For those who follow this blog, you might have wondered why there hasn’t been much activity lately. It’s not because I haven’t been working on the site, but rather that’s I’ve been working too hard on the site. I’m proud to introduce the newest feature, the B&F Compendium of Jewish Genealogy.

I’ll be filling in the details in future posts, but in short the compendium is a directory of online resources related to Jewish genealogy for each of more than 200 countries, and over 80 provinces (provinces are currently only in place for Canada, Poland, the UK, and the US). To seed these countries and provinces, I’ve personally added over 1200 resources to them.

For Poland, in addition to its 16 provinces, there are also roughly a thousand cities. This is experimental, but for those thousand cities are over 10,000 resources.

Each resource, which can be assigned to either a Country, Province, or City, can be in one of seven different categories: History, Genealogy, Cemeteries, Holocaust, Diaspora, Contemporary and Books. These resources are all intended to help one researching their Jewish families from these areas, and while they don’t all provide specific genealogical information, they are all intended to offer some piece of the puzzle one can use to pursue their research.

For Cities, there is an additional section, General, which lists general resources for the city, allowing you to double-check that you are looking at the correct city (and not another city that has the same or similar name).

For more details on all of the above sections, see About the Compendium.

The goal of the compendium is not simply to provide a list of links, but rather to be interactive and provide users with the ability to comment on specific topics and resources. When looking at list of resources for a given topic, each resource has two links. The first link takes you out of the compendium to the resource itself. The second link takes you to a page about the resource, offering more details if available, and allowing users to comment on the resource.

This is just the beginning, but I hope people will find what’s available useful, and I hope you’ll join in the discussions throughout the site on different resources and topics. I’ll be filling in additional information about the compendium and the resources on it in the coming weeks. In the meantime, enjoy exploring the site and I’d love to hear from users about what they like and what they don’t like. I have a page set up specifically where you can publicly post your ideas on how to improve the site, but you can also reach me through the regular Contact page.