Yitzhak Berchunsky
ca 1880 |
Welcome to the Orange County Jewish Genealogical Society! The OCJGS is your resource in Orange County, California, for all things related to finding your Jewish roots.
Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned expert, you will find our monthly meetings stimulating and informative. In addition to meetings, hands-on workshops, and special events, members also have access to an excellent library of books and magazines pertinent to Jewish genealogy. The Orange County Jewish Genealogical Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We are a member of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies. Remember the Days of Old; Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders and they will explain to you. (Deut. 32:7)
זכר ימות עולם בינו שנות דור ודור שאל אביך ויגדך זקניך ויאמרו לך פרשת האזינו |
Calendar of EventsWorld-Class Speakers!We have a lineup of truly world class speakers coming to you wherever in the world you are, from wherever in the world they are. We normally meet the 4th Sunday of each month.
Virtual meetings are via Zoom. You must register in advance by clicking the link for the meeting you want to attend. Registration only takes a few seconds. Attendance at virtual meetings is free to OCJGS members. If you are not a member, please consider joining. Otherwise, the charge for non-members is $5. Please visit the Membership page to join or pay your $5 fee. October 25, 2026 at 10:00 am (Pacific time zone)
Hal Bookbinder Finding ancestors in the 1850 Russian Revizskie skazki 
The Russian Revizskie skazki can be a gold mine in finding information about our ancestors. “Revizskie skazki” literally translates as “revision tales”, though we generally refer to them as “revision lists”. While censuses only provide information on people currently alive, revision lists include “tales” about the men who died or moved away since the prior revision list.
The talk will provide an overview of the periodic revision lists and demonstrate how I was able to use the 1850 and 1858 ones to identify ancestors, including those who lived earlier, and even to creatively use the information to get back yet an extra generation or two where no records exist at all. During the past three years, the JewishGen Ukraine Research Division has indexed and made available on the All-Ukraine Database, approximately four million Russian records. This includes hundreds of thousands of records from Revision Lists and other censuses of Jews living in the Russian Empire. I will demonstrate how to efficiently search this amazing resource. Hal Bookbinder is a retired information systems director and university instructor. He has been actively researching his genealogy for more than three decades, identifying over 4,000 relatives and tracing two lines to the mid-1700s in modern Ukraine. He is a past president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Los Angeles (JGSLA) and of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS). Hal publishes a series of monthly articles on safe computing which are freely available at http://www.tinyurl.com/SafeComputingArticles. He and his wife, Marci, were raised in the Catskills of New York State, in the famed “Borsht Belt”. After attending New York University and a four-year stint in the US Air Force, they have lived in the Los Angeles area. In 2018, he made a journey to Ukraine, visiting various areas of the former Volhynia and Podolia in which his family lived for hundreds of years. He also spent time experiencing Kyiv during its Independence Day celebrations, and even visited Chernobyl. Register in advance for this Zoom presentation. Click this link to register.
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