ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question: What vestiges of a Jewish past are there in the Spanish town of Fermoselle, on the Portuguese border?
Genie Milgrom was born in Havana Cuba into a Roman Catholic Family of Spanish Ancestry. In an unparalleled work of genealogy, she was able to fully document her unbroken maternal lineage going back as far as 1430 to Pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal.
She has travelled extensively to Fermoselle, the village of her ancestors in the Zamora region of Spain while doing field research on the town’s Jewish past. She is currently the President of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Miami, President of Tarbut Sefarad-Fermoselle in Spain and President of the Society for Crypto Judaic Studies at Colorado State University in Colorado Springs.
She is the author of the book My 15 Grandmothers as well as How I found My 15 Grandmothers, A Step By Step Guide. The books were both winners of the 2015 Latino Author Book Awards. She also writes for several online sites including eSefarad as well as the Journal of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian Crypto Jewry.
Her work has appeared in the Jerusalem Post, the Miami Herald and other publications around the world. In 2012 she received the Florida State Genealogical Society’s Genealogy Outstanding Achievement Award for the outstanding pioneering work she has done in Genealogy.
This week Genie is speaking with us about her personal journey to Judaism and how she was able to trace her Jewish ancestry back to the 15th century.
