community to research their Chicago-area roots. The JGSI motto is “Members Helping Members Since 1981.” The group has more than 300 members and is affiliated with the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies.