Family History

Genealogy Today reports that more images that have been added to the Registry of World War II Ration Books. War Ration Books are actually of great benefit to genealogists.

Genealogists are always in search of new record sources when confronted with a brick wall. Well, can you think of a resource that not only gives you name, address, age and occupation, but also height and weight of a person? Interestingly, the ration books issued during World War Two attempted to capture these items.

In the United States, nationwide food rationing was instituted in the spring of 1942, and each member of the family was issued ration books by the Office of Price Administration (OPA). These books contained stamps and gave precise details of the amounts of certain types of food that you were allowed. Rationing insured that each person could get their fair share of the items that were in short supply due to the war effort and import reductions. By the end of the war, over a hundred million of each ration book were printed.

I believe the database now holds over 2,000 listings you can search by first and last name.

The site warns that the book covers were written by hand, and many with pencil, so they are often hard to read and difficult to enter in the database, though new technology is improving and more images are being added all the time.

I don’t think I have any ancestors from Bukovina, but the The Bukovina Society of the Americas caught my attention.

Where, and what, is Bukovina?

From 1775 to 1918, the easternmost crown land of the Austrian Empire; now divided between Romania and Ukraine. As a multi-ethnic province, its name has several spellings: Bukowina or Buchenland in German, Bukowina in Polish, Bucovina in Romanian, and Bukovyna in Ukrainian, all of which mean Land of Beech Trees…Bukovina, on the eastern slopes of the Carpathian mountains, was once the heart of the Romanian Principality of Moldavia, with the city of Suceava being made its capital in 1388.

While under various rules over the years, including the Ottoman Turks, Russians, Austrians, Hungarian, and others, and a major battlefield during World War I, it became Russian territory after World War II and is now divided between the Chernivetska oblast of the Ukraine and Romania to the south.

An areas only 10,422 square kilometers, and home of a variety of cultures and ethnic backgrounds which moved through the area during it’s many hand offs to ruling parties, you will find “Armenians, Hungarians, Jews, Poles, Romanians and Ukrainians (at this time, generally referred to as Ruthenians). German colonists came from three distinct areas: Swabians and Palatines, from what is now Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz, in southwest Germany; German Bohemians, from the Bohemian Forest (BÃhmerwald), now in the Czech Republic; and Zipsers, from the Zips mountains, now Spis county, Slovakia.”

As few of us modern folks have ever heard of this place, it could be that one of your ancestors was either from or passed through the area, so it may be worth exploring if your family hails from Eastern Europe.

Again, I have no record of any family member from the area, so please do not ask for help finding your family members from Bukovina. This is provided as information. Go to the The Bukovina Society of the Americas for help.

I recently wrote about Google Book Search, and recently they announced that they’ve improved the process of browsing their book collection. Here are some highlights of the improvements.

* Zoom in on text and images. Here’s a cool full-page sketch of a ship from an 1898 book on steam navigation. Looking for something less dated? Perhaps this colorful page of a room from a book on interior design. Want a better look? You can now zoom in and out — just click on the zoom in and zoom out buttons. Play with it until you find a size you like.

* One book, one web page. No more reloads! In one-page mode (just click the one page button), pages appear one below the other, like a scroll of paper. For full-view books, there’s also a two-page mode (two page button) in which pages appear side by side, just like in a physical book (perfect for two-page images). In both modes, you’ll be able to use previous page button and next page button to turn pages.

* More on this (and other) books. Find other books that interest you. Just click on “About this book” to find more books related to the book you’re reading. If the book How to Draw Comic Book Heroes and Villains interests you, you’ll probably like Comic Book Artist Collection, Vol. 1. We also revised our “About this book” page to provide better information for in-copyright books, from which you can just see short snippets or a limited preview.

* Explore citations and references. You can also find other books that refer to your book of interest. If scholarly works from Google Scholar have references to the book, you’ll see them too. As an example, see what other works have referred to Aristotle’s works or the 1922 book All About Coffee.

For more information on using Google Book Search, see my article, Genealogy Research With Google Book Search.