Intro to Jewish Genealogy Fall 2026
Hosted By: My Jewish Learning
Everything You Need to Build Your Family Tree
4 Thursdays from 7:00 – 8:00 p.m. ET, Oct. 15 – Nov. 5
(And recorded)
Make this the year you finally construct your Jewish family tree!
Expert researcher Nolan Altman, the director of data at JewishGen — one of the largest Jewish genealogy databases in the world — has teamed up with My Jewish Learning to help you get started on your journey back in time.
In this four-part online course, you will cover the following topics:
You’ll use actual historical documents and photos from Nolan’s family history as a guide, and you’ll learn the best ways to start gathering information about your family, through vital records, oral histories, naming patterns, census records and more.
Headstone inscriptions provide insight into patronymic naming patterns and can be an enormously helpful tool in genealogical research. Nolan will go through an actual case study using headstone inscriptions and will show participants online resources to help find headstone information worldwide. He’ll also explain the meaning of symbols that you will find on stones, and even if you can’t read Hebrew, he’ll explain how you can understand the inscriptions.
It’s not unusual to hear from people that lost relatives and friends due to the Holocaust that there are no records available for them to find. Well, that isn’t always true. With more and more archival files undergoing indexing projects, there are a significant number of resources that you should be aware of. As coordinator for JewishGen’s Holocaust Database, Nolan will show you what is available through the JewishGen site and at other Holocaust resources.
Each registrant will get to keep recordings of each class session so you can refer back to them as you research on your own.
So let’s get you digging!
This class was made possible in part by the generous support of the Birthright Israel Foundation.
