Sorting Saturday: Leonard Broida and Anita (Meyer) Broida

Leonard Broida's Carnegie Alumni News update for September, 1964, in the Alumni News, page 7.
Leonard Broida’s Carnegie Alumni News update for September, 1964, in the Alumni News, page 7.

Broida Family (Click for Family Tree)

Newspapers are such a wonderful way to learn more about family and the everyday- and special!- activities of their life. Don’t forget to look for a variety of spellings when looking at newspapers, because:

1) Spellings of names were a bit looser in earlier times; and

2) Newspapers use OCR (optical character recognition) software to try to find the words on the page. As newspaper ages and is folded and exposed to light, parts of the letters may fade or be lost and thus be read as a slightly different letter. Hyphenation may also decease your expected ‘hits’ in an OCR search. As an example, a search on “Broida” may not pick up the name if it is hyphenated and a syllable sent to another line, as in

Broi-

da.

Leonard Broida has been harder to find in the Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project than anticipated. This may be because sometimes he is listed as “Broido” instead of Broida. There are clues it is the right person, though, as when his wife or other family names are mentioned. But there is also a Broido family living in Pittsburgh during these years. There is a Leonard in that family too, but he is often noted as “J. Leonard Broido.” Not always though, so use the address too as  a clue to help differentiate Leonards.

Max Feldman Obituary, 20 May 1932 Jewish criterion, Vol. 80, No. 2, Page 21, courtesy of Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project.
Obituary of Max Feldman, Leonard L. Broida’s step-father.  20 May 1932 Jewish Criterion, Vol. 80, No. 2, Page 21, courtesy of Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project.

Some search engines, like that of the Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project, require that one enclose words in a phrase in quotes in order to not get thousands of hits with just one of the words. Remember to try different combinations of a name- going from “Leonard Broida” to “Leonard L. Broida” provided more and different results.

A search for Leonard’s wife Anita using her maiden name picked up a number of additional articles. Don’t forget to try a woman’s name with “Mrs.” in front of it, using her own first name (“Mrs. Anita Broida”) and then again with just the surname (“Mrs. Broida”). “Mrs. Leonard L. Broida” should get picked up also when you search under his name so no need for a separate search. You might even try “Leonard L. and Anita Broida”- making a list of possible search terms and spellings can be quite helpful.

We did leave a few articles for you, dear reader, to find in the Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project, but here is one last tidbit related to Leonard and Anita (Meyer) Broida:

Obituary of Sydney Feldman, half-brother of Leonard L. Broida.Jewish Chronicle of Pittsburgh, 15 february 1990, Vol. 29, No. 1, Page 5. Courtesy of Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project.
Obituary of Sydney Feldman, half-brother of Leonard L. Broida. Jewish Chronicle of Pittsburgh, 15 february 1990, Vol. 29, No. 1, Page 5. Courtesy of Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project.

 

Notes, Sources, and References: 

  1. Citations per captions. With special thanks to the Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project for their generous permission to post articles from their digital collection. https://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/portal/collections/pjn/index.jsp

 

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