Randol Schoenberg's video: Collaborative Town Projects on Geni com

Lecture on Collaborative Town Projects on Geni.com from the 34th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Salt Lake City, Utah, July 30, 2014. This lecture is for people interested in connecting to other families from their ancestral village. The recent development of specific town projects on Geni.com has opened up new avenues for collaborative genealogical research and tree-building. Combining the benefits of KehilaLinks, JewishGen FamilyFinder and the Geni family tree platform, town projects provide a useful way for genealogists to work together on genealogies and Jewish community histories related to a specific location. The lecture will discuss examples of large and small town projects, including Krakow, Frankfurt, San Francisco, and Prague. (For further examples, see http://www.geni.com/projects/Jewish-Genealogy-Portal-A-Guide-to-Jewish-Projects-and-Resources-on-Geni/13121.) Attendees will learn how to set up and organize their own town projects and invite collaborators. Specific attention will be given to the emerging view of generational family structure and interconnectedness in smaller Jewish communities, using well-documented examples based on 150 years of family records for the towns of Kolodeje, Bohemia and Kojetin, Moravia. E. Randol Schoenberg, randols@bslaw.net, is a board member of JewishGen and the Co-Founder of JewishGen's Austria-Czech Special Interest Group. He moderates the Austria-Czech mailing list and website, and is also the author of the Beginner's Guide to Austrian-Jewish Genealogy and the co-author of Getting Started with Czech-Jewish Genealogy. Schoenberg is a volunteer curator on Geni.com, and one of Geni's most active users, managing over 100,000 profiles Professionally, he is an attorney and serves on the boards of various philanthropic, artistic and educational organizations. He presently serves as President of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.