Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain Blog

Due to the bank holiday there will be no Sunday meeting on 2 May, but coming next in the JGSGB Virtual Meeting Programme is a meeting from the JGSGB Chilterns Regional Group (RG) by Zoom. Here is the information for this meeting: • Date: Tuesday 4 May 2021 • Time: 19:30 London (note, 14:30 New York, 11:30 San Francisco, 21:30 Jerusalem) • Title: Crypto Jewish Governors & Viceroys of Portuguese India • Speaker: Bernard Miller • Description: The first one seemed like an aberration. The second might have been a mistake but by the time he had found half a dozen, there seemed to be a pattern. Several lines of Bernard Miller’s Sephardic ancestors whom he had traced back to 15th- and 16th-century Portugal seemed to contain Governors and Viceroys of Portuguese India. Like so much in genealogy, initially it appeared counter-intuitive. Many of the individuals appointed by the Portuguese Crown to represent it and govern its colonies came from Jewish ...

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 ...

After the excitement of the Limmud and The Together Plan conferences on 2nd Aug, our next meeting in the JGSGB Virtual Meeting Programme is a General Meeting by Zoom. Date: August 9th 2020 Time: 14:00 London Title: “ Geni.com ; The Good, The Bad and The Utterly Ghastly” Speaker: Bernard Miller Description: When Bernard Miller spoke on 12 July about some of the remarkable family stories that had emerged from his volunteering to be a guide at the Anne Frank exhibition last year, he mentioned his use of geni.com . Geni.com is the Marmite of genealogy programmes. Several members had questions about how he uses it, some talked of their bad experiences. Bernard has spent more years than he cares to remember involved in research, including periods at the UN and the UK Parliament and the European Parliament and finds it a valuable tool which he uses and hates, but not as much as he hates some of the other genealogy programmes, one in particular. He has offered to speak about how he uses g...