Showing posts with label jew. Show all posts

Tombstone Tuesday - the Ehrenfried family

No Comments »

Mike Coleman was recently in the Auckland City Harbour News. His ancestors headstones were one of the 20 recently vandalised in the Jewish section of Symonds Street Cemetery.

In the article, Mr. Coleman mentioned that the Ehrenfried’s were early Auckland settlers and related to him in a direct line on his father’s side.

I thought it would be an interesting little to task to see what we have immediately accessible through our website on this family.

Searching our Symonds Street Cemetery database I found references to Elizabeth Davis Ehrenfried, Louis Ehrenfried, and Bernhard Ehrenfried. We have a photograph of their headstone at the library.
  
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries


Our Auckland Area Passenger Arrivals database has a C. Ehrenfried and a J. Ehrenfried from the Addresses to Sir George Grey, stating they arrived in Auckland in 1862.

Louis Ehrenfried/ Ehrehfried is on the 1881 Electoral Roll with properties in the Waikato, Newton, and Thames (note the different surname spellings, I find it pays to search with browse if it’s an option).

There are mentions in Papers Past to the family, notably a business, Compbelle Ehrenfriede Co. Ltd., but also the attempted rape of Louis’s wife.

A search in our indexes, Index Auckland and the New Zealand Card Index, revealed a wealth of information on the family. These are abstracts to resources we have here in the Central Auckland Research Centre and can be accessed for free by coming in or requested online.

And this is just the very beginning...

Bridget

Shalom! Happy Hanukkah!

No Comments »

Jewish ancestry?


“Why New Zealand? Some had heard of Australia but New Zealand? 
For me it was absolutely the right decision – there was no where further away from Germany...”
- Hansi Silberstein in Promised New Zealand




 The eight-day Jewish holiday, Hanukkah (the festival of lights) is celebrated this week, in commemoration of the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.

This year, Hanukkah runs from Saturday December 8th until sunrise on December 15th and while there has never been a large Jewish population in New Zealand, there are certainly resources to help you start your research if you think you may be able to lay claim to Jewish ancestry.



Gary Mokotoff’s Getting Started in Jewish Genealogy (we have the 2011 edition in our collection) is recommended by New York’s Museum of Jewish heritage (and their www.jewishgen.org website).

Mokotoff shows how you can trace ancestry on line and he describes a search he conducted on a family (going back 200 years) using familiar sites such as www.ancestry.com with its Ellis Island databases.

While Kiwi Jewish ancestors are less likely to have travelled via Ellis Island, in our collection we do have several books to mull through, such as guides to cemeteries and how to read headstones (in Auckland, both Symonds Street and Waikumete have Jewish sections), and especially relevant to our country, stories of post World War 1 Jewish immigration (such as Freya Klier’s Promised New Zealand.)

Interestingly, a couple of our prime ministers can lay claim to Jewish roots– Sir Julius Vogel was a practicing Jew, and John Key has Jewish ancestry via his mother, an Austrian immigrant.

If you’re looking for aids to begin your research, use the Central Auckland Research Centre call number on the catalogue, which is... 1 GEN REL JEW.

Bring on the potato latkes and Mazel Tov in anticipation of some excellent finds.

Joanne

Additions to the South African family history collection

No Comments »

The Central Auckland Research Centre has 13 new family history eBooks on CD-Rom about South Africa including:


Diaspora to Diorama: The Old Slave Lodge in Cape Town
Brothel, lunatic house and slave lodge – the building at the top of Cape Town’s Adderley Street’s many functions under British and Dutch rule are explored in this eBook. It also includes the register of the slave lodge census of 1714, and the death register of lodge slaves spanning 60 years.
 
The Lonely Island
Tristan da Cunha, a tiny island in the mid-Atlantic - the most remote inhabited archipelago in the world - was annexed by the British Empire in 1816. This eBook gives an account of life on Tristan da Cunha written by the wife of Missionary Priest Henry Martyn Rogers who landed there in 1922.

British Residents at the Cape 1795-1819
This eBook documents British pioneers who made the Cape their home during the first British occupation 1795-1803, and the second occupation beginning in 1806 - after which the country remained a British Colony until the Union of South Africa came into being in 1910.
 
South African Jewish Year Book 1929
This first South African Jewish Year Book includes over 700 biographies as well as documenting many aspects of Jewish life such as The Jewish Gold Pioneers, United Hebrew schools, Jews of Griqualand West and Bloemfontein Jewry.

The beauty of such eBooks, is that they are keyword searchable, so you can search for names and places.


These eBooks come from online publishers Ancestry24, (no connection to Ancestrydotcom) who also have a very large amount of online South African genealogical records.


LR


« Previous Entries