My name
In keeping with a common genealogical theme, I go by various names; when writing on genealogy, I prefer to go by P. Y. Mund. (You may take your pick of my other names – Joseph, Pinchas Yosef, Yossi – if you’d like.) This is partly because of the spelling ambiguities my full name presents, something my fellow family history researchers are sure to appreciate.
(For paranoiac tech-related reasons, I don’t like sharing my picture freely. Instead, see the accompanying image for a picture of my maternal grandfather, who (at the time this picture was taken) had an uncanny resemblance to me.)
My profession
I am a freelance proofreader and translator by profession (any typos on this website don’t count, though – I’m not being paid!), and I also do a fair bit of market research for e-commerce (mostly for discontinued luxury items, e.g. perfume and antique dinnerware). Meanwhile, I am a longtime student of science, currently pursuing a B.Sc. degree, and this may affect my writing style, especially how I describe my process and results. (Genealogical research and tracing scientific claims to their original sources are remarkably similar.)
My hobby
While I have many interests, between which my focus shifts cyclically, this blog will be devoted primarily to genealogy, the oldest and steadiest of them.
I wrote my first family tree on a scroll of orange construction paper when I was about four years old; I remember interrogating my grandmother about her uncles, fearing that their names would be lost if I did not write them down. (Alas, it is the Orange Scroll that was lost in the Great Move and Subsequent Multiple Warehouse Mishaps – a historically fitting if unfortunate end for a family tree.)
In my mid-teens, I set out to complete a project begun by my paternal great-grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Mund of Paris and London (on top of the progress made by his sons, my grandfather and grand-uncle): to find all descendants of his own great-grandfather, Simcha Mund of Lviv (Lemberg), who had survived the Holocaust. By the time I got to it, a generation and its memories had been lost, but the era of internet-based database research had dawned, and so I expanded the scope to trace the fates of all of Simcha’s descendants from his times (1818–1890) to the Holocaust. This continues to be one of the major threads in my research. (Said great-grandfather’s handwritten autobiographical notes, incidentally, form the background image for this site.)
In my late teens, I began another of my main themes: reexamining received genealogical knowledge critically. As a descendant of some well-known rabbinic Jewish families, much of my family history has been in print for decades or centuries. Some of the information is solidly sourced, but not all. Inspired in part by the work of Rabbi Shlomo Englard, I began checking what is known about my ancestors and their families against the primary sources – sometimes finding the conventional source imprecise, or even outright wrong, and even when correct, often telling a richer story than before thought.
Please see About This Blog and Sources for more on my research process.
P. Y. Mund's Genealogy Blog 