IJN obituary data online

THE genealogy craze has come home to intermountain Jewry, and in a big way.

Thanks to dedicated and hard-working Denver genealogist Terry Lasky and the Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado, a wealth of new genealogical data is now available online.

Wealth to the tune of more than 15,000 obituaries, culled from the pages of the Intermountain Jewish News from 1918 to 2011, virtually every local obituary the newspaper published over the course of those 93 years.

Family tree researchers who go to JewishGen, the national Jewish genealogical website, or to that of the Denver Public Library, have free access to much of the information included in the original articles — given name and surname of the deceased, date of publication, date of death, place of burial, names of survivors, usually including spouse and children, and sometimes grandchildren and siblings.

Many IJN obits also include the birth date and birthplace of the deceased, sometimes even the deceased person’s parents. That information is also available online if it was included in the obituary.

The obituary index will also indicate whether the deceased person is listed in JOWBR (the Jewish Online Worldwide Burial Registry, a part of JewishGen) or in FindAGrave, a national registry of burial places.

For the genealogical sleuth, immediate access to such a plethora of information amounts to a lot of potential limbs and branches on the family tree they are trying to assemble, not to mention valuable clues that could open up entirely new avenues of research.

The obituary information is of obvious value to “any Jewish genealogist who has a family member who either died, previously lived or was buried in Denver — anybody with any tie to Colorado,” Lasky told the IJN in a recent interview.

“Some of the obituaries are a person who was born in Denver and hadn’t lived here for 30 or 40 years. What it will mainly give you is who their descendants are. It will also give you some birthdates and where people were born, but mostly it’s about descendants.

“The thing about that is contacting a living relative who can give you information on their portion of the family line.”

Lasky illustrates: “When you’re researching, trying to find when your family came across or something, you may not find one for your grandparents but you’ll find one for your grandfather’s brother or your grandmother’s sister. If you don’t know who those people are, you don’t know how to search for it.”

Although online researchers in the archive won’t be able to see the actual obituary as it was originally published — nor will they see whatever information the article might have about a person’s education, profession or community involvement — they can contact Lasky via email or come to the IJN offices to view its archives.

At the IJN, one can see the original obit, and Lasky will be happy to provide copies of those original obits, since he’s kept a well-ordered file of them all, and perhaps even provide a copy of a photograph of the obituary subject, if one was originally published.

LASKY, a retired database architect for Martin Marietta, has been compiling regional genealogical data — strictly as a volunteer — for years, usually as projects for the Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado of which he is a longtime member.

He has gathered, organized and posted, for example, more than 6,000 names and accompanying information from gravestones at Rose Hill Cemetery. He has performed similar “tombstone projects” at a series of other Jewish cemeteries in Colorado and eight other Rocky Mountain states.

In addition to all that, he often does personal genealogical research for individuals and families, a pursuit in which he has discovered the value of easy access to published obituaries. He has delved repeatedly into the archives of the Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post and other newspapers to access otherwise unavailable information.

The IJN idea came to him after the gigantic Rose Hill project was over.

“When it comes to Colorado I couldn’t think of anything better than IJN obituaries,” he says. “I thought it would be nice if I had an index.”

So he created one.

Beginning in 2008, Lasky began visiting the Western History section at the Denver Public Library and newspaper archives at the Colorado Historical Society, both of which have at least partial microfilm repositories of the IJN.

One of the first things he discovered was that early copies of the newspaper (then called the Denver Jewish News) had very few, if any, obituaries. Only by 1918 did the newspaper begin running them on anything resembling a regular basis.

All of Lasky’s searching, except for the three most recent years of the paper, was done on microfilm. He perused the recent issues as hard copies because microfilm hasn’t been done on them yet.

It was a time-intensive process to index a grand total of 15, 347 obituaries, to put it mildly.

“It wasn’t the poring over the microfilm that took me so much time,” he says.

“I would take the microfilm and go through looking for obituaries and I’d make copies of those pages. I would do anywhere from a year or two in a couple hours. But then I would take them home and that’s what took all the time.”

At home, he would catalog the information in the obits — the dates, places, and names that make them valuable to researchers.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how many hours I spent,” Lasky says. “I would guess that I would put in 15 hours every week for two or three years.”

Why, he is asked, would he go to so much trouble, and spend so much time, without getting paid for it?

“Trying to help people,” he replies without a moment’s hesitation. “A lot of other people have done projects that helped me in my research, my family tree, so this is a pass it forward.”

Not to mention the fact that Lasky passionately loves losing himself in the seemingly infinite records and documentary evidence that constitute our collective past.

“I love research,” he says. “Genealogy is a passion. It’s what I like.”

LASKY is far from alone in his passion and fascination for ancestral information and lore. Genealogy has become not only popular but very profitable in recent years, with websites devoted to family tree researchers doing big business.

It has even hit the cultural mainstream, with a genealogical TV show, “Who Do You Think You Are,” highlighting the ancestral explorations of celebrities, earning big ratings.

“The advantages of digital technology has had a lot to do with it,” says Lasky, who started his research “in the old days when you had to go through an archive and sit there and write,” and knows only too well how much easier it is today.

Television has also helped further the fad.

“When ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ first came on television, within three to six months the membership of just about every genealogical society in Colorado increased by 50%. It was that dramatic. That show has done more for genealogy than anything else that has happened.

“And of course, Ancestry.com’s popularity as a site has really pushed it.”

ALTHOUGH Lasky has problems with “Who Do You Think You Are” — it makes research seem much faster, easier and more fun that it really is, he says — he credits it with inspiring a great deal of interest in do-it-yourself genealogy.

He’s also a devoted user of online information made available by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) which has long collected vast troves of genealogical information.

“For Jews, it’s a love-hate relationship because they do some very bad things that a lot of Jews are upset about,” he says about the practice of some Mormons to perform post-mortem “conversions” on Jews whose names they have indexed.

“Still, they’re doing more for genealogy than anyplace else.”

Besides, Lasky isn’t about to discourage any organization that is doing its best to preserve fragile historical documentation. It worries him that original drafts of records are usually paper — vulnerable to all sorts of  dangers — and that even microfilm, subject to everything from scratches to brittleness, is also a temporary medium at best.

“If there were a fire in your office,” he illustrates darkly, “there is no other copy of those newspapers. All there is is the microfilm. The microfilm is a great back-up, don’t get me wrong, but there is no other back-up.”

The same concern applies to Lasky’s next and current project — an indexing of the records of Feldman Mortuary, ranging from the mid-1930s to the present day, a significant portion of which are currently in paper form only.

Although the Feldman index will surely duplicate a lot of the information Lasky has already collated in his cemetery and IJN indexes, it will provide yet another level of information, and another piece of the complex puzzle that constitutes the story of the generations who came before us.

Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News