About

Homestead Hebrew Data combines my experience in historical and genealogical research with my expertise in technology to reassemble the history of the overlooked Jewish community in America's most famous steel town, Homestead, Pennsylvania. The name of my project comes from the town's synagogue, the Homestead Hebrew Congregation, 1894-1993.

Over the years, I've collected an enormous amount of data about the people in this community. I've transcribed synagogue records unearthed from the archives, read through miles of newspaper microfilm, and pinned tens of thousands of genealogy records to a tree covering all of Homestead's Jewish families. I've collected real estate records from downtown Pittsburgh, tax records from Harrisburg, business records from the Library of Congress, bankruptcy records from Philadelphia, and on and on and on. I then digitized these records to analyze them in aggregate for answers I could not find anywhere else about the composition and growth of the community. Now I have results upon which to build a robust history to demonstrate unequivocally that Homestead, Pennsylvania once had a significant Jewish community who made enduring contributions to the life of the town.

For an introduction to this website, please watch this 20-minute overview:

I continue to add records to the site, as well as to post new analyses of all the data I've compiled, so please check back. Thank you for your interest!

—Tammy Hepps, HomesteadHebrews.com

Select presentations

  • “Steeltown Jews: History and Legacy at Work in Homestead, Pennsylvania.” The Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies, 2022 (video).
  • “Milltown and Hometown: How the Homestead Strike Shaped a Community.” The Homestead Steel Strike and the Growth of America as an Industrial Power, an NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture workshop, University of Pittsburgh, 2022.
  • “Homestead Hebrews: A Case Study in Digital Community Reconstitution and Analysis.” Digital Humanities in Jewish Studies, Tel Aviv University, 2021 (video).
  • “Homestead Hebrews: A Case Study in Digital Community Reconstitution and Analysis.” Software for the Past, Kinneret College, 2020.
  • “Small Town, Big Data: Reconstructing Defunct Communities through Technology.” Family History Technology Workshop, Brigham Young University, 2020 (slides).
  • “Merging GIS and Genealogy to Recreate a Forgotten Community” (with Lauren Winkler). North American Cartographic Information Society, 2019 (video).
  • “Small Town, Big Data: Reconstructing the Forgotten History of Jewish Homestead through Mass Digitization.” Personal Digital Archiving, University of Pittsburgh, 2019.
  • “Data Management for Large-Scale Genealogy Projects.” Family History Technology Workshop, Brigham Young University, 2017 (slides).
  • “In Search of a Usable Past: Reconstructing the Jewish History of Homestead, Pennsylvania.” Library of Congress, 2015 (video).