 Welcome to the Jewish Roots Project on WikiTree for WikiTree Day 2023. The Jewish Roots Project is over 100 members strong. It includes both Jewish and non-Jewish members alike who enjoy the added genealogical challenges of working on Jewish profiles. So what is the mission of this project? Our mission is to improve all profiles of ancestors with Jewish roots, which may include biography building, sourcing, and making connections. To collect in one place information and resources to assist in building and documenting Jewish genealogies. To bring together WikiTreeers interested in connecting Jewish families to the WikiTree Global Family Tree. To maintain a logical and organized structure to help individuals identify their ancestors and celebrate their history. This last one we're going to touch on a little bit later in the program because we want to make sure that we have full resources to our members so they can find sources and meaningful biographies. If you scroll down to see the box lined in green, this will tell you how you can get in touch with us as well as how you can join the project. So answer our G2G welcome post to join the project. And once you click on that link, it will bring you to G2G. Our only requirement is that you have signed the Honor Code with WikiTree. As you scroll down, you'll notice there's answer this post button in green. Click on this button and tell us that you would like to join the project and we'll get in touch with you. Once you join the project, you'll receive this project badge for Jewish roots. We have a lot of work that we're working on and including our notables, adding more resources to our research resources information. We want to have global resources for our members and anybody in WikiTree or outside WikiTree to come to so they have one place to find the information. Create new location categories in towns where Jews traditionally lived. Create a list of historical programs and other deterrents for Jews, for example, international laws relating to persecution. Make new categories when it's appropriate for the profile. In cemetery work, we'd like to make a record of places of burial for each person who is in our family tree on WikiTree. And if the headstone contains Hebrew writing, we would like it to be translated. And if you do have a photograph of a tombstone and you believe that it is Hebrew writing, keep that in mind. We're going to discuss how we can help translate that. So all are welcome. As you go through the profiles, we do ask that you add the Jewish roots category where it's appropriate by adding the sticker. The sticker always goes just below the biography header. If you have a profile that you believe needs to be managed by the project, then just reach out to us and let us know. And we will look at the profile and determine whether it needs to be managed by us or if it just needs the Jewish roots sticker. Let's talk a little bit about the resources. So for resources, we'd like to collect every resource that you would need to complete a Jewish roots profile. That includes finding the resources for conventional records such as the birth, the death, immigration records, for example, in the United States, census records. And I'm just going to scroll down so you can see some of the different types of resources that we offer. This is a list that we'll always look at to find details, but also we could add more resources to this page as we find them. After we get the conventional records, we can use some of these resources to go a little bit deeper and get oral histories. Maybe local Jewish genealogical societies have information. We could list those here so you can contact them for more details about a family, a location, or a person. And as I scroll down, you'll see that we have links for several different countries. Not everything is online, so we do mention if it's not. There's some reading. There's some books that are not online as well. And also as I scroll down, you'll notice the Holocaust is listed. We do have a Holocaust project on WikiTree that is in companion with this, and we invite you to join the Holocaust project as well. Now, we do have some challenges when it comes to Jewish names and searching for these sources. This is just a really quick reference of given names. I'm going to scroll down so you can see our table. It's not comprehensive, but it does give you a lot of names that are typically found. We can always add more names as we come across them. If you notice the table at the top will give you the columns and what we're looking at. So let's take something like Abraham. So Abraham that we might know in English would have a different name as a Hebrew name translated. Now for Hebrew, it would be spelled this way. You also have Yiddish variants. Now when you come over to the United States, the name might change completely. So what you might be looking for in a census would be Abraham. It could be Albert, for example. I'm just going to scroll down the list to give you an idea of some of the different variations of names that you might not be familiar with. And one of the ones that I really want to point out is down towards the bottom of the list. So for Judah, you might look in a census or you might look in any type of source repository for this name. So it could be spelled in these three different ways. And that's okay. You might be able to find that information in the source, but it could also be spelled a completely different way than you expect. So it could be Louis, Leo, Leon or Julius. And if you were just looking for Judah in a census, you might miss this person and think, well, there's Julius, but that can't be the same person or there's Leo or Leon. And this table just kind of lets you see the different variations of names that you can find. A good example would be Mark Cuban. So shorting the name and anglicizing it. And Cuban was a name that was originally Kibitzky. Another good example of a Jewish notable is Scott Turo. And the original family name was Turovesky. So we do have a little bit of challenges. We're looking through the names to see how they were spelled previously and then now how some families have shortened their names. And this is a really good example of his dad. And how we make sure that we put both variations so they can be found in search and no duplicates are created. As we move along talking about resources, this particular page just lists resources that you can access, databases and different types of groups. I wanted to point out that the meaning of tombstones is also a really good resource that we have. Once you click on that link, it'll take you to another page outside of WikiTree. But it's a really good blog entry that kind of explains what you might be seeing with photos on tombstones. If you're somebody who goes to a cemetery and documents the cemetery, photographs, surveys it, you might see symbols like this and you're thinking, I don't know what this is. If you're seeing this type of symbol, chances are you're looking at someone who is of the Jewish faith and look into detail that you see. So if you take a photograph at a distance to get the entire tombstone, try and make sure that you also get a little bit closer so you can get all this wonderful detail and the next photos really show the detail. So for this particular one, it also has Hebrew writing. And look at the detail of the bookshelf, the book. If you do not know Hebrew and cannot translate this, the Jewish Roots project can help you out with that. So as we come over to the categories and the maintenance categories, these are very similar to what other projects have on WikiTree. For example, if you see the unsourced Jewish Roots unsourced, it means there's no sources. We need to add sources to this particular profile. If you see needs more records, that means there might be a source, for example, of birth but we need more records and more sources to complete the entire profile. If you see needs profiles created, that means that we need to add more family members. We already know there's more family members to add, but for some reason the person who created the profile did not have the time to add those family members. And then here's this, these gravestone transcriptions. So if you do come up and find a tombstone that has in Hebrew and you need it transcribed, feel free to put this category on it. You do not need to be a member of the Jewish Roots project to use this category. I know that a lot of our members do survey and photograph large cemeteries at a time and they might not be part of this particular project, but they can still use this category as they create the profile and add the tombstone picture to it. This just lets us know that there are some gravestones that we need to come in and transcribe and when we see them, we'll go in, transcribe them and put that information on the profile. So these are just a few ways that you can help our project out. Again, you do not need to be Jewish or have Jewish roots to join us. You just need to want to help the project out. And like the work of a little bit more challenge, we do also have a THON team. So if you have done a Connect-a-THON or Source-a-THON, we have a new THON team that you can also help out with. Team Locayim, you do not need to be a member of the Jewish Roots project to be on our THON team. So next time that you see the Connect-a-THON or Source-a-THON, think about joining us. We're a brand new team and we are still building as we go and adding more profiles with the Connect-a-THON and sourcing more profiles with the Source-a-THON. And Locayim means to life. So it can be said during a toast or heard when watching, Fiddler on the Roof. So I invite you to join our project. Just come down to our main page, click on the G2G post and we will be in contact with you. Thanks for watching our program on our project and enjoy the rest of WikiTree Day 2023.