This section covers those documents which cannot be categorised under the three families.
Historical Overviews
- Overview of the Cohen - Cassirer history is the first place to look to understand the big picture.
- Following that are historical overviews of A tale of two men - Cassirer and Cohen 1530-1800, the Cassirer family and the holocaust, the Cohen family from convict to knighthood, general and cabinet minister, and the Falk family which bridges the other two.
A note about the site
- It is appropriate to say a few words about the new design of this site. Unlike most genealogical websites, the emphasis is less here on the family tree than on the history. When I first set this up in 2004 it was as a web site, because I could use some of the nice features of the web - notably hyperlinks. Of course a family tree was needed, and the beauty of a website was that you could link people referred to in the histories to that tree rather than always having to explain in words where they sit. Then of course it also turned out to be a nice way of sharing what was being discovered, because a thing like this was going to evolve as I learned more. Better still, people wrote back to correct and add to the site.
By 2013 it was obvious the material in the site was getting too complex for a simple website. Most things linked to many other things so how should one organise it? It was all rather daunting because whatever I did looked likely to take a lot of time, just to move from the old to the new. After thinking about this a bit I decided to use a rather novel approach - to utilise the power of a Wiki. Now, Wiki's were designed really for "crowd writing", but what I wanted was a side-product of that - namely that in order to allow multiple authorship and corrections possible a Wiki uses a very simple formatting and editing system (which can be used from any browser). It makes linking pages terribly easy, automatically links "Wiki Words" which I decided to use for names, and then has many powerful programs which can be added in to do things like footnoting, indexing, publishing, and much more. The advantages of this were that these powerful features could be utilised and it is perfectly suited to being constantly updated and amended. The disadvantage was that some of the old web content still needed to be included, at least for the time being, but the Wiki search engine cannot search those bits. So there are two search systems, as well as the indexes. Actually I have never seen a Wiki used for this purpose, so any comments or advice will be very much welcomed, by me, the site editor.
Overview Documents
- Acknowledgements. Work on this site is an ever-more collaborative process. Early on I listed here the contributions of those who had helped. But now so many have that most are acknowledged by footnotes. My apologies if any contributors feel that more would be appropriate.
- Bibliography. This is a list of some of the key sources, primarily where they appear in book form. More detailed references can be found in the notes associated with the entries in the Family Tree.
For more on individuals and families, and their genealogy, see Family Tree Index.