So it’s been two weeks since I last posted, and that’s because I’ve been busy on a new project. When Mocavo, a search engine dedicated to genealogy, launched a couple of weeks ago, I was inspired to figure out exactly how they were returning the results they were returning, and how one can create topic-specific search engines.
It was not clear to me exactly how Mocavo collected its results – if for example it uses results from another search engine, and just releases the results that match a pre-set list of genealogy-oriented web sites, or if Mocavo is indeed operating its own search ‘spider’ to crawl the web and collect its own results. It seemed clear that while Mocavo did find good results within a number of major genealogy web sites, it didn’t appear to find results on many minor sites, or on major general web sites that might have small genealogy sections. For example, if someone posted a web page on their family on their own web site, or started a Yahoo Group to discuss a particular town or surname (such as described in my earlier post on mailing lists), it did not seem to appear on Mocavo. I don’t know what algorithm Mocavo uses, but I’m guessing it can’t currently find particular sites within larger general websites like Yahoo, so it ignores Yahoo altogether (to eliminate the chance of false positives).
Not knowing anything about how Mocavo put together their site, I decided to see what I could put together myself. Using tools provided by Google (I suspect Mocavo uses the same tools, just their paid versions that allow them much greater customization) I worked over the past couple of weeks to put together my own genealogy search engine. It is a bit more inclusive in how it determines which sites to search than Mocavo. It is thus more likely to find small genealogy sites, but also more likely to find some less-than-relevant results. That’s a compromise I’ve struck, which I think returns many interesting results than you might not find on Mocavo. Of course, Mocavo has the advantage of being a real company with employees who get paid to update the search results, so they can improve their results over time. As this is not my full-time job, I don’t have that luxury. Don’t think, however, that I’m trying to compete with Mocavo. This is just my own attempt at creating a useful search tool for genealogists, inspired by Mocavo.
Unfortunately one of the downsides of Google’s free search tools is ads. I can’t stop the ads from showing up unless I’m willing to pay Google for that privilege. I don’t know why Google shows ads more aggressively on custom search engines like this one then they do on their own search engine, but they do. I’m sorry about that, but there isn’t anything I can do about it.
When looking through the tools available to me, I tried to figure out how I could improve the results for genealogists. I came up with an interesting idea, but Google restricts how useful it can be. Basically when towns have undergone name changes or have different names in different languages, and a record shows up under a name of a town that is different than the version of the name you are searching, you will not get results. Google will actually help here with major cities, so for example if you search for Wien it knows to search for Vienna, but it does not know every version of every town one might be searching for, nor frankly should it as this technique can actually reduce the usefulness of search results when alternate names overlap. In any event, Google allows you to define synonyms for search terms, but limits the amount you can do.
As I was limited, I had to choose a small area to try this technique out on, and I chose the Galicia region of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is a particularly good region to choose, as it has been controlled by many different countries over time, had many different languages spoken, and most towns have many names. It’s also small enough of a region that it fits within the limits of what Google allows me to do. Part of the problem is that Google only allows uni-directional synonyms, which means you need to know which town name to search or the synonyms won’t kick in. To use a set of names that was easily definable, I’ve chosen to use the names at the top of the Locality Pages from the JewishGen Community Database for the given towns. Basically, whichever name appears at the top of a Locality Page for the given town is the one you should use – except don’t use accent marks or apostrophes in the name. You should use dashes if they are in the name. Obviously it must be a town that was part of Galicia. While this will only help people who are searching with one of the hundreds of Galician towns in their search query, if you are not searching with one of these town names, the search engine will still work well to help you find results among the many sites it does search.
I am open to all feedback on this search engine, and welcome feedback in the comments. Please leave comments on the search page itself, and not on this post, as this post is just an introduction and in the future people will just go straight to the search page.
Getting started in researching your family can be difficult. There is a lot to learn, both about how to do the research, but also about the tools needed to organize your research. As you move forward, I always recommend to people to invest in a good genealogy program on their computer, but at the beginning it can sometimes be easier to work on paper.
In this day and age, when I say paper this can also mean the virtual kind – PDF forms. There is no need to actually print out PDF forms, so you can keep them on your computer, share them, etc. without needing to waste real paper.
B&F Ancestor Form
I have designed a series of forms I call the B&F Forms System. You can use most of the forms by themselves, but it is a system because the forms complement each other and can be linked together.
For example, you might start with an Ancestor Form (sometimes called a Pedigree Chart) where you fill out information about yourself (the Source Person), your parents and your grandparents. If you know about generations going back further than that, you can start a new Ancestor Form with one of your grandparents as the Source Person. If you want to enter information about the Source Person’s siblings, or the siblings of their parents, you can fill out a Sibling Form. For parents in the Ancestor Form, you can fill out a Family Form which shows information about the parents and up to six children. If you need to add more children, you can add them to a Sibling Form. For each sibling in a Sibling Form, you can create a Family Form and write the number of the Family Form next to the name of each sibling. These are just some of the examples of how the forms interconnect, creating a full system of forms.
I invite you to go check out the forms yourself, try them out, and send me feedback (you can comment on the bottom of the Forms page).
In the future I will update the forms based on user feedback, and I will also be adding some new forms, such as research-specific forms.
As Genealogy Day is coming up this Saturday, if you have been looking for a way (and an excuse) to get started in your family research, now you have some forms that can help get you started.
It wasn’t that long ago when collaborating with others doing genealogy research meant going to a local genealogy meeting, or traveling to a regional, national or international conference, or looking up fellow researchers in a printed directory, and sending people letters and documents via postal mail. While meeting other researchers in person is still a great thing, and sending items via postal mail can still occasionally be useful, the Internet has thankfully made finding and collaborating with other researchers easier.
I wrote earlier about finding other researchers who are looking for people with the same surnames in the same towns through the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF). That is the best way to find specific researchers that might be researching the same family members as you, but what about more general questions you might have? What if you don’t actually know which town the family lived in? What if the knowledge you need is not specific to your family, but something specific to a document you found – like interpreting a Polish-language birth certificate, or trying to find a town listed in a a document you’ve found.
While gaining access to many documents online is great for genealogy, and having a way to contact distant archives for free and quickly (via e-mail) is very helpful, the biggest improvement to genealogy in the past decades is really the ability to tap into the group knowledge of all the other researchers out there. There are various way to tap into this knowledge, but I think one of the most useful ways is the variety of topic-specific mailing lists out there. By finding the right mailing list, either a broadly defined group with many people, or a very narrowly defined group with only a handful of people, you can find the right people with the right knowledge to help you with your genealogy research.
JewishGen Lists
JewishGen operates a number of heavily-used mailing lists that are specific to Jewish genealogy. Starting with their main list, the JewishGen Discussion Group, which is a kind of catch-all list for Jewish genealogists where you can ask any questions you might have. If you follow this list you will learn a lot about the problems other people are having and will be able to apply some of their solutions to your own research.
In order to join a mailing list on JewishGen, you should first join JewishGen (which is free) and then go to the mailing list administration page to add lists you’d like to subscribe to to your account.
Besides the main list, they also have a large number of mailing lists that are connected to specific regional Special Interest Groups (SIGs). These include (with descriptions from the JewishGen site):
A forum for those researching Jewish genealogy in the areas formerly known as Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic), plus parts of Austria, especially Vienna, but not Galicia.
A forum for researchers with Jewish family roots in country now known as Belarus and more specifically from the former Russian Gubernii (provinces) of Grodno, Minsk, Mogilev, and Vitebsk.
The Jews of Danzig/Gdańsk, and its precursor communities of Alt Schottland, Langfuhr, Mattenbuden, Weinberg, Danzig in der Breitgasse, and Tiegenhof (Nowy Dwór Gdański).
A forum for Jewish genealogical research in France and French colonies, as well as other French-speaking areas such as Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
Hungarian Jewish Special Interest Group is for those with Jewish roots in the area known as “greater Hungary” including areas that at one time were predominantly Hungarian speaking.
Jewish Communities and Records (JCR-UK): A project to record genealogical and historical information concerning the Jewish communities of the United Kingdom.
A forum for those researching the city of Łódź, Poland, and localities within a 40 mile radius – in Congress Poland’s gubernias of Piotrków, Płock, Warszawa, and Kalisz.
A forum for those with Jewish roots in Bessarabia, Bukovina, Dobruja, Maramures, Moldavia, Transylvania and Wallachia (all within the modern nations of Romania, Moldova, and southwestern Ukraine).
A forum to discuss the genealogy and family history of Jewish communities of South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia (Rhodesia), Swaziland, Mozambique and the former Belgian Congo.
A forum for researchers with family origins in the former Russian Empire gubernias now in the Ukraine: Podolia, Volhynia, Kiev, Poltava, Chernigov, Kharkov, Kherson, Taurida and Ekaterinoslav.
While you might get lucky in the main research group, you will find that if you join one of these more specific groups you will be much more likely to find people researching the same families, or at least familiar with the resources available for researching your family from one of the regions covered. I recommend joining the main JewishGen list and whichever regional groups cover where you think your family originates.
Rootsweb
Rootsweb is one of the original online communities for genealogists. There are many free resources available on the site, including the Social Security Death Index (SSDI). They are now owned by Ancestry.com, although the sites are not directly connected.
Rootsweb hosts over 32,000 mailing lists covering many different genealogy topics, including specific regions, surnames, ethnicities, etc. Not all of these mailing lists have active users. You can sign up for a mailing list on Rootsweb and not see a post for months, even years, but there are still some very useful lists on rootsweb, and if you find the one person you need to answer your question, then it doesn’t matter how many message are posted a week. One way to gauge the current traffic of a mailing list is the browse the message archive and see how recently messages have been posted.
There are about 25 specifically Jewish lists on Rootsweb, including:
A mailing list for Jewish genealogy about the past Jewish community of the city of Berdichev, Russia (now Ukraine). See home page for more information.
For the discussion and sharing of information regarding the Brown surname and variations (e.g., Braun, Braumeister) with Jewish origins in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Austria, and Germany.
A mailing list for anyone with a genealogical interest in Grodno Gubernia, a division of the Russian Empire. While the focus of the list will be on Jewish family history research, other subscribers with an interest in the area are welcome. See home page for more information.
Jewish Hibel surname and variations (e.g., Hebel, Hübel, Huebel, Heubel, Hubal) in any place and at any time, but with an emphasis on Galicia/Eastern Europe.
A multilingual English-French-German mailing list for anyone with a genealogical, cultural or historical interest in the Province of Alsace, nowadays France, related to their Jewish roots. Anything that concerns Jewish-Alsatian traditions, culture, folklore, heritage, or why not old recipes and daily life in ancient times in the Province of Alsace is an appropriate topic.
A mailing list for anyone trying to trace their Jewish roots back to the 18th century Grand Duchy of Lithuania – Kingdom of Poland Commonwealth before Jews had surnames. Additional information can be found on the Jewish Family History Foundation website.
A mailing list for the discussion and sharing of information regarding Jewish but non-German branches of the Sztern surname and variations (e.g., Stern, Stein) at any time. Primary focus is on branches which were in BEL (Belarus), UKR (Ukraine), POL (Poland) and/or New York circa the late 1800s/early 1900s.
A mailing list for the discussion and sharing of information regarding the originally eastern European Jewish surname Tesler, Tessler, and Teszler in any place and at any time.
A mailing list for anyone researching their Jewish roots in the Chernigov Gubernia, a province in Russia from 1802-1929/1932 and since then a province in the Ukraine known as Chernigov Oblast. See home page for more information.
A mailing list for anyone with a genealogical interest in the Jews who once lived in the Kremenets District of Ukraine and their descendants. Topics will include updates and discussions about Jewish genealogy in the towns, villages and shtetlach of the Kremenets District.
A mailing list for the discussion and sharing of information regarding the Winograd surname and variations (e.g., Winagrad, Wynagrad, Wynograd) in any place and at any time but primarily Jewish Winograds originating in Poland or Belarus.
A mailing list for the discussion and sharing of information regarding the Jewish surname Wolfshaut and variations (e.g., Wolfsont, Wolfsout, Wolfshout, Wolfshant, Wolfsant, Wolfsaut, Wolfshont, Wolfset) in any place and at any time.
Most of the above lists, with the exception of British-Jewry, are not particularly high-traffic lists, but many of them have people who are very knowledgeable about their topics who can help you if your research falls into the purview of their topic.
Google Groups (and Usenet)
I’m going to mention Google Groups quickly, because it is after all Google, but truthfully there are not lot of groups on Google of interest to Jewish genealogists. The primary resource on Google Groups that is useful to Jewish genealogists is access to the newsgroups that are a part of the very old Usenet system, in particular soc.genealogy.jewish.
soc.genealogy.jewish is a way to look back at more than 15 years of Jewish genealogy discussions, and searching it through Google’s interface is a great way to find out about the discussions that have taken place about towns and surnames you are researching. soc.genealogy.jewish is still actively used so you can post new messages there and get responses to your general questions as well.
Google Groups does allow you to set up your own mailing lists, but there are not many Jewish genealogy mailing lists on Google Groups, and I suspect the reason is simply that Yahoo Groups are much easier to set up and manage.
Yahoo Groups
If you decide one day that you want to start your own Jewish genealogy mailing list – perhaps covering your ancestral town or your family, etc. Yahoo Groups is a great way to set up a mailing list quickly. In addition to a mailing list, you also get a file upload area, photo albums, a database and other advanced features. It is also very easy to manage the mailing list, moderate messages, reject messages that are spam, or even to modify messages before they get posted (such as adding a moderator’s message when a discussion veers off-track). Because setting this up is so easy, it really has become the serivce of choice for setting up small discussion groups for many topics.
There are dozens upon dozens of groups of interest to Jewish genealogists on Yahoo. The best thing for you to do is try searching for your ancestral towns, or regions, or surnames, etc. and see if there are groups already set up to discuss your specific areas of interest. The following table is a list of those groups that mention Jewish genealogy, but many likely do not use those specific words, but will show up if you’re searching for them by town name, etc. The following table is not alphabetical, but actually ordered according to whatever metric Yahoo uses to determine the popularity of a group. The more popular groups are at the beginning of the table and the popularity declines are you continue down the table.
The purpose of this forum is to discuss SEPHARDIC/JEWISH GENEALOGY, GENEALOGY TOOLS, HISTORY, CUSTOMS and other issues related to genealogy. We invite those of good will regardless of religious beliefs to visit and participate.
Researching your Jewish ancestors from the Pultusk area, north of Warsaw? Link up with others also looking for family tree connections in Pultusk and surrounding area, now in Poland and once part of the Tsarist Russian Empire.
For anyone with a connection to or interest in the town of Keidan, Lithuania. For nearly 500 years, Keidan – now called Kedainiai – was home to a proud and vibrant Jewish community.
This group is composed of genealogists, who are researching their Jewish roots to the town of Nowy Sacz, Poland. In the past this town has been known as Neu Sandec, Neu Sandez, Nowy Sancz, Tsants, Sants, Tsanz, Sanz, Zanz,etc. See here for more info.
The mission of the genealogy group is to research information about Sephardic Jewish Families from France and Canada. This includes the discussion of the Canadian-Anusim Family Tree DNA Project and our test results.
The Jewish community of Jebenhausen, near Goeppingen in Wuerttemberg (Germany), was founded in 1777 and dissolved in 1900. This list aims at a virtual reunion of descendants of Jebenhausen’s Jewish families, and invites discussions on all issues relevant to the community history, genealogy and related matters.
DNA Researcher group for Jewish people in the R1b haplogroup. The R1b haplogroup is the most common haplogroup in Western Europe, yet it is found in only a small percentage of Ashkenazi Jews (roughly 10%).
This group is concerned with genealogy in the Botosani (Romania) area. The majority of members are of Jewish descent although there is no plan to omit anyone else. Everyone interested in Botosani is welcome.
This group has been set up with the purpose of collecting and sharing information concerning Vistytis and all those individuals and families who have their origins there or for those who have an interest in the town.
This group is for those interested in tracing their Jewish family roots in and around the area of northwest Ukraine known as Volhynia Gubernia, which borders Poland and Belarus. Among the major cities in Volhynia are Lutsk and the crossroads city of Kovel.
This Jewish genealogy group is dedicated to the town of BORSZCZO’W which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of WW1(Galicia) then became part of Poland until the end of WW2 and is now in the Ukraine. See here for more info.
The International Sephardic Discussion Group is an Internet based group of members who discuss issues pertaining to Sephardim, past and present. We do not talk about religion on this list.
Between 1882 and 1884, as many as 80 Jewish immigrants came to Cotopaxi, Colorado, in an attempt to farm the land there. This is a place for those who are researching the genealogy of the Cotopaxi Colony.
The site was created to allow those with Ancestral Roots belonging to the village of Hostów ( Hostiv, Gostev, Gostiv Pop 1983-36% Polish in Y1907)and Tarnowica Polna (Ternovytsa, Pop 1798 -90% Polish) located 3 km apart to connect with their ancestral history within Eastern Galicia(Pokucie/Kresy).
For descendants of Jews who lived in or near the Jewish Shtetl (town) of Plontch (Polaniec), which was located in Kielce Gubernia, in South-Eastern Poland.
This Jewish genealogy group is dedicated to the town of Czortkow which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of WW1(Galicia) then became part of Poland until the end of WW2 and is now in the Ukraine.
Isaac and Samuel SHUTER, sons of Michael SHUTER from Lissa, Prussia (now Leszno, Poland) were both married in the Great Synagogue of London in the year 1850.
Dedicated to the town of Kalusz (Kalush) which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of WW1(Galicia) then became part of Poland until the end of WW2 and is now in the Ukraine.
Dedicated to the town of Mielnitsa which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of WW1(Galicia) then became part of Poland until the end of WW2 and is now in the Ukraine.
Devoted to exchange of information about Jewish residents of pre-1939 Jaslo – a town in southeastern Poland’s district of Podkarpackie (formerly in Galicia).
A list for all the STOTTERs who wish to find out if and how they are connected.
Other Groups and Lists
There are numerous other mailing lists and discussion groups out there on the Internet, and you should try searching for groups that are connected to your specific research areas such as town names and surnames. For towns, always check the ShtetLinks page for your town to see if they mention other resources like mailing lists. Also search the archives of the larger lists like the main JewishGen list, or a regional list like Gesher Galicia (if your town is from Galicia) to see if other mailing lists have been mentioned for your town or whatever topic you are researching. You can even search all of the JewishGen mailing lists at once.
If I’ve missed a great Jewish genealogy mailing list, please let me know in the comments.
UPDATED:
I will be adding mailing lists mentioned in the comments at the end of the posting as people make me aware of them.
For descendants of Wolinsky (and variants Wolin, Wolins, Woliyniec, Wolinetz) from the town of Antopol, Russia (now Belarus) and the surrounding area. This group includes descendants of Baruch Wolinsky of Antopol.
A mailing list composed of Jewish survivors from Mir, descendents of former residents and descendents of students of the Mir Yeshiva. Link is for the web site, e-mail the moderator for access to the mailing list.
When you do research into your family, you need to cite your sources. Without sources for all the names, dates, etc. that you put into your family tree, your tree doesn’t really mean that much. Let me explain why this is the case.
There are millions of people worldwide who are actively researching their family trees. Some people consider it an occasional hobby, and others spend all their waking days looking into their families. No matter which side a researcher finds themselves on, or anywhere in between, the quality of the research done by these people varies greatly. In other words, some people do quality research, back up everything they find, and cite the sources for everything so they can go back and tell you how they determined the year a particular person was born, or what their name was before immigrating to the US, etc. Other people do lower-quality research, don’t record where they found anything, and just enter the names and dates they find into a database on their computer, or directly to an online family tree. I would venture to guess that there is little correlation between how much time someone spends on their family tree, and whether people are quality researchers or just name collectors.
So why is it a problem to just collect names and dates and throw them into a database? Well, primarily the problem is that you will make mistakes. I don’t mean that quality researchers don’t make mistakes and sloppy researchers do make mistakes – I mean everyone makes mistakes. There will always be times when you find a record of a person and you think it is the brother of so-and-so or the father of this-or-that cousin, and it really isn’t.
A good researcher will cite the source for the record, and most likely recognize that without more information they cannot conclusively say that the person is who they think it is. The good researcher might not even put the person into their tree, but put them in a folder for unconfirmed relatives until such time that they do find more information. If you don’t cite where you found out a piece of information, then when you do find more information, you will have no way to compare your new information with the old information.
For example, if you first calculated the birth year of a person by their age listed on their grave, but later find another record with the birth year on it, how will you know the relative strength of the new record versus the old record in terms of determining the birth year. Will you remember ten years later that you determined the age from a gravestone? What happens if you ended up recording the age of the wrong person? How would you confirm that without knowing your original source? Maybe you recorded the name of the person’s niece of nephew that shared the same name. How would you be able to tell?
Imagine a researcher just records names and dates as they find them. They don’t double-check anything, and couldn’t if they tried since they don’t know where their information originated. Using an example where someone recorded a nephew instead of the uncle, let’s say that same person finds a tree of the nephew online (which they identify since the spouse is the same). They copy and paste the new information into their tree, except it’s under the uncle instead. Now you have a branch of the family which is completely wrong. What does this researcher do next? They post their tree online with no sources. The next person comes along and finds someone who matches in their tree and copies the rest of the tree into their own, propagating the mistake.
There are really two lessons to be learned here.
First, don’t trust anything you find on the Internet, without independent confirmation. If you import a tree from a web site, make sure to check it out first.
Second, cite the source for everything you record in your own family tree, so you won’t come back years later with a new, different, piece of information and not know which is correct.
How To Cite Sources
When you were in high school or college you probably remember having to format your sources according to a citation style guide like the Chicago Manual of Style or the MLA Handbook. These guides defined where the title of the book or article went, how the author’s name was listed, etc. with examples for different types of citations – like newspaper articles, published books, unpublished dissertations, etc.
In the world of genealogy, there are many more types of evidence that one might need to cite in their research, since a scribble on the back of a an old photo, a listing in a commercial online database, the inscription of a gravestone, vital records of all kinds from all countries, etc. can be cited – all for the same person. The bible of genealogical citation is Elizabeth Shown Mill’s Evidence Explained. The book contains over a thousand citation models for just about any source you can think of that you will come across in your genealogy research. For example, do you know how to cite this blog entry? According to Evidence Explained (pg. 812) it could be formatted something like this:
Trauring, Philip, “Don’t Trust What You Find on the Internet, and Cite All Your Sources,” Blood and Frogs: Jewish Genealogy and More, 27 February 2011 (http://www.bloodandfrogs.com/2011/02/dont-trust-what-you-find-on-internet.html : accessed 27 February 2011)
It gives a two more options for different types of blog citations. It also has citation models for tweets, chats, discussion forums, podcasts and other Internet-based content that probably wasn’t listed in the MFA Handbook or Chicago Manual of Style the last time you used one of them. I’m pretty sure that even today you won’t find a citation model for citing a gravestones in the Chicago Manual of Style. Coming in at over 800+ pages, Evidence Explained is a much bigger book than those other style guides.
There has been an effort by some to try to standardize genealogy citation models around those in Evidence Explained, and indeed some genealogy software programs have offered the ability to use Evidence Explained citation models when citing sources in your program. I think that it’s good to have a standard for citations, and I hope all the major genealogy software companies adopt Evidence Explained as their citation model. If there isn’t a standard for citations, then sharing citation between programs becomes difficult.
The Debate
While there is no debate in the world of genealogy that there is a need to cite sources, there is a big debate over how to cite sources. Do you really need to follow strict citation standards like those advocated by Evidence Explained? Therein lies the issue debated amongst genealogists, how important is it really to use a citation model? Isn’t it just important to convey the information to find the source cited? Do you really need to follow an 800+ page book explaining every possible citation model you could need?
I’m not going to go into this debate in depth. I’m simply going to give my opinion that as long as you convey the correct information in an understandable way, the style is not really important. I think it’s great to use a system like Evidence Explained if you can, but if there’s a chance you won’t enter the source because it takes too long to figure out the right citation model for the source and you think you’ll get back to it later (which you won’t) then just enter the citation however you want. As genealogy programs add better source citation tools, this won’t become as big an issue and it will actually be easier to cite them properly when it is automated.
[Update: This article was written in 2011, and I launched the B&F Compendium of Jewish Genealogy in 2016. If you’re researching specifically Polish shtetls, definitely check out the Polish Cities list in the compendium with more than 25,000 resources for over 1400 towns in what is now Poland (this includes towns that were in Germany before WWII and are now part of Poland).]
One of the first steps to doing genealogy research is to find the town that each person in your tree was born. For most Jewish researchers, this means tracking back to towns that may no longer exist or have not had any Jewish population for generations. Certainly the Holocaust was the cause of many of these disruptions.
A Jewish ancestral town is sometimes generically referred to as a shtetl, which in Yiddish simply means town. Shtetl is sometimes used more specifically to mean small towns in Europe with large Jewish populations. Finding your ancestral town is a different topic (or rather there are many topics related to finding one’s ancestral town), and an important one, but for the purposes of this article I will assume you already know the name of the town from which your family originated.
So you’ve found the name of the town, now what? I think the first step in doing research on the town your family came from is to find out where the town is, and what it is/was near. This might seem simple, but many of the towns Jews lived in in the past had the borders switch around them amid the wars and dealings of the empires (Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Prussian/German) that ruled them.
There are several resources that can help you find out more about your town. Two important databases on JewishGen are the Communities Database and ShtetlSeeker. These two databases are not the same, and I’ll explain the differences.
JewishGen Communities Database
The Communities Database contains information on known Jewish communities across the globe. If your town is in the database, there is a page that contains a lot of basic information on the town, as well as links to other data on the town. The resultant page is largely generated automatically. It will show you which country and region the town existed in during different time periods, as well as which towns are nearby. Knowing which towns were nearby is very important, because while you might only search your town, your relatives might have moved to the town nearby and there might be records in that town for your family that you could miss. It’s always worth looking into the nearby towns, searching the JGFF and searching for records in the nearby towns, as you are likely to find you family didn’t all live in one town.
The Communities Database does not let you search using an exact match, so it will show you results on all similarly sounding towns. If you’re searching for the first time and you don’t actually know the modern spelling of the town’s name, this can be very useful. If you know the exact current spelling of the name, then you’ll just need to scroll through the results until you find the correct name.
For example, if you were to search for ‘Kanczuga’ you would get results like the following:
JewishGen Communities Database Search Results
There are six results, from several countries. If I had specified Poland as the current country then there would only have been two results. Of course, you may not know which country the town is in currently, so if you are not sure then do a broader search to see all the possibilities. Only one result has the exactly spelling I searched for, which if you know the spelling means it’s easy to figure out which one is correct. Also note the other information shown in the results. It gives you the district the town was in during different periods and the number of listings in the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF) database.
If you move your mouse over each town name, you’ll see a pop-up box giving you basic information on the town:
Mouse-over pop-up details
This can be useful if you’re not sure which town is the correct one. When you click on a town name, it will take you to a page summarizing information on that town:
JewishGen Community page for Kanczuga
If you click on the image above it will load it full size and you can see my annotations showing what to look for on the page. The key things you should notice are the alternate names for the town (useful when searching for records in databases that don’t know alternate names – like on Ancestry.com), the country the town was in during different periods (so that while you know the town is now in Poland, you now know for example to look for ‘Austria’ as a country in records because it was in the Austrian Empire), a direct link to the JGFF search, a list of nearby towns ordered by distance, and a list of other resources. Some of these pages will also link to the town’s ShtetLink page if one exists, although for some reason this Community page does not. ShtetlLinks is discussed below.
JewishGen ShtetlSeeker (Update: as of Aug 2011 this is the JewishGen Gazetteer)
The ShtetlSeeker is a bigger database that contains information on towns everywhere, even if there is no known Jewish community that existed there. It also contains geographical names, such as the names of mountains and streams. Whereas an open search above for ‘Kanczuga’ returned 6 results, an open search on ShtetlSeeker returns 303 results including Kamchikha, a section of a town, Konchuga, a town, and Kunzhuga, a stream. If the place in the list is also in the Communities Database, it will have a small flower icon next to the name of the place, and you can preview the town info with a mouse-over and click on it for more information like in the Communities Database search itself. In this case only four results have the icon next to them. Why aren’t there the same six results from the Community Database before? I have no idea.
The information in the search results is also a bit different in ShtetlSeeker. For example, this is a portion of the Kanczuga results:
Part of ShtetlSeeker search results for Kanczuga
If you take a look (you can click on the image to enlarge it) you can see the flower icon next to Kanczuga, indicating that it is in the Communities Database.
After the name is a column defining the name as a ‘populated place’, or as a stream, mountain, etc.
Next is a column showing the map coordinates for the location. This is actually a link that will take you to a Resource Map for that location. The Resource Map is a very useful map that shows you what resources (such as records in JRI-Poland, names in JGFF, etc.) exist on the JewishGen site for everyone in the immediate area. This is very useful, even more so if your town is not in the Communities Database, as you will be able to see what towns with known Jewish communities existed nearby, and you can then see what resources exist for those communities.
Kanczuga-area Resource Map
In the map above, I’ve selected Kanczuga and it has popped up a bubble showing what resources exist for Kanczuga. If I had selected any of the other little tree icons around the map, it would show me similar information for those. If you look along the top of the image, you can see that you can select what type of resources you want to see on the map, although the default is to show everything.
Going back to the search results page, the next column has links to various mapping web sites, showing you the location on each site. The mapping sites include Expedia, Mapquest, Microsoft Bing Maps and Google Maps.
Next the search results who you the current country the town is in, it’s distance from a reference point (usually a large nearby city) and a bullseye button that will take you to a new set of search results that show all towns within a 10 mile radius of the town on whose line you press the button.
JewishGen ShtetLinks (Update: As of Aug 2011 this is now KehilaLinks)
ShtetLinks is a large collections of town-specific web pages developed by real researchers who know about the town. You can think of them as the hand-made version of the Communities Database. Depending on who worked on the ShtetLink page for your town, it might be a simple one-page site with a few links, or it could be a full-blown web site with multiple sections, photo albums, historical documents, etc. It all depends on how much time and effort were put into the site by the volunteers who put together the pages. Sometimes a page was developed by someone who is no longer involved, and it hasn’t been updated in years. In these cases sometimes the administrator of ShtetLinks will post that pages need new administrators to the JewishGen e-mail list.
If you town does not have a site as part of ShtetLinks, you can of course volunteer to create one yourself. This is a great way to give back to the genealogy community.
Virtual Shtetl
JewishGen is not the only organized source for information on Jewish communities. Another site is the Virtual Shtetl, a project of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is currently under construction and planning to open in 2012 in Warsaw. The site contains basic information on over 900 towns, but is meant to be a collaborative effort to collect information on the towns. Users can upload documents on the towns to share with others, and they can ‘like’ a town, similar to how someone ‘likes’ a page on Facebook. Users with interest in the same town can communicate anonymously through the site.
As the site is intended to be used both by Polish people, as well as their descendants, it is available in several languages. Some content is not yet translated into all languages, so you might find a town’s information only in Polish. Information on towns can include history, synagogue info, cemetery data, places where people were killed in the Holocaust, legends, stories, memories of the town, as well as contemporary information such as transportation, hotels and restaurants.
The Virtual Shtetl is a work in progress, and most of the resources are not yet in English, but by the very nature of its location in Poland and the attempt of the hosting museum to attract many local Poles to the site, it has a lot of potential to be a unique resource on towns in Poland.
Other Sites
There are many many other sites online with information on specific towns, regions and countries. Many people have created their own web sites with information on their ancestral town, or started a Yahoo Group or Rootsweb mailing list for their town. Try searching for your town name and seeing what you find. Use the alternate names from the Community Database in your searches as well, as you never know which version of the name a person used online. Keep in mind that some of these groups and mailing lists may not have a lot of people, or a lots of message traffic in them. That could be good or bad depending on your perspective. As long as there are knowledgeable people on the lists, it doesn’t really matter how often people post to it, as long as there is someone who knows how to answer questions posed on the list.
Figure out which region your town was in, as there may be regional sites as well. Kanczuga, the town I used as an example above was in the Galicia region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before WWI. That means the Gesher Galicia organization is a great place to look for information. Gesher Galicia even has a sub-group for the specific region of Galicia Kanczuga was in, the Kolbuszowa Region, which has its own web site. On Rootsweb there is an Austro-Hungarian-Jewish list, and on JewishGen there is a Gesher Galicia mailing list.
Google, beyond the straight web site search which you should do has two other sites that you can use to research your town. Google Books contains the scanned contents of millions of books from all over the world, and will show you which books mention your town. If the book is out of copyright, you may even be able to download the whole book. If it’s still in copyright, you still might be able to search inside the book and find out information, depending on what the publisher allowed Google to do. Google News Archive is a site for searching news sites including some that you will need to pay for if you want to read the whole articles. Again, this is useful just for seeing where your town may have been mentioned.
Once you find which sites contain information on your town, see if there’s a way that you can help. Do you have photos or documents from that town that your can contribute? Are you a web designer that can improve the look and function of one of the sites?
If there is no site for your town, consider starting one. Starting a group on Yahoo is a good way to organize researchers from the same town, and allows you to share photos, documents, links and other information is a neat organized way (and doesn’t require any web design skills).
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