It’s not so easy for Jews to learn about their roots.

We are an ancient people; we were exiled and moved from continent to continent, country to country; we don’t have millennia of birth and death records in an old stone church in an idyllic meadow somewhere. Our people’s lives often were interrupted by pogroms and other acts of violence; most recently six million of them were ended by Nazis who, yes, were careful with their own records, but weren’t so punctilious with, say, gravestones.

That means that doing genealogy isn’t as easy as pulling out the family Bible.

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But technology has made genealogy easier for everyone, including for Jews. The internet makes huge amounts of information available; researchers no longer have to fly across the ocean and park themselves in an archive somewhere, desperately hoping that their limited language skills will allow them to understand what they find if they are lucky enough to find it.

Instead, many records are online, and there are databases that make gaining access to that information much easier.

Now, JewishGen and the institution of which it is a part, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, are about to open the Peter and Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center.

Right now, JewishGen is accessible online to everyone and its stores of information are available free,…