2025 has been another year of genealogical miracles, capped off by being contacted by long-lost Divinskiy relatives and meeting them online! The Divine siblings, my 5th cousins twice removed(!), found my Divinskiy family history blog through Google. Their grandfather, Abraham L. Divine (c.1880?-1964), came from the area of Boguslav, Ukraine and settled in St. Paul, Minnesota, and helped bring over his brothers, sister, and parents. Their last name is closer to the original "Divinskiy" than my Great-Grandma Bess's maiden surname of "Davis," and one family story they shared is that our ancestral surname may be based on the "Divina River" (Western Dvina?).
It's incredible that the internet and online genealogy resources (particularly the JewishGen Ukraine Database!) allow us distant descendants of the Pale of Settlement to reconnect. Our common ancestors, the tavernkeeper Gershko Berkov Divinskiy and his wife Golda Leybowa, lived in Bila Tserkva over 200 years ago! Another astonishing coincidence is the Divine siblings have ties to Western Massachusetts, where I grew up. So we're landsmen, on top of being distant mishpoche!
My year in genealogy was mostly made possible by FamilySearch's Full-Text Search, which much like Google can turn a keyword search to a treasure trove of unexpected resources. I did my main burst of searches in February and March and I still need to sort through all of what I've found. Time and time again, searching for a name was enough to knock down a brick wall or unlock a new family story. The power of Full-Text Search cannot be underestimated!
A reader of this blog convinced me to apply to speak at FamilySearch's RootsTech 2026 conference, and my proposal to discuss how Full-Text Search uncovered my Colombian ancestry was accepted! Sometime in the first week of March 2026, I will give my online talk on "How Full-Text Search Can Uncover Latin American Genealogy," and then it will be available on-demand on FamilySearch's website. I'm very honored to speak at this event, and hope it can be a way to "give back" for all that FamilySearch did to benefit my research.
If that wasn't enough, some other major genealogy highlights of 2025 include:
- Seeing for the first time a photo of my Grandpa Alfred as a boy, thanks to my cousin Rich!
- Reconnecting with more Davis relatives from the Flatbush, Brooklyn branch and recording stories. They inspired me to look up our fascinating relative, the labor union leader Elinor Marshall Glenn (1915-2013), and I found that UCLA posted online her extensive oral history! She thankfully shared so much, from how her grandparents met in Russia(!), to how she inspired the novel and movie Marjorie Morningstar, to how when you got off the subway in Old New York, you walked in the street, not on the sidewalk... I assume to be less vulnerable to crime!
- Learning about my distant Colombian forebear, Antonio Sánchez de Cozar Guanienta, a 17th century priest who left behind a treatise on Biblically-inspired astronomy and claimed his brother deserved to be his hometown's rightful cacique. It's a fascinating window into a mestizo who embraced his Indigenous heritage but also wanted to loot its tombs and sacred sites. Finding portraits of two probable 16th-century relations was also a highlight!
- My continued research with British genealogist Caroline Gurney on my ununsual Cohen ancestors from Bristol, England who settled in London, Jamaica, and Colombia. I believe I've found living descendants in Bermuda that I will hopefully contact in the future. Caroline told me that we need to write an academic article on our findings, so hopefully we can do that in the upcoming year!
- Season 6 and Season 7 (6-7!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) of "Rediscovering Latinidad": The newest episodes of my podcast include some fascinating discussions on the Israel-Palestine war, queenship and medieval princesses, endogamy and cousin marriage, Mexican-American genealogy with Moises Garza, and the cultural impact of Bad Bunny's album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS”!
I'll end with a funny ancestral encounter... as I blogged earlier this year, I found a possible link from my Colombian family back to the royal families of Navarra and France. I've enjoyed going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see objects related to these families, and recently I went to the Cloisters and viewed the prayer book of Bonne of Luxembourg (1315-1349), my supposed 19th-great-grandmother who died from the Black Death!
This prayer book was incorporated into the special exhibit "Spectrum of Desire," because it included a devotional "life-size" image of the side wound of crucified Jesus. Well, that image has gone viral, since the image of the wound is rather... yonic... or as one friend said, it has a passing resemblance to the Eye of Sauron:
Here's to the beautiful hobby of genealogy, where I've learned to expect the unexpected, and be amazed by the connections that string us all together in the intersections of history and family. And here's to a wonderful new year of discoveries!
Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut (at) gmail.com.
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