JEWISH GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY, INC. Contact: Steven Siegel / 212-415-5544 / swsiegel@pipeline.com “The Jewish Calendar Demystified” and “Searching the New York State Census with Fewer Tears” To be presented at Jewish Genealogical Society meeting on Sunday, April 13, 2008 The Jewish Genealogical Society will present “The Jewish Calendar Demystified” and “Searching the New York State Census with Fewer Tears” on Sunday, April 13, 2008, at 2:00 PM. The guest speaker is Stephen Morse, developer of web-based family history searching aids. The program will be held at the Abraham Joshua Heschel High School, 20 West End Avenue at 60th Street, Manhattan. Subway: A, B, C, D or 1 to Columbus Circle. There is a $5 admission charge for non-members. The Jewish calendar is important to genealogists because Jewish vital records use the Jewish dates. This includes not only birth, marriage, and death certificates, but tombstone inscriptions as well. The Jewish calendar is both a solar and lunar calendar, with the months being synchronized to the moon and years to the sun. As such, the rules governing the calendar can be a bit daunting. This talk presents the calendar in an easy-to-understand – and sometimes tongue-in-cheek – fashion. The aim is not to make you an expert in computing Jewish dates (we have programs that do that) but rather to give you an appreciation for what’s involved in such calculations. Topics covered include the 19-year calendar cycle, the origin of time, errors in the Jewish and secular calendars, and the use of Hebrew letters to represent dates on tombstones. There were several state censuses taken in New York starting from 1790. The most valuable for genealogical purposes are the 1905, 1915, and 1925 censuses because that was a time of large influx of immigration. There were numerous assorted aids for navigating through those censuses, but they were often hard to use, covered only specific years or boroughs, and were not available at all libraries. The One-Step website rectifies that situation by putting a universal finding aid on line that covers all the boroughs of New York City in each of the three census years. This presentation describes the One-Step approach and contrasts it to the previous methods. Stephen Morse is the creator of the One-Step Website for which he has received both the Outstanding Contribution Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, and the Award of Merit from the National Genealogical Society. He has also received the first ever Excellence Award from the Association of Professional Genealogists. In his other life Morse is a computer professional with a doctorate degree in electrical engineering. He has held various research, development, and teaching positions, authored numerous technical papers, written four textbooks, and holds four patents. He is best known as the architect of the Intel 8086 (the granddaddy of today's Pentium processor), which sparked the PC revolution 25 years ago. The Jewish Genealogical Society hosts monthly programs held at the Center for Jewish History. Members of the public are invited to attend these events and to join the organization, which was founded in 1977. For further information call 212-294-8326 or visit www.jgsny.org. # # #