Academic Genealogy

To be a professional in academic genealogy requires being involved in academic genealogy projects as well as in individual research. Without those many years of individual experience I would never have been able to write my PhD dissertation about the wonderful aspect of Jewish tradition – genealogy. To the best of my knowledge it was the first doctoral dissertation on Jewish genealogy ever written in a Polish University. I hope this work is only a prelude to the development of Jewish genealogy studies in my country.

“It is hard to imagine the history of Poland without the historical and intellectual contributions of Polish Jews. The catastrophe of the Holocaust irreversibly changed the ethnic fabric of Poland. In their time, Jews had constituted the largest minority in the country, with a illustrious history going back over one thousand years. Over three million of them were murdered at the hands of the Nazis, and in 1968 many of those remaining departed, adding to the immeasurable and irrevocable damage done to the community by the Shoah. Today, virtually all that remains of the former Jewish population of the country are material artifacts and the many documents stored in the national and municipal archives, registries, museums and libraries of Poland. The main purpose of contemporary documenting is to rescue memories of the residents of former shtetls (towns where Jews lived in significant numbers), to reassemble broken family trees, reconstitute the structure of lost communities, and preserve this knowledge for future generations.
Since the 1980s, Jewish genealogy has developed rapidly. Whereas in Poland, the study has been treated marginally as a domain supporting history, anthropology and sociology, in the world at large there has been a genealogical boom, as carried out both by family historians and social scientists (Klauzinska, 2007). A number of solutions to difficult genealogical problems are increasingly being proposed by researchers in hard-science fields (biologists, mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, computer scientists, and so on)(Wagner, 2006). Computer technology and the Internet have enabled programs to create intricate genealogical trees and specialized databases.”

Klauzińska K. (2013), „A Practical Introduction to Dataset Merging”, In: Lectures On Academic Genealogy. An Introduction To Scientific Tools, Weizmann Institute, Israel, editor: Daniel Wagner