150YearsofCare.org website header Since most of what I view on Youtube are genealogy subjects, and I subscribe to some genealogy channels, much of what is shown at login is genealogy. RLP 378: Interview with Gavin Beinart-Smollan * showed up, and I wanted to listen because my most recent genealogy project is all Jewish immigrants and their descendants, who mostly came to New York City from areas then called "Russia." Wikipedia says, " The Pale of Settlement included all of modern-day Belarus and Moldova, much of Lithuania, Ukraine and east-central Poland, and relatively small parts of Latvia and what is now the western Russian Federation."  Part of what makes this population challenging to research is the difficulty in locating records, and the confusing, even overwhelming DNA data. This is a result of the laws and customs governing life in the Pale of Settlement, described by Wikipedia: "The Pale of Settlement was a western region of the Russian Empire... th...

By Janet O'Conor Camarata Willis, Linda, Looking for Mr. Smith: Seeking the Truth Behind the Long Walk, the Greatest Survival Story Ever Told., New York, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010. Readers familiar with the book, The Long Walk , first published in 1956, remember a survival story about a group of men caught up in the events preceding World War II. Each was sent to a labor camp in Siberia where they joined together in escaping during a blizzard and walking south-southeast for over a year. They walked from Siberia through Mongolia, into China, skirting Tibet and into India between April 1941 and the spring of 1942. The group experienced difficulties and hardships suffered defeats and deaths, and finally, as a much-shrunken band of survivors, they reached India and freedom. The men who began their walk to freedom are all East European: young and old, skilled and unskilled workers from Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, and the Balkans. The oldest escapee at fifty-one ...