SFBAJGS--Officers, Board Members, and Addresses
SFBAJGS--Officers, Board Members, and Addresses
Current Officers and other members of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society:
| Preeva Tramiel President president@sfbajgs.org sfbajgs@gmail.com  |
Preeva was exposed to genealogy at an early age by meeting her mother’s many cousins at the Abraham Spilka Ripner Family Circle in New York, enumerating her own first cousins—10 on each side, and listening to stories from the Holocaust survivors on her father’s side of the family. She began analyzing documentation her father left behind in 2008, using the databases at Yad Vashem and JewishGen. This led to a trip to Western Ukraine, Budapest, and Prague in 2010, her first IAJGS conference in 2011, membership on the SFBAJGS board in 2014, and publication of a memoir, The Girl on the Wall, in 2015. A rabid Facebooker, she discovered a whole Midwestern branch of 3rd cousins in 2018 through Tracing the Tribe. Her academic background is in Economics and English, but her primary focus has been on her family and community. A former PTA and synagogue president, Preeva enjoys running meetings and gathering input, so email her! |
Jeremy Frankel |
Jeremy's foray into his family genealogy began during the 2nd night of Passover 1985 when his maternal grandfather asked him what he knew about the Levy family. After making some inroads, real life and work intervened and the project was placed on a back-burner until the arrival of the internet and online databases. Jeremy's work in England as a cartographer for 14 years brought together two passions, history and geography. This helped enormously when studying families and migration patterns. Over forty years later and the tree is burgeoning with 15,000+ people. |
JoAnne Goldberg |
JoAnne grew up in Kansas City in a family of secrets, with a mother who is a German-born survivor and a father whose parents had immigrated from Lithuania. Finding a couple of relatives—one on each side—who had researched family history enabled JoAnne to get started learning about family, and when direct-to-consumer DNA testing became available, she jumped in. Finding German records has been easy thanks to online databases; the Lithuanian side is far more challenging. |
Dana Kurtz |
An IT project management consultant, Dana returns to the Board after a long hiatus. In more than 30 years of membership, Dana has held almost every Board and Officer position: President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Membership, ZichronNote Editor, Webmaster, Publicity, Librarian, Family Finder/Roster producer, Annual Workshop Coordinator, Elections Chair; and brought cookies to meetings. |
I was born in New York City, and received a Ph.D.in Research Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. I have been a consulting genealogist since 1991. My academic background, and post-doctoral teaching of courses in research methods and statistics, have proven helpful in my genealogy practice, where proving hypotheses and weighing the probabilities of purported facts are central to solid research outcomes. My research engagements have most often focused on American genealogy, but past projects have involved research in the British Isles, Greece, Italy, France and Eastern Europe. I have enjoyed serving the profession as past president of the California Genealogical Society and through genealogy lecturing and pro-bono coaching throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. I also enjoy solving historical mysteries using genealogical methods. |
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Roy Ogus
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Roy Ogus has been researching his family history since 1985. He has documented his family worldwide, and has traced his ancestors back to Lithuania and Belarus in the early 18th century. Roy was born in South Africa, and has been living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1970s. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area JGS for nearly 30 years, he has published articles in the journals Avotaynu, ZichronNote (JGS San Francisco), Shemot (JGS Great Britain), and Roots-Key (JGS Los Angeles), and has given presentations at numerous IAJGS annual genealogy conferences. Roy is the Vice-President and Journal Editor of the JewishGen Southern African Research Division, a LitvakSIG District Coordinator, and an Avotaynu Contributing Editor. He is a computer engineer by profession. |
Janice Sellers  |
Janice M. Sellers is a professional genealogist specializing in Jewish, Black, forensic, and newspaper research. She began researching her family history at the tender age of 13 and soon will mark 50 years of research. She is the president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon and is also a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, Council for the Advancement of Forensic Genealogy, Genealogical Speakers Guild, and Genealogical Forum of Oregon, where she leads the African American Special Interest group. She has been on staff at LDS FamilySearch centers and libraries since 2000 and gives presentations on many genealogical topics at events ranging from local to international. Janice worked for many years in the publishing industry as an editor, indexer, and compositor and has edited several genealogy journals and newsletters. |
Mona Siegel |
Mona Bache Siegel has been doing genealogy research for about 30 years, and started by ordering microfilm at her local Family History Center. She is still discovering family records in the online records from Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine. Most of her ancestors arrived in the United States in the mid-to-late-1800s, but she has the Ellis Island inspection card for her great-great grandmother, who arrived in 1921. Mona is a graduate of Stanford, and was the academic technology specialist and webmaster at Palo Alto High School before retiring. She and her husband, Dave, have been married since 1985 and have two adult daughters. |
Barbara Stack
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Barbara has been researching her family roots in Poland and Ukraine since the late 1980s when her sister met a maternal cousin, Joseph Chandler, of Portland, Maine, who had made an enormous hand-written family tree. Joe passed along a copy, and Barbara began to map it into Reunion. She also started exchanging letters with far-flung aunts and uncles. Many busy years passed. In late 2009, a mutual friend introduced her to Jeremy, who pointed to the LDS Family History Library in Oakland and to the SFBAJGS. A website became necessary to organize and share the mounting piles of research. Repeated gentle inquiries of the Chandler family led to a revised tree, a narrative history, a scrapbook and the hope of discovery of correspondence. And then there’s her mother’s father’s family and her father’s family from Nowy Dwor. A long story. If you do genealogy long enough it becomes something other than what it seemed at the outset. Barbara's most recent pleasures have been in reintroducing members of long-separated branches of the family. 1969: BA, Brandeis University, Economics; 1975: MA, U. Massachusetts Amherst, Linguistics. In her professional life Barbara has been a systems analyst, a fiddler, a youth orchestra ED, and most recently a database manager, archivist, editor, and writing coach. |
| Shellie Wiener At-Large  |
Newsletter exchange-- For other JGS chapters wishing to exchange emailed copies of their newsletters for emailed copies of ZichronNote: ZNexchange@sfbajgs.org
To contact the SFBAJGS by U.S. Mail, address your letter to:
SFBAJGS
P. O. Box 318214
San Francisco, CA 94131-8214
