As detailed on my About Me page, my interest in genealogy is enduring and relatively wide-ranging, but never strays far from the flavours of my own family history: Jewish rabbinic genealogy, especially of Hasidic rabbis; Jewish genealogy of Galicia and nearby regions of Eastern Europe; and the genealogy of the Yishuv haYashan Jewish communities, from historical Ottoman-era Palestine to early modern Israel.
My motivation for starting a blog
I am especially drawn to tangents: the poorly-known branches that split off or intertwine with well known trees. The problem with tangents is that they usually don’t fit in well under any category. Cousins of rabbis don’t belong in publications about rabbinic families proper, and long-removed branches of Yishuv haYashan families no longer fit into sources devoted to their ancestors’ lives. In particular, I found myself researching and writing up families that had multiple connections to better-known or even famous families, but were in themselves obscure. In addition, I have been finding it harder to keep updating my distant cousins of progress in my research into their families, and rewriting and sending out again all that I knew every time I found a new relative.
As such, I felt that it was high time to take to publishing my findings in a blog, when this medium is that most suited to them.
The two projects that made me feel this need acutely were my research into the Rubin family of Hrubieszów and the Schnee family of Sokal.
My focuses of research
The families I will most often return to are:
- The Mund family of Eastern Galicia
- I am interested in documenting all descendants of my fourth great-grandfather, Simcha Mund of Lviv, until the Holocaust, and determining which descendants survived.
- I am also interested in tracing descendants of Simcha’s grandfather, Yitzchak (Isaac) Mund (possibly the founding member of the Mund family of Lviv) in Lviv to the end of the 19th century, and to a lesser extent, the interconnected Lapter family of Lviv.
- The descendants of Rabbi Naftali Tzvi “Reb Hershele dem Baal Shem’s” of Tiberias, a relatively obscure branch of the Baal Shem Tov’s family tree. Much of what can be found online about R. Naftali Tzvi’s descendants that is not found in older sources (especially on Geni.com) is due to research by myself and my collaborators; the justification and sourcing for my findings, however, is not available online, and I hope to correct this here, eventually.
- My interest in this side of my family branches off into research of many families of the Yishuv haYashan of 19th-century Safed and Tiberias.
Style
While my first language, spoken and in writing, is English, my primary language for keeping genealogical notes is that of many of my sources: a rabbinic register of Hebrew. As such, some stylistic habits appropriate in that context carry over to my writing in English, sometimes unconsciously.
Some deliberate choices in this vein are the use of the honorific abbreviation R. (for Rabbi) for any personality referred to as such, in the loosest sense, in rabbinic genealogical sources (the complete absence of a title looks strange when you are used to sources that use it – but the equivalent abbreviations for non-rabbis look strange in English) or referring to all personalities who had a known Hebrew/Yiddish name by an arbitrary standardized spelling of that name.
P. Y. Mund's Genealogy Blog 