Is Sarah Palin Jewish?

(This post is an expansion of comments I posted on Frumpter's post: Is Sarah Palin Jewish. He, in turn, links to a number of related articles on the web.)

The short answer is: the "articles" I've seen on the Blogosphere offer no proof that she is.

I've been doing Lithuanian Jewish genealogy for only about 10 years, but this article struck me as wrong on a few grounds:

"Further information on Governor Palin's ancestors can easily be found in the vital records in the Lithuanian State Historical Archives in Vilnius."

I wish! Actually, the only known surviving birth/marriage/death records for Vilkavisis that are for birth: 1810-1811; 1876; 1922-1939
for marriage: 1810-1811; 1904/1925 (RECONSTRUCTED RECORDS); 1922-1939
for death: 1810-1811; 1877; 1880; 1922-1923; 1925-1939 (source: rtrfoundation.org search for Vilkavisis). RTR Foundation is an online database of known East European Jewish records.

Anyone who says that a Lithuanian genealogy can be "easily" found in the vital records is lying. LitvakSIG, a group dedicated to obtaining and transcribing Lithuanian Jewish Genealogy records, has been working on pulling these records out for years. It is NOT easy. (As a side note, LitvakSIG is hosted by JewishGen. They announced at the last International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) convention that they are in the process of moving to more robust servers. I don't think this has happened yet, so please be understanding if you have issues connecting to the site. LitvakSIG and JewishGen are non-profit organizations supported by donations, so please consider helping them out if you think that their work is valuable and interesting.)

Note that the critical year in the Palin case (1912) is not known to exist (source, record search on http://rtrfoundation.org/). The gaps in the records make it difficult to prove parentage with any certainty. Most of the Marijampole District records that can be obtained have been translated by LitvakSIG volunteers and donations. Note that the records during the time period we're talking about can no longer be obtained as they fall within the EU 100-year privacy blackout. LitvakSIG has some of these records (since the blackout was just instated within the past couple of years), but not all. An interested party can check out what is available on LitvakSIGs All Lithuanian Database and see just how difficult this would be to prove with any certainty.

Then there is another problem with the Jewish Sarah Palin theory:

"The Names Are Altered. At Ellis Island Immigration Centre, the name was entered as Sheeran, a standard practice when immigration officers were unable to understand the pronunciation of non-English speaking immigrants."

This is also less than true. The Ellis Island records were translated directly from the ship manifest. Transcription mistakes did happen, but this "standard practice" nonsense is a bubemeiser. You would need to carefully trace the family tree to see if you could map it back to the Ellis Island records. This can be done, of course. A combination of naturalization records, WWI/WWII registrations, census entries, city directories, voter registrations and U.S. birth/marriage/death records (among others) can be used to pinpoint the immigrant ship manifest even if the immigrant name was different on the manifest. You can then take that information to set up plausible connections to the surviving records in Lithuania (which may include census data, tax records and (if you're lucky, birth/marriage/death records). The Palin-is-Jewish story didn't offer ANY evidence that there is a shred of actual proof beyond "wouldn't it be cool if." You can't simply say that "Green" sounds awfully like "Greenberg," therefore the person must be of Jewish descent! Well, you could, but you would likely be wrong.

The third issue that raised a flag for me:
As for the cemetery, this is what seems to be popping up on Google:
"members of the Sheigam family are buried in the Jewish cemetery Budezeriai"

There may indeed be Sheigams buried in a Jewish cemetery at Budezeriai (I didn't bother to see if I could find the data online), but this is NOT proof that they are related in any way shape or form to Sarah Palin.