Ken Bravo, a retired attorney, is Vice President of the IAJGS and a past president of the JGS Cleveland. He is also a member of the Ohio Genealogical Society, the East Cuyahoga County Genealogical Society and the Association of Professional Genealogists. He was one of the co-chairs of the 2014 IAJGS conference in Salt Lake City.

Ken is a frequent lecturer on a variety of genealogy subjects. He has been searching his own roots since the mid-1970s and, in more recent years, has added the families of the spouses of his four children to his research.

Educators Forum*: “The Nuts and Bolts of Jewish Genealogy for Beginners” (Sun-136), 10:15-11:15 A.M.

This is a program designed to help those who are new to Jewish genealogical research, as well as those who are more advanced, to get practical tips and hints on where and how to look for clues and data. Sources will include: immigration records, naturalization records, census information, newspapers, cemetery records and many others. Some of these are the basic resources common to any  sort of genealogical research, but some are more uniquely Jewish. Jewish sources will include: newspapers, cemetery records, records of Jewish organizations such as burial societies and many others.

Category: Beginning genealogists

*The combined fee for attendance at the full conference and the Educators’ Forum is just $365 during early on-line registration through April 30. If one wishes to attend the Educator’s Forum only,  registration fee is $50 per person.  See http://www.iajgs2016.org/educators/

“Finding Frida, a Holocaust Survivor” (Tues-137), 4:30-5:45 P.M.

This program demonstrates, using mostly the Internet, how to discover relatives that you did not know existed and how to track them down.

I started with only these facts: my grandfather had a brother who had married my grandmother’s sister; neither of them had left Russia; and the family had perished during WWII. I found newly posted information on Yad Vashem.  That led to locating various records written in Russian; searching Google looking for family in St. Petersburg, Russia; and, ultimately, locating surviving family and finding additional family members in the United States and Israel.

Topics: Holocaust research

Sleepless in Seattle: “The Journey of One Photograph: 15,000 Miles in 90 Years” (Weds-162), 9-9:25 P.M.

In the course of locating relatives in my mother’s family (none of whom had been known to survive the Holocaust), I received a family photograph from a Russian relative who had made alyiah to Israel.  The photograph was simply labeled “Mispoka” and no one in my family had previously seen it.

In reviewing the photograph with my sisters and cousins, we immediately identified my grandparents, my great grandmother, and my grandfather’s siblings and their families.  We were able to date the photograph to about 1928 by the age of one of the children and realized that the photograph had traveled from St. Louis to Belarus, then to St. Petersburg, onto Israel, then by email to Cleveland, Ohio and finally to a family reunion on New Brunswick, NJ.

This program uses that photograph as the jumping-off point for exploring records relating to the immigration to the US from Belarus of my grandfather’s family.