Genealogy series offers Jewish seekers the root stuff

East Bay residents comprise a big chunk of the local chapter of the Jewish Genealogy Society. But they haven't had a meeting place of their own.

A four-week course in Berkeley to help students trace their own roots may change all that. If enough new sleuths sign up, the group will get a site of its own for monthly meetings.

El Cerrito psychologist Sheila Becker, a self-described "wandering Jew," has put together the course for others like herself who need a boost to climb their family trees. Sessions began Tuesday.

"I just heard Salman Rushdie talking about the 20th century being the century of migration," Becker said. "My family left Palestine for Vienna before World War I, and returned in 1935, and resettled in Canada in 1951. Then, nationalist struggles finally propelled us to California."

Both Becker and her husband, U.C. Berkeley geophysicist Alex Becker, are only children.

"We're two little peas that have crossed the ocean and cultures," she said. "My husband's family is from Vilna, and he was the only Holocaust survivor out of a family of 30. Quite a few of our people were working and probably killed in the Vilna Ghetto and Lithuanian work camps."

Becker has lined up four speakers, experts in genealogical research, for "Getting Started on Your Family Genealogy," which runs Tuesdays through June 1 at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center.

"Sheila is focusing her series on the beginner, although it doesn't take long to move up to the next step," said Sita Likuski of Castro Valley, membership chair of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Jewish Genealogy Society. "I'm sure everyone who sticks with the series will join."

Rodger Rosenberg, a San Francisco social worker and president of the chapter, said family genealogy is the "fastest growing hobby in the U.S. today."

With nearly 300 members, participants turn out for monthly meetings at San Francisco's Fort Mason Center to hear speakers as well as to meet others from the same land of origin. Nearly two-thirds of those attending drive in from the Peninsula, Marin or the East Bay.

Most are Ashkenazim. And they are increasingly younger in age.

The thrust of the East Bay series -- European records -- is timely, said Rosenberg. "When people begin doing this research, they get so enwrapped in census data and so on, and they forget about the people themselves. I always say, 'The records will always be there, but the people will not.' The thing you really want to do is find the oldest living relative you've got and interview them before it's too late," he said.

Becker added: "Also, we've gone from nurture to acknowledging nature as an important component of who we are. For instance, my son has perfect pitch. Experts told us we should, using perfect pitch as a hereditary guide, be able to pinpoint a handful of people in Poland in the 1600s. I'm hoping in due course we'll find out who it came from."

Many say their children spurred their interest in family history.

Rosenberg began his informational trek when his son Mark, now 7, was born. He now has a database of some 700 relatives, "and I didn't know about at least 98 percent of them before."

Said Likuski: "As people hit their 50s, they become more interested [in family origin]. But over the last few years, we see more and more people in their 30s and 40s. Kids do a family tree in middle school, so then the parents get involved. And we're losing our survivors."

The organization offers the armchair traveler plenty of tools for transit.

For instance, there is a "soundex," a tome that lists every conceivable transliteration for the names of towns a researcher may only have heard spoken once -- or not for many years. And there's a calendar converter that transposes dates from the Hebrew calendar to the lunar calendar. The Shoah Oral History Project offers extensive guidelines for collecting oral histories.

Then, there's JewishGen, an online digest Rosenberg calls "the end-all of all Jewish Web sites."

"It's huge," he said. "You can plug in the name of a shtetl and find out who lived there before the war."

JewishGen does both macro- and micro-searches. Its Family Finder enables searchers to locate family members by inputting a single surname -- which led a man with the unlikely name of Nunez-Vaz to find the part-Sephardic Likuski, whose maternal family sojourned from Portugal to Curaçao to Panama, where she was born.

"It brings the circle a little closer in," Rosenberg. "Sixty years ago, one-third of the population was wiped off the earth. Yet, we're still here."

All these tools and more are available to members at the JGS library. The organization just acquired library space at the Institute of Masonic Studies at 11 California St. in San Francisco.

And, "We network," she said.

"I have nothing but good to say about this whole thing," said Likuski. "It makes real communities out of people who are otherwise just sitting at their computers."