do you have any recommendations for jewish genealogy research? i'm a bt and my family destroyed almost all records of their judaism during the holocaust (even changing their names) and i feel like i'm hitting a roadblock
Jewish genealogy can be REALLY hard unfortunately and some of it may well be lost forever in cases like yours. :( The two sites I’ve mainly used for genealogy research are Ancestry and Geni. There’s also a site called JewishGen or something like that but I never had much luck with it. Both will let you access some info for free and then offer a 2 week free trial of their paid versions (so if you ever have a lot of free time for a couple weeks you can gather as much information as possible for free and then cancel the membership before it starts charging). The paradoxical thing is that the more information you already have, the easier it is to find more information, and vice versa. :/ With the Jewish side of my family, I had a really hard time finding stuff until I got a bunch of names my father already had, and then I started turning up a lot more new info. But yeah, I would basically try plugging in any names you already have (ask every possible relative if they know anything, as well) and seeing if anything turns up. Also, a tip, both of those websites will sometimes put up a paywall for certain info if you click the link to it from their site, but if you are able to find the same page via a Google search and click to it from there, it won’t have a paywall.
