JGS program welcomes professional genealogist Janette Silverman
'We can't restore the people that are gone to life, but we can restore them to living memory'
A May 17 program with the Jewish Genealogy Society of Pittsburgh will enable members to learn more about a historic schlep and the need to preserve history.
In the late 19th century, a Jewish family traveled from Lithuania to Pennsylvania. After settling in Pittsburgh, several relatives relocated to Bisbee, Arizona.
Reaching the copper mining town took approximately 30 hours by train. The trip’s fascinating circumstances, which involve death, marriage, economics and diary entries, will be covered by Janette Silverman, a professional genealogist and JGS’ guest speaker during the upcoming Zoom presentation.
Speaking with the Chronicle by phone from New York on her way home from a conference in Vienna, Silverman, an Arizona resident, described her love of genealogy.
“It’s about the serendipitous find,” she said. “It’s about discovering new family and finding out information that you didn’t know you didn’t have, answering questions that you didn’t know you had, resolving mysteries that you didn’t know existed, and that’s what genealogical research is.”
Silverman, 75, heads a team of specialists in Eastern European and Jewish genealogy at AncestryProGenealogists, a division of Ancestry.com handling private client research. She’s held the position for nearly 11 years but charts her interests in the field much earlier.
In her 30s, she and her father would “go to the New York Public Library and the New York City Municipal Archives. We would go page by page. We would get whatever we could on ship manifests and just turn pages, turn pages on U.S. census records, sometimes looking at thousands of pages of documents,” she said. “My dad was and is my favorite research partner. He’s now 99.”
Much has changed since Silverman’s initial interests. Even with the advent of the internet, however, certain aspects remain the same.
Digitization affords certain access and ease, “but it does not preclude the necessity to visit archives whenever possible,” she said.
Sometimes pages are electronically recorded but not uploaded, or documents are stuck together and don’t scan. For various reasons, seeing pages in print remains an essential genealogical exercise, she said.
Preserving Jewish stories is a personal penchant of Silverman’s.
“Our history was cut off to some degree by the Holocaust,” she said. “The people that were murdered during the Shoah, the survivors in the family, didn’t always talk about those who were murdered and the ancestors of those who were murdered either because it was too painful, or because they just didn’t know.”
In various cases, post-war immigration exacerbated silence. Relocation led to cessation of contact and information was lost.
“The same thing happened with our ancestors, with our families, and I feel an obligation,” she said. “We can’t restore the people that are gone to life, but we can restore them to living memory.”
Such practice and ideas trace their origins to Boethius, a sixth century Roman statesman, whose work, “The Consolation of Philosophy,” notes, “But if you think that life can be prolonged by the breath of mortal fame, yet when the slow time robs you of this too, then there awaits you but a second death.”
“By saying people’s names, by finding out a little bit about them — where did they live, what did they do, when did they live — we’ve restored some of their story to our story. We’ve made the connection,” she said.
Steve Jaron, JGS’ president, told the Chronicle he’s known Silverman for more than a decade and is excited to welcome her for the program. He encouraged readers to register and learn more at www.pghjgs.org.
Silverman’s talk, which will provide material for seasoned genealogists and neophytes, relies on a singular principle.
“Genealogy is not a timeline. It’s not just points on a timeline,” she said. “When we’re kids and we do our family tree in school, all we see is the one dimensional names and dates. Our own family tree is our living history, and the lives of our ancestors are as rich as ours.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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