Sasha Rodnyansky joined the JHSUM Board in the fall of 2005, and has quickly become an indispensable resource and friend.  Sasha offered JHSUM members and the public his presentation on an extraordinary family genealogical puzzle in January, 2006, and has made himself available on selected Monday evenings this past May and June for genealogy consulting.   His interest in genealogy began with a family secret revealed just before he immigrated to the US from Russia.

The Rodnyanskys—Sasha, Tanya and their children Seva and Masha—came to Minnesota in 1993.  A few months before leaving their home in St. Petersburg, a great uncle casually mentioned to Sasha that two of his uncles had left Russia after the turn of the century for America. Any correspondence with them ended with the death of their sister, Sasha’s great grandmother, who was killed in the Holocaust.  Looking up lost relatives took a back seat to settling in to the community in Minneapolis , but with the advent of the Internet, options for searching for genealogical information helped make up for lost time.  

Advised by family friend Irina Yakushev, Sasha turned to www.Jewishgen.org and began his search in the Jewishgen Family Finder, a database that allows a researcher to put a name and location into a search field and find other individuals searching for the same or similar information.  After posting his inquiry, he heard back almost immediately from a California genealogist who had spent over 20 years researching the exact person and family Sasha was looking for.  

“Not only did my research benefit from the new technology’ said Sasha, referring to the Internet—“but I also got the best of traditional methods of looking for information.  All of the years this other person had been sending letters to archives and waiting for responses…My genealogy story is one of great good luck.”  Sasha and the genealogist who first contacted him (also a distant relative) have identified over 800 people in ten countries who are related to that side of the family.  Sasha has furthered the original work by translating documents from Russian to English and contacting new referrals in Russia.

With one side of the family accounted for, Sasha’s next search assignment involved tracing Tanya’s family line back to the Vilna Gaon, the foremost scholar-sage of Lithuanian Jewry in the eighteenth-century.  Sasha is now researching two more branches of the family. To be better prepared for searching, Sasha has recently enrolled in an online genealogy course taught through MyFamily.com.  Although the course reintroduces some of the same resources he has used in the past, it has provided Sasha more time to learn searching nuances.