RLP 378: The Jewish Board’s Unique Collections – Interview with Gavin Beinart-Smollan

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 378: the Jewish Board’s Unique Collections Interview with Gavin Beinart-Smollan. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (41s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hello everyone and welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (49s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (52s):
I’m doing great. And what’s going on with you?

Diana (55s):
Well, I’m excited to tell everyone that I have finished the book I’ve been talking about for months, which is Women and the Law of Property in Early America by Marilyn Salmon. And it has been such a good book. It’s been so eye-opening. I’m going to actually write a little blog post about it and then we’ll probably talk more about it in-depth on the podcast. But I have learned a ton and my biggest takeaway is that the law and women and the law of property from the colonial era of the US through today has just changed a lot. You know, the US was based on common law, which means it can change, statutes can change it. And so it’s been really fascinating to see the progression and sometimes regression when sometimes things got worse for women.

Diana (1m 40s):
So it’s been, it’s been great.

Nicole (1m 42s):
Cool. So over time, case law influences the changes and probably the creation of statutes. But yeah, that’s interesting about the common law changing over time. Of course.

Diana (1m 54s):
Absolutely. And a lot of it was just because of economics that there were some things that they thought just weren’t really good for the economy of their state or, you know, wherever they were. And so they had to change the law a bit, which would affect women such as dower. You know, sometimes if the dower was going to entail the land, that wasn’t great for the economy ’cause they’d have to wait for the widow to die before they could do anything with it. And so in some areas they just took that away. They, and you know, even though it was traditional, they kind of changed how dower works. So anyway, lots of really good examples and things to dig into.

Nicole (2m 30s):
Well, good job finishing that and congratulations on getting it all done. And I look forward to hearing more about what you learned.

Diana (2m 37s):
Thank you. Well, let’s have some announcements. We’re excited for our next Research Like a Pro webinar, which will be Tuesday, October 21st at 11:00 AM Mountain Time. Our presenter is Melanie Whitt, and the title for this webinar is Parents for Ellen Cecilia Scott: a 19th-Century Irish Immigrant DNA Case Study. So this is all about this woman, Ellen, who is an orphaned Irish American born in 1860. She had conflicting historical records about her origins and parents, and using autosomal DNA analysis, pedigree triangulation and Gephi network graphs, along with Ancestry DNA data, the researcher was able to identify her genetic networks and traced maternal and paternal lines to specific US and Irish localities that revealed candidates for both parents despite the lack of official records.

Diana (3m 34s):
So this will be so great because those Irish Americans can be incredibly difficult to trace back to the homeland there. Melanie is a professional genealogist with a master’s degree and UK accreditation. She specializes in international research and DNA analysis, having solved biological family identity cases for clients. We are excited to think about our next Research Like a Pro with DNA study group, which begins in February of 2026, and it’s never too late to start planning ahead and thinking about further education and especially working through your own project with DNA with us and a group of peers.

Diana (4m 17s):
If you’re interested in being a peer group leader, please see the application and let us know. We’d love to review that and see if you’d be a good fit for our team. If you would like to know what is going on with us, get the latest blog posts, and podcast episodes and YouTube videos, please join our newsletter. It comes out every Monday. And we are also looking forward to the next conference, which is the Texas State Genealogical Conference. And that is virtual, so anyone can register and watch that online. It’s November 7th through 8th. Nicole’s teaching two lectures, one about tax records and one about AI and genealogy.

Diana (4m 59s):
And I am teaching two about writing focused narratives and then one about cluster research for a female and using DNA when the records perish. So we’re excited about that and that’s a fun conference with a lot of really great topics that you might be interested in. So check it out.

Nicole (5m 18s):
Yes, the Texas conference will be really fun. Well, I’m excited that we have a guest today. Hi to Gavin.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (5m 26s):
Hi, thanks for having me.

Nicole (5m 28s):
And a little bit about Gavin. His name is Gavin Beinart-Smollan. He is a public historian in residence at The Jewish Board, one of New York State’s largest and oldest mental health and social service agencies. He is the project lead for the agency’s digital history exhibition and genealogy database, and it’s called 150YearsofCare.org. Gavin is also a PhD candidate at New York University where he researches the history of Jewish immigration and the Jewish immigrant family. He grew up in New Zealand and now lives in Stanford, Connecticut with his family. So to get to know Gavin a little bit more, let’s ask him, how did you get started with family history?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (6m 12s):
Yeah, thank you. So it kind of happened in tandem with my own dissertation research and this work that I’m doing for The Jewish Board. So in in my own research, I just became very interested in the practical experience of migration, how, how did migration actually happen and work on the level of the family, on the level of the individual. But also, you know, my research is about, it’s about Yiddish letter writing. It’s about how do people communicate with each other? How did families stay together as a family unit, even if they lived on opposite sides of the world in a time before telecommunication? So, and then on the, on the professional side, You know, I’m, I’m not a professional genealogist, I’m a public historian.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (6m 56s):
I guess I, I like to think of myself as a professional historian and a very amateur genealogist. But, you know, as a public historian, I think that genealogy is so powerful to bring people into history because it gives people a direct connection to whatever history that, that we’re trying to, to share and to teach as histor, as historians. Not just in general, you should be interested in this, but you should be interested in it because your family was part of this story. And that I think is just really powerful.

Nicole (7m 29s):
That is really powerful. And it reminds me of when I was a history teacher in middle school for a short time, how we, we tried to do that in our classroom and it was really fun. The kids were learning about World War II and so connecting their family tree back to their grandparents and great grandparents wasn’t too much of a stretch for them at their genealogical level of being a beginner and interviewing family members about what they were, you know, remembered from that era. But I love that. So it’s neat that as a public historian, you’re, you are working on things that do connect to genealogy as far as the letter writing. I mean, any genealogist that has letters from their families thinks of it as like gold or treasure.

Nicole (8m 11s):
So it’s neat that you can connect those two disciplines.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (8m 15s):
No, it really is treasure. I’m very lucky to have such rich material and, and to be able to, to, to mine it like that. The letters are just absolutely fascinating and I, I spent a very long time with them and I haven’t gotten bored of them yet.

Diana (8m 29s):
Well, the interesting thing about letters, you, you read them, but then you’ll get started on a project and you’ll return to those and have new insight once you learn more about the family. So you do, you can return to those over and over. So they are amazing source. I am so interested in talking about two of the different websites that we’ll talk about today that you are instrumental in. And the first one is called the National Desertion Bureau Card Catalog, which covers the years 1911 to 1935. So just a little blurb about that. It’s an index to cases pursued by the National Desertion Bureau, an agency that helped women track down husbands who had abandoned their families.

Diana (9m 15s):
Each entry typically includes the husband’s and wife’s name, the date a case was opened, the referring agency, the recorded cause of desertion, the disposition and case file number. And from the database listeners can request the corresponding YIVO or YOVO archives case file at no cost. Okay, well this is a fascinating card catalog or collection. So can you just tell us more about it and, you know, give us a little bit more of the history of this?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (9m 48s):
Yeah, sure. So the Desertion Bureau is this really fascinating organization that was one of The Jewish Board’s predecessors. And if you can imagine the, this, this comes into being in 1911, at the turn of the 20th century there, there’s a huge wave of, of Jewish immigrants, I think it’s 1.4 million between the 1880s, East European Jewish immigrants, between the 1880s and, and the first World War. And they’re fleeing poverty in Eastern Europe. And then, you know, we, we kind of, we kind of imagine that immigrants are very successful when they come to America.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (10m 27s):
In reality, many, many people struggled greatly when they came here and they dealt with poverty. They lived in tenements in New York City. There was terrible overcrowding. And of course that has a really terrible effect on the family unit. So you can imagine family, a lot of children, husband and a wife, maybe some boarders crammed into a small, a small tenement apartment. No one’s making enough money they possibly can’t get by, even with multiple members of the family working. And so that creates an enormous amount of tension and it it, it leads to this problem of desertion of men, typically men, although sometimes it was women, also men running away from their families and kind of just, and and we can discuss the reasons for why, but, but leaving women and children essentially destitute, it was at that time extremely hard for a woman to support herself and raise children at, at the same time.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (11m 31s):
So Jewish communal leaders in particular start to notice this. They, they think it’s a crisis and you know, it, it’s not that this is a Jewish only issue at all. This is a, an immigrant issue, an issue with poverty. But these Jewish communal leaders paid very specific attention to it because they were worried about antisemitism. They were worried, you know, what happens when suddenly large numbers of Jewish families need welfare and they’re very visibly poor. And, and so in order to, to tackle this, they felt it was embarrassing, so in order to tackle this, they created this organization called the National Desertion Bureau and, and notice that it’s, it’s not called the Jewish Desertion Bureau.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (12m 16s):
They, they did that on purpose, you know, because they didn’t want to draw attention to this as a Jewish issue, but it, it helped mostly Jews, although actually in the later years that it became a, a resource for a lot of other communities as well. And so the Desertion Bureau’s job was to track these men down and try to force them to financially support the families that they had left.

Diana (12m 43s):
Well, that is absolutely fascinating and it makes absolute sense that they are fleeing antisemitism. I mean, I’m sure that’s a reason why they would come to The States, you know, they’re trying to get out of Europe where that was so rampant and they don’t want to start that again here. So I had never thought of that. That is really interesting. I am guessing that when they first started doing this, that they were just, of course they’re just keeping paper files, but they must have kept really good records of all of this.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (13m 13s):
They, they did keep really good records. Interestingly, the administrative records of the organization are missing, but what we do have are these incredible case files and it’s, it’s actually unclear how many there are in this particular database. From 1911 to 1935, we have over 19,000 case files and they contain just the most remarkably rich material about, not just the desertion case, but also ordinary people’s lives, their photographs, details about their family, how they interacted with charity, how they interacted with the state. It’s really an amazing resource, the kind of information that you really can’t find anywhere else for, for, you know, just regular immigrants.

Diana (14m 2s):
Such a good lesson to us as genealogists that there’s always something else to learn from and to look at in the matter of records.

Nicole (14m 11s):
Okay. This is really neat. So I wanna kind of circle back to The Jewish Board and can you tell us a little bit more about what The Jewish Board is and why does this Jewish Board, a mental health and social service agency have a genealogy database?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (14m 28s):
Right. So The Jewish Board is not a history organization at all. The Jewish Board is focused on the present, on helping on helping New Yorkers in need access mental health and social services. I believe it’s one of the biggest in the state, but last year it was, it was the organization’s 150th anniversary and so I got involved in this project to create a digital exhibition and a and a bunch of other things for the organization. And you know, as as I, it, it just so happened that we, that that we have this such rich genealogical material as part of our, as part of the archives of the organization.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (15m 8s):
And as I said before, what better way of connecting people with the organization then to, to give them a personal relationship with it. And, and you know, too often I think as a society, when we talk about people in poverty, when we see people struggling with social issues, we as a society can be very judgmental. We can say, you know, why can’t they just fix it themselves? Why can’t they just pull themselves up by the bootstraps? And that’s the kind of stigma that I think a lot of the Jewish Board’s clients face. And so one of the ideas is to help people who are comfortable, who are better off, to see that actually in their own past, their grandparents or their great-grandparents, they also, they also struggle, they also need needed help from organizations like The Jewish Board.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (15m 55s):
And so then it becomes a very present tense goal of we’re we’re trying to help cultivate empathy for the next generation of people who need the services that they need.

Nicole (16m 8s):
I love that. And it reminded me of a guest blog post that we had a while back by Sarah Clift about her work with homeless people and how she really felt that helping them draw on the strength of their ancestors would help them with their struggles. And so that was, her company was Olive Branch Connections and helping research trees for people. So that’s really neat that that’s kind of the same energy that The Jewish Board is coming from with this database.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (16m 37s):
As a historian, I just feel like history and genealogy is, is a tool that we need to use to understand ourselves in the present and to improve things for the future. That’s kind of the whole goal of this project.

Diana (16m 48s):
I agree. And it can be very healing for people to learn about the past and regardless of what stories they find, just to connect with those ancestors. Well, so in this data that you’ve got in this collection, you’ve touched a little bit on some of the information that could be there. And I am guessing that it is unique for each case. Oh, excuse me, I am guessing it is unique for each case, but maybe can you give us an example of what could be found, something specific that might be interesting?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (17m 24s):
Sure. So there’s the card catalog itself, and then there’s the case files. So the card catalog was created by the Desertion Bureau itself to help manage its cases. You know, they’re just little, you can see on the website, they’re just little index cards and a, as you mentioned before, they have in all ca, in all cases they have the name of the couple, the case number, the date of the case opening and the referring agency. But then there’s also, some of them have more information like where the decision occurred, if the man was located, where did they find him, the disposition, meaning what was the outcome of the case. And then the most interesting, I think is the perceived cause of desertion.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (18m 5s):
And it’s only recorded on about 4,000 out of the 19,000 cards. But it’s just, it’s such a rich little piece of information. It’s usually only two or three words. And the, the causes of desertion are really fascinating. The, the biggest categories are another woman, that’s why men ran away, that’s the most popular one, another woman. But then things kind of like we were talking about before, lack of support, incompatibility between the couple, laziness, bad habits, interference of relatives, that’s that, that’s my favorite one I think.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (18m 48s):
And gambling, drinking, things like that. I mean, you have to remember that these, it’s the stated cause of desertion because it’s what the woman is reporting to the desertion bureau. What the actual cause is we don’t know because they didn’t necessarily ask the men why they left. And and so yeah, these are the, these are the big categories, but then there’s all kinds of weird stuff like listed in this, in this field like “Broadway high life” is one of them, or you know, the one, the wife is Jewish and the husband’s not Jewish, or they didn’t like a specific place that they lived in. There’s so many different reasons and you know, I, I encourage people when they go check this out, not just to look for their own ancestors, but you couldn’t actually download the whole data set as a CSV, as an Excel file.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (19m 38s):
And then you can look through all of these different reasons and see, see them in-depth. That’s the card catalog. And then the case files are much more lengthy, usually. Sometimes they’re very short, but sometimes they have really a wealth of information, especially when the men are, what what was termed chronic deserters, they ran away multiple times and the agency is chasing them across the country over a course of, of many, many years. So you usually, so you see the a questionnaire, the woman sat down for an interview, so you see the questionnaire that, that they filled out based on the woman’s answers.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (20m 19s):
And then there’s a lot of correspondence because the Desertion Bureau had a, an enormous network of affiliates, agencies in the United States and internationally that they used to track down these men. So you see all of that correspondence, you see photographs of the family, you see business cards, you see information that other people provided. It’s a really, really rich and fascinating source.

Diana (20m 44s):
And those men thought they could just disappear and they had no idea.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (20m 48s):
And if you think about it, at that time it was, you know, this is before social security, and bureaucratic tracking of individuals that that kind of entailed, it’s before the internet, so it’s pretty easy to actually just disappear. And so the fact that the Desertion Bureau was able to track down so many of these men is kind of a remarkable feat of organization and, and detective work.

Diana (21m 16s):
Absolutely. That is just fascinating. And I would imagine that anybody doing their family history and they come to a situation like this where all of a sudden the woman is just by herself. You know, we run into these all the time wondering what in the world happened and how neat would it be to be able to go find the ancestor in a database like this and then get a file with the backstory. I mean, this would just be amazing. So I love those examples that you shared of the different types of things. And I am just chuckling at the causes of desertion. I don’t, they’re not really funny, but those poor women, you know, so many different things. So, you know, laziness, bad habits, let’s just lay it on.

Diana (21m 58s):
So, oh my goodness. So interesting.

Nicole (22m 2s):
Right. I think it’s interesting, and I’m glad you pointed out Gavin, that the informant was the woman on the cause of desertion. Because that’s one of the things we’re always looking at is what kind of information do we have? Is this primary information or secondary? And of course the woman doesn’t always know why the husband left, but she has her guesses. So that would be secondary information. But it is telling us something about what the woman believes about her husband. And usually like, like you said, mom, we don’t always know the why behind the actions that our ancestors took. So whenever there’s some kind of questionnaire or something that was filled out with, with information about the why, it’s really interesting and exciting.

Nicole (22m 42s):
I love the pension applications that we have for our family and they have questionnaires too. And sometimes those are just really interesting to finally get an insight into the why why did these things happen beyond the, beyond the data that we are finding in census and tax and land records. Well, you mentioned how the Desertion Bureau had an affiliate system. Can you tell us a little bit more about how the Bureau functioned and how successful it was?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (23m 13s):
Yeah, sure. So it had this, this network of affiliate organizations all across the country. And so a, a woman would typically come in, she wouldn’t come directly to the Desertion Bureau itself. Usually she would come to a charity, not immediately after the husband deserted, usually after many years sometimes. And I I should say that, you know, a lot of the information that we’re talking about today is based on a wonderful book by Annette Igra. It’s called Wives Without Husbands and I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in this topic. It’s kind of the only full length study of the National Desertion Bureau.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (23m 53s):
And what she found is that women typically tried their best to support themselves before they turned to charity. But then sometimes things got so desperate that they, they turned to organizations like the United Hebrew Charities, which is our first predecessor as The Jewish Board. We then referred them to the Desertion Bureau, they went to the offices of the Desertion Bureau in Union Square, and we have a fantastic picture on the, on the website of the woman sitting in the office. And they sat down for an interview. They gave as many details of their husband as they could to help the investigators of the bureau track the men down their physical characteristics, where they came from, how old they were, what they looked like, et cetera.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (24m 35s):
And then the agency would send out this information to its affiliates across the country to start looking for these men. And they would also advertise the cases in local newspapers. And most famously, they advertised the cases in a column in the Yiddish Daily Fovert called The Gallery of Missing Husbands, A Galeria fun Farshvundene Mener, in Yiddish, which basically was the mugshot of the man and a description of him. And the idea was essentially twofold: it was to shame the men into coming back and supporting their families, ’cause they were now being put on blast broadcast across, you know, to the millions of readers of these newspapers;

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (25m 21s):
and also to help get the public involved in tracking these men down. And of course the interest of the newspapers was also to entertain their readers. And these stories were quite scandalous. So they made, you know, they made good reading material for, for, for the newspapers as well. And, and you asked about, you know, how successful were they. Professor Igra who wrote that book, found that they, they were remarkably successful in tracking them in down and 75% of the time they were able to track them in down, they were remarkably unsuccessful at actually forcing them in to provide child support or to come back to their families and, and reconcile with their wives.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (26m 9s):
But that was kind of just the nature of the game. No one really was actually successful very much in achieving, in achieving that. But they did, they did manage to find them.

Nicole (26m 20s):
Wow, that’s really an interesting statistic that they were able to find them 70 per 75% of the time. But then, you know, the child support and the coming back was not able to be forced upon them.

Diana (26m 33s):
I can just imagine the people that are getting the newspaper and opening it straight to that column and saying, this person just showed up in our neighborhood. Is he, could this be him? I mean, can’t you just imagine, you know, the the gossip that would be going around if about a man just showing up in the area trying to see if he’s one of these. Oh goodness.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (26m 55s):
Yeah, exactly. And, and we have, you know, as part of the website, in addition to the database, we have a story of one particular family that goes through the case file of that one particular family, and you see exactly that. You see people writing in to The Fovert saying, I I know who this man is and I saw him in my neighborhood at x and y time, this is where he lives. They do, they do exactly that. And it’s really fascinating. And I would also just note that there is actually a separate database for the Gallery of Missing Husbands not created by The Jewish Board. It was created by someone called a, a wonderful genealogist called Michael Morganstern. And it’s on the website JewishGen.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (27m 37s):
So, you know, I recommend to people interested in this that they look in both places and then they can cross reference and see a fuller picture of the case. They can see the case advertised in the newspaper and they can see the, the case file itself, what was happening in the background.

Diana (27m 57s):
So to get the case file first, you have to learn how to use the card catalog, which is what is published online. So do you have any tips for searching the card catalog? What would be the best way to go about that?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (28m 10s):
So firstly, I would say unfortunately due to technical difficulties, we would not able to implement Sound X on this database. We, we did do it for the other database that we’re talking about, but for this one we didn’t. So people should really try to do a lot of variations, spelling variations, of their ancestors’ name. You can also download the whole thing as an Excel file and, and manipulate it that way if, if that produces better results. And we also have a filter system on, on the side so that you can search for a filter for a variety of different things like the referring agency, the location, et cetera.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (28m 59s):
So if you know the location, but maybe you don’t know the name, you can look that up. Or if you’re just interested in seeing cases, you know, that men desert because of laziness, you can, you can specifically search for that. And, and then, you know, as I said, this is just the, the cards itself, which they’re fascinating in and of themselves, but they’re also a portal into the full case file. And so once you click on one of these case files, you get a link to the YIVO archives in New York. And YIVO was a wonderful partner in putting this database together. They hold in a storage facility, all of these thousands and thousands of case files and they will go and look, they will go and look for the ca, your case file for you and not, and I should also just warn that not in all cases is there actually a corresponding case file to the card catalog, but a lot of the times there is.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (29m 52s):
And then they’ll send you for free the reference pictures of that case file.

Diana (29m 58s):
Oh, how wonderful. And how exciting that would be. So it sounds like you have to just have the specific spelling as what it is. I mean it’s not going to give you any spelling variations. So it, this is a case where you’re going to have to put on your thinking cap and think of the different ways you’ve seen the name spelled or I like the idea of just downloading the entire file and maybe even using some AI to help you to organize that and find things. But just for fun, I put in a filter of laziness to see some of these cards with laziness and, and here’s a Joseph and Rose Espinoits and cause of desertion is laziness, but happily two weeks later they were reconciled.

Diana (30m 42s):
So they must have worked that out. So amazing. It’s fun to see that you could put so many different things in the filters and I think it’s like any type of research that we’re doing, you have to just get familiar with the data set and how to work with it and then you get better and better. So just because you put in a name and it doesn’t come up with anything doesn’t necessarily mean your person’s not there. So I love the way this works though. It’s a beautiful website and it’s just so easy to work with. They’ve done a great job.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (31m 12s):
No, Thank you. They really did do a great job and, and we love how colorful and and fun it is even with this serious topic.

Diana (31m 21s):
Yeah.

Nicole (31m 22s):
When you search for the names, is it just the husband and wife’s names who are indexed or are there additional names of people mentioned in it? In the index?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (31m 34s):
It’s just the husband and wife’s names in the name search field, but sometimes, referred by, could be a name of an individual. So if you’re interested, if you come across someone who maybe referred people to the Desertion Bureau, often it’s kind of community leaders, like it’ll be a rabbi for example. Hmm. You can, you can put that into the referred by search bar on the side and try to find people that way too.

Nicole (32m 3s):
Okay. Yeah. And that would be neat if you have a rabbi in your family history too, to see him on some of the records as well. So you’ve mentioned that sometimes there’s a case file. What are the steps users have to take to request that? Is it a PDF form or is it an online request system?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (32m 24s):
It’s pretty straightforward. It is basically just an online form. There’s a link directly in the database that you click on it, which takes you to the YIVO website. It has a little description of of what to do. And then it’s basically an Airtable form where you can fill out, you can fill out actually a few names in case you have a, a variety of people that you’re interested in. I think it’s six that you can, that you can list and then you can choose to either get photographs of it, they’ll send it to you, or if you’re in New York City, you can actually go to the archive to the Center for Jewish History on West 16th Street and look and hold the papers and look at them in person.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (33m 4s):
Which I highly recommend if you’re able to do it because it gives you a much more visceral sense of, of the file.

Nicole (33m 12s):
I love the way you explain that and I feel the same way about holding original records. It’s, there’s nothing else like it, it’s really special.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (33m 20s):
Exactly.

Diana (33m 22s):
Well, let’s talk a bit about the ethics, and I think this is always a concern. So were there some ethical considerations? What would those be as you’re making this, you know, this is pretty sensitive information, or at least it was a hundred years ago, making this public.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (33m 40s):
It’s been a discussion essentially for the past 50 years really. And, and, and it, it’s kind of gone back and forward initially because of the sensitivity of the material. The files were very highly restricted. If you look at Professor Igra’s book, you’ll see that she’s changed all the names ’cause she was requested to, to change the names, to protect people’s privacy. But, you know, when The Jewish Board started its work toward a couple of years ago towards the 150th anniversary, this came up as one of the issues that we needed to deal with. And it was really a, a a in-depth conversation with the agency’s leadership and with the YIVO Institute that actually holds the files.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (34m 22s):
And, you know, eventually the, the decision was made that, and we also had a committee of academic historians who are our advisors, and we all kind of came to the conclusion that enough time had passed from the creation of the files. You know, these are up till 1935. So enough time had passed that the pros of opening the files up outweighed the cons, that it was not freshly painful information. And, you know, in terms of the pros of opening it up, you know what I hope more than anything is I imagine that it could be difficult for people, even though this is deep in the past, to learn about ancestors who abandoned their families, it’s, it’s, it’s not necessarily a nice thing to learn about your family.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (35m 10s):
But what I really, really hope is that people looking at these files, they discover things about their families that they did not know before. And it could be that the effects of the desertion a hundred years ago has affected their family until today in a variety of ways. We know how as genealogists how our ancestors’ decisions affect us to this day. And so I’m hoping that maybe in a lot of cases this material can provide answers for people and maybe some closure and maybe some, some healing as as you said, as you said before. And, you know, we definitely, we can’t excuse, we don’t wanna a apologize for these men who abandoned their wives, but I think looking at these files also helps people understand that the huge difficulties and challenges that their ancestors faced when they came to America.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (36m 4s):
And not to mention that, you know, if you focus on the woman, there’s some remarkable stories of resilience of these women who had to raise their children to, to support their families under enormous strain and difficulty. And then also had to advocate for themselves to the charities, to the state after their husbands left them. And so to recover the lives of these women, I think is a really a worthwhile thing to do,

Nicole (36m 34s):
To do well, I agree. I think that that is a worthwhile thing to do. And yeah, weighing the pros and cons, it is definitely probably helpful at this point, more than painful.

Diana (36m 45s):
Well, and I have to agree that just learning more about it, you know, at first it might be a shock for someone, but as you learn more about the situations, you come to a place within yourself where you understand and you can give your ancestors some grace for what they were going through and the situation. You know, we haven’t lived through that specific time. It’s hard for us to look at that without the lens of, you know, our 21st century eyes and situations. So that’s just all part of, of our family history, the good, the bad, and the ugly. We, we look at it all and we try to, as historians put it into context and make sense of it and, and really help us with our own challenges.

Diana (37m 26s):
So I think this type of information is so valuable and how wonderful that it’s now available.

Nicole (37m 34s):
So what is YIVO, the YIVO Archives? You’ve mentioned that a couple times, just give us a little background on that.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (37m 42s):
Sure. So the, the YIVO Archives is probably the, the premier and biggest archive outside of Israel of the Jewish experience. And they specialize particularly in East European Jews. I, I don’t have the figures, but they have millions and millions of records. They’re located in the building of the Center for Jewish History on W16th Street. And it’s really been fantastic to work with them. We also put on, in addition to this digital exhibition, we also put on a physical exhibition at YIVO, which unfortunately is no longer showing, but there is, if you look on YouTube, if you, if you searched a National Desertion Bureau on YouTube, you’ll see that we did a panel discussion with them, with Eddy Portnoy, who curated the exhibit, with Annette Igra who wrote the book about the Desertion Bureau and with Annie Polland, who is the president of the Tenement Museum in the Lower East side.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (38m 44s):
And I highly recommend watching that, that session because they provide really fascinating background information on the Desertion Bureau and how it worked.

Nicole (38m 54s):
Oh, wonderful. We’ll try to put that link in our show notes.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (38m 57s):
Great.

Nicole (38m 58s):
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Nicole (39m 38s):
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Diana (39m 57s):
Well, let’s change gears here and talk about another offering on your website, The Jewish Board, 150YearsofCare, and this is another database titled the United Hebrew Charities Recipients and Donors. So can you tell us a little bit about what this is?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (40m 16s):
Sure. So this is a, a much, much smaller database than the Desertion Bureau one. And I, I encourage people to go check it out even if they don’t think they have ancestors at around this time period. You know, just that they’re interested in early New York Jewish history, early history of, of charity. And so basically the, the United Hebrew Charities was formed in 1874, more than 150 years ago, and it kind of, it amalgamated about half a dozen smaller Jewish charities into this umbrella organization, which, and the idea was to make charity more efficient and more kind of quote unquote scientific, which we should talk about more.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (40m 57s):
But the, the timing is really important because the previous year, 1873, there was a enormous amount of banks that failed at the same time, which set off this nationwide financial crisis that came to be known as the panic of 1873. I’m sure some of your listeners have, have, have come across that before. And of course the poor people and poor immigrants especially were the most affected by this. And so if you can imagine in the 1870s, there’s essentially no safety net for people in need in New York City or probably anywhere else. There’s, there’s maybe a few public hospitals, but other than that, if you fall into hard times, if you get sick, if you lose your job, if someone dies you, you’ve kind of almost immediately thrown into poverty.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (41m 52s):
So in the 1870, You know, 1874, some of New York City’s Jewish elite decided to form the United Hebrew Charities to help its, you know, Jewish poor people. There’s obviously other organizations that were helping poor people of other denominations. It was very denominationally divided. And so here there’s the same issue of, or similar issue of respectability that we discussed worries about antisemitism that we discussed with the Desertion Bureau because these, these middle, more middle class Jewish people, more upper class Jewish people, they wanted to reduce the visibility of Jewish poverty.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (42m 32s):
They wanted to reduce the visibility of people begging on the street because they were worried about negative perceptions of Jews by wider society, what they would that would do to their own position and what that would do to the position of Jewish people in New York and in the United States at the time. And so this is a way to essentially get people off the street and provide them with support.

Diana (42m 57s):
So this started early with, in the 1870s just post Civil War and interesting that there was enough need. And of course there’s always going to be the poor, you know, there are always going to be situations like that. But I think the interesting thing about this is that there was the other side of the coin, there were those who were, were well off these Jewish people that wanted to have, have the Jewish community appear to be successful and not nuts or on the streets. So wow, what an interesting situation. And I haven’t done, you know, a lot of New York research and obviously none in the Jewish research arena.

Diana (43m 38s):
So I’m so glad that we’re talking about this and you’re just really teaching us so much about this.

Nicole (43m 44s):
Yeah, this is a really fascinating part of history and I actually was just thinking about the panic of 1873, with my ancestors in Texas at the time. And the impact for them of that was that the land values plummeted and you can really see that in their taxation and in the amount of money they were able to get from selling their land in the 1870s. And it wasn’t very much for per acre as compared to the rest of the country. So it is interesting to see the different effects of the various depressions and challenges, and the wider US history, that they had on different groups and communities of people, whether they were farmers in Texas or immigrants in New York.

Nicole (44m 24s):
And understanding that historical context is so valuable. Can you tell us a little bit more about the beginnings of the United Hebrew Charities? Like who was involved and just some more background on that?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (44m 38s):
Sure. Yeah, so there was, it really kind of ran the gamut of New York’s Jewish elite and we have actually in the database and on the map we have the donors. And so you can dig into exactly who was funding the organization. A lot of it was individuals, a lot of of it was, you know, societies, and some of the most famous names that people recognize of, of prominent Jewish people at the time are in this database, Jacob Schiff, the Lehman Brothers are there. And so they saw a need and they formed this organization in order to bring a lot of other organizations together that were kind of, they were worried about work being doubled up, money going to places that shouldn’t go to.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (45m 26s):
And so this was the beginnings of a professionalization of a charity, which eventually, you know, that’s really the 150 year history of The Jewish Board, the, the slow professionalization of the organization from the charity into into more social services as well.

Nicole (45m 43s):
Wow. Yeah, that’s interesting.

Diana (45m 46s):
So what was the source material for this database? How did this get started?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (45m 52s):
I was in the archive trying to think about what we would present as part of this digital exhibition. And we had, you know, this, there was material in the YIVO archives, we have our own internal archive, a lot of administrative records, a lot of annual reports, a lot of descriptions of how the organization functioned. Even as people who love history, we know that that stuff can be quite dry. And then one day I came across this, you know, we’ve all had these, I’m sure you both had these eureka moments in the archive where you’ve been searching and searching and you find something that’s just pure gold.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (46m 33s):
And this is probably, you know, I’ve done a fair amount of archival research in my life and this was kind of probably my most exciting find ever. It’s not that it was my find, other people had found it already, but it was very exciting for me because it’s this, it, it’s this tiny little booklet, it’s a ledger handwritten and very difficult to read script that this charity worker had recorded the recipients of the United Hebrew Charities with notes with the amount of money that they’d been given and with their addresses, which was really, really fascinating and enabled us to put this also on a map.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (47m 15s):
And then in addition to that we decided to put the donors, the donors are listed in the annual reports and they also have addresses. So we were able to put them on the map so that you could see the donors and the recipients together and contrast them.

Diana (47m 32s):
That is so neat and I love that you have uploaded complete images of these. So you know, I’m looking at a little bit of the small book and the person is listed in black and then underneath in red are the entries about what happened to them. So these color images are so neat and interesting to see how much people were receiving because we’re going from all the way from three quarters of a dollar up to $4. So I’m not sure what that would’ve been at their time. But we’re not talking huge sums of money. This is just a little bit, it sounds like just enough to get by for that week or that month.

Diana (48m 17s):
So fascinating. And again, it’s a beautiful website and really easy to navigate.

Nicole (48m 25s):
Yes, I love the color images and usually we’re looking at digitized microfilm that are black and white. So this is special, but what information would the ledger have about a person that would help identify them as being a match to your own ancestor? Like does it have any age information? You mentioned addresses.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (48m 46s):
So it has, it has the name either the name of an individual or the name of a couple. It has the, the physical address. So if you know approximately where your ancestors lived, that’s another way to, to look people up even if you don’t have a name. And…

Nicole (49m 5s):
The page I’m looking at right now says WID after a person. And I think that means widow. So it sounds like there might just be different little notations and clues included with each person’s entry. And of course if there’s a couple listed, that helps too because the relationship between, you know, the man and the woman identifies them more uniquely than just only having the name of one person.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (49m 29s):
Yes. So there are a few notations, some of them are, you know, of, of the status of the person. Some of them are in the booklet itself as special notations like widow because that was a category of person who specifically in the United Hebrew Charities’ eyes deserved aid because they were a widow. And then there’s also some that we’ve added in the description. You’ll see a lot of desertion, you know, coming back to the Desertion Bureau, this is really the origin story of the Desertion Bureau 40 or 50 years earlier, that you, you see a lot of description of women who have been deserted and are therefore sometimes not always, but sometimes worthy of support.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (50m 16s):
So we’ve added that in also.

Nicole (50m 19s):
Oh yeah, I love that. And the page that I happen to click on, I think I’m on page 25, it also mentions the occupation of some of the men. You know, one is a teacher and one is a tailor, so that can also help identify them.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (50m 33s):
Yes. And the, the notes are just absolutely fascinating. I mean, they’re one or two lines, but it’s almost like a short story of these people’s lives and the, and the troubles and the, the difficulties that they’ve had in their lives and the event that has caused them to, to need charity. So it’s very succinct, but it’s also very, very rich. And it also gives you an idea of what the charity worker who wrote it down thought of these people.

Nicole (51m 4s):
Right. Once again, the informant is important to think about and it’s the person who’s deciding what part of the story to record.

Diana (51m 12s):
Okay. So that leads me to another question here. I see that on the website there are several different categories you can choose, that they’re called codes, and they’re like “not recommended”, “not recommended worthy”, and then there’s the “worthy” and “not worthy”. So this sounds to me like a judgment call on the part of whoever was taking in this case. So, you know, in your experience, what, what did that mean, worthy and not worthy? Where did that come from?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (51m 43s):
So if, if you look at, you know, if you go to the map part of the website and you, and you look at the description, you’ll see actually a, a picture of the inside page of the booklet where he produces very helpfully, he produces the code. And so this is clearly premeditated idea of, of we are gonna categorize people. The, the late 19th century, this new idea of scientific charity comes to be very popular, specifically amongst Jewish and, and Protestant charities and there was this feeling that quote unquote indiscriminate giving, just cultivated dependency on charitable institutions.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (52m 25s):
So this new method of charity, scientific, they called it method of charity, said, we, we need to, they called it sharp scrutiny. We need to provide, we, we need to scrutinize people very carefully, people who want charity. And we’re only going to help people who want to help themselves. So the entries in the ledger, the result, you can imagine this charity worker visiting people’s homes and he’s exercising ’cause it was a a, he, he’s exercising his sharp scrutiny, deciding whether these people are worthy of help or not worthy of help. I mean, it’s not entirely clear what the differences in the, in the codes between not worthy, not very worthy, not recommended, not very needy, you know, that that’s kind of a, a, a loss to time that the nuances between those things.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (53m 16s):
But you get a general idea of of of what they thought about about people. They were trying to help them, but they were also trying to be scientific about it and very careful about it. And you know, this terminology I think is quite jarring to our modern ears, but you can definitely see in this history the echoes of our very contemporary debates about charity and about welfare and about who is and isn’t worthy of help.

Diana (53m 45s):
Oh, absolutely. And there are some, like a lot of divisions there. We’re not just saying worthy or not worthy, but there’s so many little pieces in between that. So it makes me wonder if they just had a list they were checking off and okay, if you get five of these things on the list, then you are this, like you said, scientific, you know, it seems like they would have to have something besides just their idea, you know, something very, you know, clinical going through. So I don’t know if we know that or not or if we, we just have to guess.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (54m 21s):
What, what I hope is that a, a researcher or someone will go through the database and try to actually figure out in, in, in great in-depth why, you know, comparing the descriptions with the codes and seeing, trying to understand some more of those nuances.

Diana (54m 41s):
That sounds like a great research project or oh yes, something for a dissertation

Nicole (54m 46s):
That would be so fun. And it would be so neat to just take one of the families and correlate their census records, land values, property values, taxation, and all of the different records that went into their whole economic outlook and, and see what was happening with them and try to correlate everything. But looking at the categories, I thought, there’s even professional beggar PB was one of the codes.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (55m 10s):
You know, I was actually very disappointed because professional beggar is in the, the guide at the beginning, but it turns out, and so we include it in the filters, but it turns out that he didn’t actually write professional beggar for any of them. So maybe he was just, he thought he was looking out for professional beggars and just didn’t find any.

Nicole (55m 29s):
I love that part of the story because it does illustrate the kind of the fears that that charity workers had of being taken advantage of. And then in actuality when it came down to interviewing the people, he’d never categorized any of them as a professional beggar. That’s so telling. Well you have put all of the database entries on an interactive map, which I just found that page when you mentioned it. And this is a really neat map. Wow. So tell us more. What can we learn from the map that we didn’t know maybe from just the database?

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (56m 3s):
Right. So, you know, as I said, I was super excited to find that this ledger contained the addresses and I immediately thought we gotta put this on a map. And there’s a lot of fascinating things that you can see from the map that you wouldn’t see just by looking at the data on its own. Firstly, you can see where were the immigrants located. And remember this is prior to the mass migration of East European Jews after the 1880s and they all settle on the Low East Side. There are kind of a, there are highly concentrated on the Low East Side and the East Village. And I, I apologize to your listeners who don’t have as much familiarity with New York because this kind of, you know, this probably more relevant or interesting for, for New Yorkers.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (56m 49s):
So you can see how they’re concentrated on the map. You can also see how dense the concentration was. We actually had to hack to, on a technical level, we had to hack the map because there was in some cases seven or eight people on the exact same address. And the underlying technology is Google Maps. It’s not very good at showing multiple points on one map. So we had to hack that and you can see how dense the concentration was of people. And you can actually imagine this charity worker walking up and down the kind of rickety steps of these crowded tenement buildings possibly interviewing literally everyone in the building and seeing whether they needed charity, whether they were worthy or not worthy.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (57m 35s):
And then because we have the donors on the map too, it really is a very stark and, and the donors are in one color, they’re in blue, that recipients are in orange. So it’s a really stark representation of the geographic spread of, of Haves and Have Nots, at least in the Jewish case, but probably more broadly of New York City in the late 19th century. You can see the recipients are mostly downtown and the, and the donors who have entered the middle class or the upper middle class have moved uptown. And then there’s even more fascinating nuances than that. You can see there’s actually kind of two blobs. If you look at the map of the donors, there’s the people uptown and then there’s right at the bottom of, of Manhattan, if people are familiar with the financial district and that’s where they, so the uptown is their homes and downtown is their place of business.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (58m 32s):
And all the downtown entries are of men giving money. A lot of the uptown entries are of women, and not always money, Sometimes they’re providing clothes or supplies or other things like that. So you can also see a gender division in gender and geographic division in the way that charity was given.

Nicole (58m 53s):
Wow. This, this map is just wonderful and I’ve been zooming in and out and looking all over this and it’s really neat to hear you describe the different clusters of the people and where they were living and then see it on the map. And I am not as familiar with the New York geography, but now I feel like I am because of this map is just really telling. You can clearly see where the Lower East Side is because of the cluster of all of the people who received charity and then the financial district with the men donors and then just kind of a scattering throughout uptown with all of the, the women donors and then some of the charity recipients who are living amongst them. So this is really neat.

Diana (59m 31s):
I agree. I love this map. I wish I had a map like this for all the different research projects that I have. It’d be so neat to have tax records connected to a map or land records connected to a map like this, so well,

Nicole (59m 42s):
It does remind me a little bit of that resource that has the land descriptions and the original patents for the federal land states, which I’m blanking on the name, but it’s similar, where it has the names linked to a location on the map. And this is just really cool zooming in, being able to see actual name, you hover over the person and you can see that Mathis and Mina Newhouse are the charity recipient that lives on 26th Street.

Diana (1h 0m 6s):
Yeah, the actual record comes up. That’s awesome. Really great. Well, Gavin, this has been such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. I hope all of our listeners have enjoyed it. I know, I have loved learning about this new resource and it’s just so eye-opening to see the good work being done out there and trying to bring these types of records out of the archives and make them available, and I think it’s a good lesson for all of us that not everything is online, but give us some time. Maybe we’ll get there. You know, this is, this is just a great endeavor and kudos to you and your whole organization for putting this all together. It’s been such a pleasure to talk about this with you.

Gavin Beinart-Smollan (1h 0m 47s):
Thank you so much. It’s been truly is a delight to talk to both of you and I. I hope that you listeners enjoy browsing around and seeing what this whole has to offer.

Diana (1h 0m 55s):
Well, thanks everyone for listening. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and you can go take a look at the websites, be sure to checkout the show notes where you can get links to everything we’ve talked about, and we will talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

Nicole (1h 1m 9s):
Bye-bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.