About the Website

This website is intended to be a home base for the genealogical study of the Palevsky surname. The ultimate goal is to document the ancestry of every "distinct" Palevsky family, as well as to prove or disprove a genealogical relationship between each of the families.

Who Are We?

Elise Friedman, the creator and webmaster of this website, has been actively researching her Palevsky family history since 1999. The Palevsky family has always been a huge part of her life -- her maternal grandmother is one of 7 Palevsky siblings, she is named for her great-grandmother Elke Ruchel Palevsky (nee Lifshitz) and spent many holidays of her childhood with her Palevsky cousins in New York. Simple childhood curiosity about her heritage grew into a lifetime hobby quite by accident. One day back in 1999, Elise came across a website called MyFamily.com, which was a place to set up a private family forum. One of the sections on MyFamily.com allowed for family trees to be posted. That piqued Elise's interest and she went off in search of information on how to create a family tree on the computer. Family Tree Maker software in hand a couple days later, she began making phone calls to her parents and grandparents in search of details to add to the tree.

Soon after Elise started work on the Palevsky family tree, her cousin Hariette, who also had an interest in the family history, heard about the project and contacted Elise. They began to share notes, then began to split further research between them. As time went on, they spurred each other on with deeper and more challenging research into the Palevsky genealogy, which continues today and ultimately led to the creation of this Palevsky website.

Although a relative newcomer to genealogy by years, Elise has done an extensive amount of genealogical research in a short period of time and considers herself to be an experienced researcher, especially with internet resources. Elise has attended and given several presentations at annual IAJGS (International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies) conferences since 2002, served as president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland for two years, and now speaks on both genealogy and genetic genealogy at JGS and community meetings periodically.

Elise and Hariette complement each other well in their genealogical pursuit. Elise works full time, so does most of her research in the evenings and on weekends, usually on the internet. Hariette does volunteer work and does much of her research at her local Family History Center and the National Archives during the day. Elise has her computer files organized fairly well, but is admittedly horrible at organizing her paper files. Hariette has an excellent paper filing system and can always find needed documents at almost a moment's notice!

Credits & Thanks

Thanks to Jay Palevsky for supplying us with our palevsky.net web and email addresses.

Thanks to Michael Paley for his assistance in translating from Hebrew and Yiddish, as well as on-site research in YIVO and other NYC archives.