Searching in the real world for forefathers

Welcome!

Hopefully some of the ancestors you've entered so far have been entered by others who have found more relatives so you'll be merged into their trees.

If you can afford it, I would get a subscription to Ancestry.com as well as they have a lot more info than MyHeritage.com that supports Geni. It mostly has family websites, with limited databanks for researching people unless they just happen to live in very specific areas like Utah, California and the like.

If you have not already started with the Jewish Gen (www.jewishgen.org) JRI-Poland database, that's where I would start. If you are lucky, there will be records going back to the early 1800s for your town and maybe even further back.

Learn about the town? How many families lived there? If it was a small town and your family was there for 120 or more years, then you will be related to some or all of the families who settled there early. I make projects on Geni for towns and areas that my ancestors came from and start learning about ALL the families. The pattern is for rabbinical families to marry cousins and other rabbinical families, so I learn about all the families that mine married with.

I would consider DNA testing also. There just are not records for most of us Ashkenazi Jews to trace our ancestry and surnames are very new. I would do first Y-DNA and then an autosomal test. Look for others who have shared DNA segments with you over 10 cM who are from that town or towns in the vicinity. That may give you additional surnames to consider.

I am a Rubenstein by the way (Volhynia Gubernia, Ukraine) and there is a Rubenstein branch of the Alperovich / Heilprin family. There is a project on Geni about the Alperovich.

Hi Hatte Blejer, thank you for the info. We are Rubinstein "Kohanim" were your forefathers Kohanim? please if you have time google 'elimelech rubinstein'
and for Jean Hageman first thank you for replying, We pooled our resources and this is how far we got. now I want to go further, since there was a few wars, prosecutions etc. it's much harder to find. then the language barrier doesn't help either.

Hi Nachmen Boruch Hakohen Rubinstein, I don't know if my Rubenstein ancestors were kohenim. It's actually the name of my great grandmother. My great grandfather's surname was supposedly "Reib" which probably means rabbi. Similar to Rabinowitz. I know that he was very observant and that he and his relatives founded a house of prayer for the Jews of Muscatine, Iowa where they settled and that he was a leader in his synagogue in Alton, Illinois. His name was Mordechai and his father's name was Menachem Nuchem, names borne by the Chernobyl Twersky Rabbi and his son, and given the birth years of my great grandfather and his father, I assume that they were followers.

Interesting that my wifes Maiden name is Rabinowitz she is a granddaughter of Premishlan Rebbe of sunderland (Margulis) later in London.

I am a descendant of the Margolis of Lithuania. Probably not related to your wife's Margolis family. That's on my father's mother's side whereas Reib / Rubenstein is on my father's father's side.

they are descendants of the "Mateh Ephraim" rebbe Ephraim Zalmen Margulis.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10405-margolioth

That's your wife's family but my Margolis family, which consists of a number of famous rabbis, in Lithuania may not be connected with the Polish rabbinical family of Margoliot. We are the subject of a book by Dr. Neil Rosenstein and supposedly are descendants of the Maharam of Padua R' Meir ben Itzkhak Katzenellenbogen.

http://chfreedman.blogspot.com/2008/07/death-in-venice-seeking.html