By Susan Weinberg -
One of the sites that often helps to crack open a genealogical puzzle is stevemorse.org. Steve Morse has a number of claims to fame. In his career he was the architect of the 8086 Intel chip. He brought his computer expertise and inquiring mind to his exploration of genealogy and quickly saw that the search engine for many genealogical sites could be improved. He does not create databases, but rather has found better ways to mine existing databases.
His site has grown over time and it now addresses the following topics:
Immigration
Census (US, NY, Britain, Canada)
Soundex Codes
Vital Records (B-M-D, Naturalization)
Calendars and Maps
Transliterating in Foreign Alphabets
Holocaust
Genetic Genealogy
Each of these categories consists of many links so I thought I’d share just a few with you, in particular the ones that I’ve used to solve puzzles.
One of the early sites he addressed was Ellis Island. The early version of the Ellis Island site allowed limited inputs on which one could search. Morse observed that they had many outputs which meant that those items were associated with the record. He went to work building a better front-end search engine that allowed more complex searches on those variables. Since his initial efforts Ellis Island has increased the number of search variables, but there are still things one can do on Morse’s site that you cannot on Ellis Island.
Immigration Records: Searching the Town
Example: My family story was that my grandmother traveled with her younger brother to the US. She was reportedly shot at crossing the border and ended up in a hospital in France. I finally found her immigration record coming from Boulogne sur Mer to Rotterdam. Her brother was nowhere on the manifest. I had searched many avenues for his record to no avail.
Based on my grandmother’s data I was searching for a Kishlansky who came in 1921, born in Chotin from the Rotterdam port to New York. I went intoEllis Island and input this information. I found that I had to input a surname so used all of their options for sounds like, close match and alternate spelling with no success. When I received nothing I gradually began to remove constraints with still no success.
Then I turned to stevemorse.org and tried the same inputs on the Ellis Island Gold Form. Still no success. But there is one more trick to explore. I removed the name thinking it could be misspelled or badly transcribed. This time I got about 300 entries and as I went through them one by one I saw Elia Rishlansky with his wife Golda. When I clicked on the name there was a nicely typed manifest, not one that you would expect to be misread, but the top of the K didn’t appear leaving the transcriber to conjecture it was an R rather than a K. Had they looked further they would have seen that his nearest relative in Europe was his father Abram Kishlansky and he was going to his brother Frank Kishlansky. The date of his manifest was one week after that of my grandmother. Presumably they started out together, but in an age without easy communication perhaps they didn’t connect after her hospital stay.
Immigration Records: Missing Manifests
I had searched in vain for an uncle of my grandmother. I knew he had lived a few years in London before coming to America. I also knew the ship he came on and the dates he left and arrived as they were noted on his naturalization record I had found at the National Archives office in New York. Even with that information, his manifest remained hidden.
Finally I made use of the stevemorse site beginning with the Ship Listing Database. I input the information from the naturalization record, the name of the ship and a band around the arrival date. I then got listings on several voyages of that ship. I selected the one that most closely corresponded to those dates and recorded the roll and frame numbers that came up. Then I shifted to another site on stevemorse – Missing Manifests. These manifests exist, but for whatever reason weren’t indexed or linked such that we can access them easily. I input the roll and frame numbers and then started to move through the pages one by one. Soon I made the discovery I was searching for. There his name was on the manifest coming from London to New York. It was difficult to read the initial letter which may be the reason it was not linked. To get a copy of the manifest, I entered another name on the page and pulled it up in Ancestry.
Vital Records: Finding my Grandparents Marriage Record
Steve Morse offers a number of resources to track down vital records. Many of them make use of Italiangen.org, a site not exclusively focused upon Italians, but rather New Yorkers. As most of us had some family that originated in New York this often proves useful. Italian Gen is constantly adding records. For many years I searched in vain for my grandparents’ marriage record contemplating if they were ever actually married. I knew their oldest child was born in 1918 and my grandfather arrived in New York in 1913 so I was focusing my search in that window. One day I decided to try just one more time.
Success! I went into the Grooms’ Index and input my grandfather’s last name and first initial. I clicked through the brides until I came to my grandmother’s name. With the index number and the family history library microfilm number I was then able to locate the actual marriage record through the Family History Library.
Transliterating to and from Russian or Hebrew
Transliterating is valuable in a number of circumstances. When I travel to Eastern Europe to do research in archives I often transcribe the given names and surnames that I am looking for into cursive Russian so my eye knows what to look for. When I plan to wander around cemeteries I transcribe the names to Hebrew text. Even from the comfort of my home I often find Polish records (written in Russian) that are on-line, but in a folder with other records. Before I post them on Viewmate for translation I want to be sure that they are the correct record. To this end I type out the name that is in the JRI-Poland index. Then I use Morse’s English to Russian tool to get it into Russian text. Note that you will get many entries. I just select the first. Then I do the additional step of converting Russian Print to Cursive which often looks quite different than the typed text. I then compare the text to what shows up in the record to determine if it matches. I don’t worry about endings that may vary.
Tombstone Dates
One of the puzzles that I was interested in solving was aimed at uncovering the story within the data. I had found my great-great grandfather’s tombstone. I knew he died in 1904, the same year as my great-grandfather came to America. I assumed my great-grandfather waited until his father had passed away before boarding the ship, but wanted to confirm that.
To this end I first pulled up the tombstone on the Jewish Online Worldwide Burial Registry. He didn’t have a last name recorded so I entered his given name, Pesach Mordechai, and the town of Dunilovitchi. It brought up the Hebrew date, but written in English so I used the Jewish Calendar Conversiontool. Sure enough my great –grandfather came to the US shortly after his father passed away. Note that if the date was taken from the tombstone and was in Hebrew letters, I would have used the Tombstone Dates tool which has Hebrew inputs.
In each of these cases, I was able to crack the code by using stevemorse.org. These are just a few ways in which you can make use of his tools. Now put his site to work on your mysteries.