Barenaked Genealogy

The often unanalyzed result of migration 50 to 100 years after the fact often is taken as a study in Genealogy as opposed to a study in immigration, but if you had the opportunity to bring some attention to the issue, how would you go about getting people's attention?

The obvious approach would be to get someone famous, such as the lead singer Steven Page of The Barenaked Ladies, and bring him to the city of his birth and help him trace back his family roots and air it on national television.

In the show Who Do You Think You Are? Aired on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation on December 26th this journey of the Page family was taken. Steven discovered that his family were originally from Poland/Russia and came to live in Toronto, Canada in the early half of the 20th Century. His investigation with the help of local historians, his family and the community in Poland where his family was originally from helped him find out more about his heritage, including the realization that his Grandfather was one of the first recorded Hasidic singers in Canada and finding the last traces of his family and why they left Poland in the first place.

Like Steven's family, many Jewish people left the region of Poland/Russia at the turn of the century due to unequal treatment and Pogroms, which were attacks and killing of members of the Jewish community in Eastern Europe by local officials at random over accusations which sought to tie the alienated Jewish community towards crimes against society and state at the time. Many of the people who left at the time make up the majority of the Jewish community in North and South America, as well as a large portion of Jewish people worldwide. This look into one migrant family from 100 years ago is very interesting for students of Genealogy, Immigration and individual families as a whole.

Europe circa 1900