After talking with my mother and aunt about our family tree I headed to Ancestry.com to compile a visual. Working my way through this site made me realize how much more judicious my decisions have to be when I am researching and connecting family. My great grandmother whose maiden name was Pauline Anna Müller, came up in databases as Pauline Mueller, Pauline Miller and Carline Muller. It was difficult to match census records from 1900 and 1920 due to the handwriting, spelling and incomplete data.
It also helped greatly to have my living relatives a phone call away to check on facts like birth dates, immigration dates, death dates and social security numbers. After going through this process of checking dates, names and locations in the census reports and connecting documents it has helped me greatly in finding information on the Children of the Lodz Ghetto site.
Many of the features of the Ancestry site can be applied to the Lodz Ghetto research site:
A visual family tree: Connect a family together
An address: Find out who lived there, tracking the migration or deportation
The Leaf Icon: This gave the researcher a hint on Ancestry.com for what records are out there that matched the persons name or birth date in your tree. Sometimes it matched sometimes it didn’t. An icon could be developed for the Lodz Ghetto inhabitants and that icon come up when matching records might be present.
Perhaps from these records researchers can build a better holistic database linking not just individuals with their past but perhaps a whole family?
Neil O Ward 