Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland

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Sunday November 18, 2018
Save the date for our next meeting!

Please join us on Sunday, November 18, 2018, at 1:30 p.m., at the Pikesville Library’s meeting room, 1301 Reisterstown Road, Pikesville, to hear Manuele Wasserman present “Legends and Lore of Lost Generations: Problems in Sephardic Genealogy.” Manuele Wasserman’s family was exiled from Egypt in 1956 at the time of the Suez Canal crisis. Before settling down in the United States, the family lived in France and South Africa. Their story of loss, resilience, and hope inspires much of Manuele’s genealogy research. However, in tracing the Sephardic branch of the family, Manuele has found that concrete information is elusive, and much remains untraceable. Without access to accurate records, Sephardic family stories are often prone to embroidery or what we can dub “legend and lore.” Her presentation will show how the family’s tales, migration patterns, and traditions created a rich tapestry of collective history.

Tracing the “facts” of that history remains a more difficult task. Having engaged in extensive research on both her husband’s background and her own, Manuele will focus on the particular challenges of Sephardic genealogy in comparison to Ashkenazi genealogy. She will discuss the field of Sephardic research in general and the available resources. She will provide insights as to why this particular topic can be fraught with pitfalls. By looking closely at the issues of Sephardic genealogy, we can all be made aware of the importance of documentation when researching our ancestors’ pasts. Thus, issues in Sephardic genealogy can be more broadly applied to all our genealogy quests.

Manuele Wasserman is a member of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland. She was born in Egypt and is a Sephardic Jew. She and her husband are avid genealogists and have embarked on numerous projects exploring the different branches of their respective families in an effort to discover how it came to be that a nice Jewish boy from Baltimore married a girl from Egypt. Their family tree now numbers over 1500, with some branches reaching back as far as the early 1600s. As an adjunct to this project, they have traveled to numerous countries to do on-site research, thereby learning in depth the local history of their Jewish ancestors.

The program is free for paid members and $5 for non-members (applied to JGSMD membership fee) after their first meeting. Please check our web site at www.jgsmd.org for late updates and for the time, location, and program of future meetings.

Past Programs

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Upcoming Programs

Please visit our programs page for details on our 2013-2014 programming schedule.

News Tidbits

JGS Maryland has been reconstituted!
JGSMD had its initial meeting on Sunday August 18, 2013 to see if there was interest in the group's reconstituting. The turnout was overwhelming, with 31 people attending with only a few days' notice. Look forward to new programming over the next year!
Some of the attendees: