Brooke Schreier Ganz is the founder of Reclaim The Records, a not-for-profit activist group that uses state Freedom of Information requests to return genealogical records to the public.
As the former Vice President of Gesher Galicia, she designed and built their website, including its innovative “All Galicia Database.” The underlying search engine codebase, named “LeafSeek,” was released by Brooke as a free open source project, for which she won second place in the 2012 RootsTech Developer Challenge.
She further refined “LeafsSeek” to build the bilingual “All Israel Database” for the Israel Genealogical Research Association (IGRA).
She lives in California.
“Reclaim The Records – How to Use State Freedom of Information Laws for Genealogy” (Mon-124), 3:00-4:15 P.M.
Tired of being told by state and local archives and government agencies that your family’s genealogical records are “unavailable” to the public, or only available if you visit them onsite? We were too, so we figured out how to do something about it. We’re Reclaim The Records, a new activist group that filed a first-of-its-kind Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) legal petition in the Supreme Court of New York against the NYC Municipal Archives, for access to twentieth century genealogical records…and won!
We also secured the first-ever public release of the indices to hundreds of thousands of vital records from the New Jersey State Archives. And we’re filing many more requests against city and state agencies, large and small. This presentation will tell the story behind these cases, walk through the legal basics of FOIL, and teach genealogists how to file their own FOIL requests for their own records.
Topics: Repositories, Open records activism
“Converso Genealogy Project: Tracking the Diaspora of the Iberian Forced Converts” (Tues-167), 7:30-9:30 P.M.
The objective of The “Converso Genealogy Project” (a multi-tiered project) is to consolidate the work that has been done on large segments of Spanish and Portuguese Jewish populations who were converted to Catholicism during the 15th century. Some people fled and joined Jewish communities in the East and others established communities in Western Europe and in the New World. Many were lost to recorded history.
The project will garner information on the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Diaspora as well as genealogical information matching contemporary descendants to their forced-convert ancestors.
The project intends to compile in one place, information that has been scattered in multiple sources, languages, repositories and countries throughout the world for centuries. It will find a home for all the work that historians, researchers and serious genealogists have done. Aside from the obvious contribution to Jewish genealogy, this will equip historians with data enabling them to rewrite entire chapters of Jewish history.
[Presented with Abraham Gross, Sallyann Sack-Pikus, and Genie Milgrom]
“Using the Gesher Galicia Website and All Galicia Database to Research Towns and Families” (Thurs-135), 7:30-8:45 A.M.
Come along on a tour of Gesher Galicia’s award-winning websites! They’re a one-stop resource for people researching their families and ancestral towns from the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, which is today split up between southeastern Poland and western Ukraine.
The main website features new content and resources for 400+ Galician towns and 2700+ Jewish Galician families. It has nearly 100 searchable online articles and 50+ full PDF issues from almost two decades of “The Galitzianer”, Gesher Galicia’s long-running quarterly publication about Galician Jewish life.
Learn about our “All Galicia Database” with its 380,000+ records available for free searches, our unique searchable inventory database of 1700+ record sets from multiple archives, the Gesher Galicia Family Finder and its hundreds of family names, and our newly added members-only features like the Rabbi Kolesnik papers, lecture videos, and unique historical articles.
Topics: Ashkenazic research, Repositories, Galicia (Austro-Hungarian Empire), Technology in support of genealogical research