Chava Lefand (1797-1884) lived in a time when we'd expect a woman to not be well-represented in documentation. And in fact, looking at traditional genealogical documents gives little information about Chava and the life she lived. But Chava's story shows how much can be learned by looking at non-traditional documentation to learn about an individual and the context in which they lived. Chava had already lost two children to mandatory conscription into the Russian Empire, and she refused to lose another. The widowed mother filed a series of petitions throughout the 1850s which went as high as two Czars and the Governing Senate (the Russian Empire's Supreme Court equivalent). In doing this, she generated a genealogical gold mine (telling of secret marriages and where various relatives were living or hiding from the draft) and gave her perspective on family and community gossip and conflict.
While this is the talk about one woman (the speaker's 5th great grandmother), her hundreds of pages of petitions and appeals tell her perspective of how Jewish families dealt with mandatory conscription of their young children, how conscription caused strife within the Jewish community and formed a hierarchy (she felt she wasn't part of the cool kids' clique), and how relatively simple Jewish families were able to generate a significant amount of documentation in the mid-1800s.

• Update participants on advocacy efforts to push USCIS to transfer historical records in its custody to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA);
• Discuss C-Files and the urgency of needing USCIS to change their status from temporary to permanent (destruction date: 2056); 
• Discuss P-Files and explain that while their status has changed from temporary to permanent, P-Files are still all but inaccessible; and
• Explain how legislative advocacy is necessary to implement these changes, and how JGSGW members can play an important role in this, given the influence their federal elected officials play in oversight for USCIS (MD-Raskin; MD-Mfume; VA-Connolly) and funding for NARA (MD-Van Hollen; MD-Harris; MD-Hoyer; MD-Ruppersberger VA-Cline; VA-Wexton)