Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain Blog

Our next meeting in the JGSGB Virtual Meeting Programme is from the JGSGB Dutch & Sephardi Special Interest Group (D&S SIG) by Zoom. • Date: Sunday 18 April 2021 • Time: 14:00 London; 09:00 New York; 16:00 Jerusalem • Title: Stories from the Archives – the Lara and Furtado Families; From research to publishing – a personal journey • Speaker: Pearl Foster • Description: Real-life stories of the Lara and Furtado families of Georgian England. They were people who brushed shoulders with the good, the bad and the godly and often fell foul of the law. They married with the Disraelis, met the Adams brothers and the Byrons, leading lives sometimes heart-warming, always fascinating. About Pearl Foster ================== Pearl Foster was born in London and moved to Bristol for teacher training and to read for a degree in economics and sociology. Her career in education was followed by ten years as a registrar of births, marriages and deaths. She h...

Our next meeting in the JGSGB Virtual Meeting Programme is from the JGSGB Dutch & Sephardi Special Interest Group (D&S SIG) by Zoom. •       Date: Sunday January 17th 2021 •       Time: 14:00 London; 09:00 New York; 16:00 Jerusalem •       Title: Genesis: An Indian Childhood – a beginning and an ending •       Speaker: Margery Cohen •       Description: Margery Cohen was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) to parents of Baghdadi origin.  She will talk to us about what it was like growing up in India, within a very mixed cultural society, in the twilight years of the Raj. . Margery went back to Mumbai on a tour organised by Jewish Renaissance, and was inspired to write an article for Jewish Renaissance about her childhood and early memories.  It was her first trip back to her birthplace after 45 years.  For the first time since she lived there, she was able to...

Our next meeting in the JGSGB Virtual Meeting Programme is from the JGSGB Dutch & Sephardi Special Interest Group (D&S SIG) by Zoom.   Date: Sunday 20 December 2020 Time: 14:00 London Title: Sephardic-Nordic-Noir Speaker: Bernard Miller Description: Think Sephardic Jews and you are unlikely to think Viking. So when, early in his family history search, Bernard found Danish, Swedish and Norwegian relatives sprouting on his family tree, usually related by marriage, he assumed most were paternal Ashkenazi one-offs even if they showed as connected through his mother’s Sephardic side. After all, most of that lineage came from Spain, Portugal, Holland and Belgium. Even after becoming aware of the German Sephardic community based around Hamburg, he was not expecting to uncover Sephardic blood relatives in Scandinavia. A series of apparently random discoveries and a set of astonishing coincidences proved his initial assumptions wrong and show he has many more Scandinavian Sephardic ...