Tag Archives: archives

A Major Breakthough for Jewish Polish Records

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JRI-Poland and the Polish State Archives have announced a new agreement to expand the availability of Jewish records from Poland. An earlier agreement which was in effect between 1997 and 2006 resulted in the indexing of more than 4 million records which make up the bulk of the JRI-Poland database. The cancellation of that agreement in 2006 was a major blow to Jewish genealogy. There have been ongoing discussions since 2007, but the resumption of cooperation did not materialize until now. This announcement, made on Friday, is much more than most expected, and well worth the wait.

The first major component of the announcement is that JRI-Poland will be able to add an additional million records to its database within the next year. That is in addition to the 4 million existing records already in their database that originate from the Polish State Archives.

JRI-Poland Executive Director Stanley Diamond signing the agreement in the
presence of Polish Consul General Andrzej Szydło in Montreal, Quebec.

The second major component is that JRI-Poland will launch a new Order Processing System, which will allow people searching for records on the site to click on a record they want and order it directly on the JRI-Poland site using a credit card. JRI-Poland will handle the credit card processing and the archives in Poland will copy the records. For anyone who has dealt with ordering records from Polish archives directly, this is a major breakthrough.

While my Finding and getting copies of Jewish records in Poland article is still one of the most popular on this site, and was published in print as well, it is my hope that this announcement means that in the future that article will not be needed.

Polish State Archives General Director Władysław Stępniak signing the agreement,
with JRI-Poland representative Krzysztof Malczewski (on left) looking on.

The third major component of the announcement is that the Polish State Archives is starting a major effort to digitize all of their records in all 30 Regional Archives, and make them available for free online. As these digital scans come online, JRI-Poland will link directly to the images from their database search results. As the images come online, the new Order Processing System will be phased out.

The announcement is available on the JRI-Poland site (in English) as well as the Polish State Archives site (in Polish).

I’d like to congratulate Stanley Diamond, the Co-Founder and Executive Director of JRI-Poland, as well as the other JRI-Poland board members, staff and volunteers who made this agreement possible.

I look forward to seeing the different elements of this agreement come to fruition, and will let readers of this blog know about things as they happen.

Useful Document for Researching Belgian Immigrants to US

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Antwerp Baggage Disinfection Room
“Everything for passengers is done free of charge in this building.”

I recently discovered a document on the web site of the Felix Archives (the Antwerp city archives) called Emigration to America (this is a PDF). It seems to date back to 1999, but is still useful, especially considering no documents newer than 75 years ago are available anyways, and this document lists what documents exist in archives related to people living in Antwerp that may have emigrated to the US. The document was put together by the Archivist of the City of Antwerp. The availability dates mentioned are certainly out of date – for example it refers to certain collections available up to 1915, but those collections are now available to at least 1930 if not later. This is because as time goes on, more records are made publicly available.

Some of the interesting records mentioned in the document include registers from hotels and boarding houses, and emigration lists of third-class passengers from 1892 forward (second-class and first-class passengers were not recorded in these registers because American immigration restriction did not apply to them).

Some of the archives mentioned in the document include:

  • Antwerp City Archives (Stadsarchief Antwerpen)
  • Provincial Archives Antwerp (Provinciaal Archief Antwerpen)
  • National Archives Antwerp (Rijksarchief Antwerpen)
  • National Archives Beveren (Rijksarchief Beveren)
  • National Archives of Belgium, Brussels (Algemeen Rijksarchief Brussel)
  • Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brussels (Archief van het Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, Brussel)
  • National Archives, The Hague (Algemeen Rijksarchief Den Haag)
  • Rotterdam Municipal Archives (Gemeentearchief Rotterdam)

as well as these in the US:

  • National Archives and Records Administration
  • Ellis Island
  • National Archives Regional Center in New York
  • New York Municipal Archives

and these genealogy societies:

  • Flemish Association for Family Research
  • (Vlaamse Vereniging voor Familiekunde)
  • Netherlands Genealogical Association

Keep in mind that some of the documents mentioned as being in specific archives (in 1999) are now in different archives. In particular the central immigrant police files are now in the National Archives in Brussels.

Did your family live in or pass through Antwerp, Belgium?

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I’m looking for people whose relatives lived in Antwerp by the 1920s. Antwerp, as one of the largest port cities in Europe, was host to many people who left their homes in other parts of Europe and made their way to Belgium, sometimes permanently and sometimes just briefly on their way elsewhere, such as to the US.

I wrote an article back in November on researching Jewish relatives that passed through Belgium, but it is now woefully out of date due to changes at the web site of the Felix Archives in Antwerp. As part of updating that article (which is the basis of a lecture I’ll be giving in August – more on that later) I’d like to find a few people with families who lived in Belgium so I can help them find records, and at the same time update my knowledge of the archives.

If your family lived in Antwerp in the 19th century up through the 1920s, please send me an e-mail with the following information:

– Name of family member(s) that lived in Antwerp
– Where they lived before Antwerp (and where they were born if different)
– When they arrived in Antwerp
– When they left Antwerp

Also, let me know if you’ve ever researched your family members in the Felix Archives in Antwerp or the State Archives in Brussels, and if there are other archival resources in Belgium you’ve used to find out about your family there.

Thank you.

British Mandate Publications

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This posting is a bit tangential to genealogy, so for those not interested, I apologize. However, researching history goes hand-in-hand with researching your family. It’s hard to understand what is going on in your family tree without understanding what was going on around your family at the time.

In the period between WWI and shortly after WWII, the British government ruled the area which now constitutes Israel and Jordan. That area was called the British Mandate of Palestine (the ‘mandate’ given to the British by the League of Nations). What is now Jordan was split off in 1922 as Transjordan, and eventually became the modern state of Jordan (technically the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan). The remaining area is now the State of Israel and the territories (Gaza, which was captured by Egypt, and the West Bank, captured by Jordan, during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948-49 and later captured by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967).

Back to the British. It’s important to realize that the period of the British Mandate was the apex of the British imperial empire. After WWI, the British ruled over the largest land mass in its history (1.8 million square miles) and yet it really was the beginning of the end of the empire. During the interwar years, and following WWII, the British Empire began to unravel.

During this transitional period, the British government published quite a bit about what was going on in their empire. Many of their publications, even though they dealt with far-flung parts of the empire, were either published or at least made available by the British Mandate government. When the British left in 1948, they left behind many of their government documents which found their way into what became the Israel State Archives.

While many of the documents from this period deal specifically with the British Mandate of Palestine, the variety of documents is actually quite interesting. Many documents deal with the British during WWI and WWII. War Office. Colonial Office. Parliamentary debates. Naval law. Education. Police. Prisons. Railway. Agricultural and Veterinarian studies. Archaeology. Water. Documents related to France, Egypt, Iraq, India, Yemen, Transjordan, Sudan, Turkey, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), West Indies, Kenya, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Gambia and more.

Some documents of interest to genealogists (besides for general history) include a phone book from Iraq in 1945 and phone books of the Palestine Mandate from 1946 and 1947. A guide to transliterating geographical and personal names from Arabic and Hebrew into English that was published in 1931. Several reports deal with the Arab riots in 1920, 1929, etc. which presumably list the names of the victims.

Of course, as the government was British, the great majority of documents published were in English. For those people interested in general British history, there are probably better ways to search for these documents, although browsing the Israel State Archives catalog might give you some idea of what documents you want to look for elsewhere.

The Palestine Gazette, the official publication of the government for all legal notices and publications of new laws, etc. also included name changes during the period, although these are already indexed and searchable on the Israel Genealogical Society web site.

Other British Mandate documents made searchable on the Israel Genealogical Society web site include part of the 1922 census (from Petah Tikva and Tel Aviv) and a collection of lists of medical practitioners. The 1922 census is available to anyone online, but the medical practitioners list is only available to IGS members. Thanks to Rosie Feldman for pointing out these additional resources.

By now you might be wondering where on the Israel State Archive’s web site you can search their catalog of British Mandate government publications. The fact is, you can’t search for it there. The Israel State Archives does not have this index online. In fact, while it was put onto a computer roughly twenty years ago, they no longer even know where that computer file exists anymore, if it does at all. Like many government archives, they have their budget issues and I don’t blame them for these problems. So how do you search this catalog? The archive has a printout from 1993 on fading paper from when it was computerized back then. You can go to the archive and look at it if you’d like of course, but the purpose of this posting, besides making people aware of this archival resource, is to make available a digital version of this catalog.

I didn’t re-type the catalog. It’s 111 pages. What I’ve done is scanned the catalog, applied optical character recognition to the pages so it is semi-searchable, and put the whole thing online. I say semi-searchable because the document was in such poor shape that I wouldn’t rely on the search exclusively to find entries in the catalog. Also, there are about 9 pages of Hebrew documents at the end of the catalog which are not searchable at all (for those who can read Hebrew).

In order to access these documents in the archives, you need to go to the archive building in Jerusalem. It’s in a nondescript building in the Talpiyot neighborhood. See their web site for details on hours, etc. The code given in the catalog needs to be ‘translated’ into a location code using a second document they have there, which maps the codes. I can put this online too if there’s interest, but if you’re already going down to the archive to look at documents, this will only take a few minutes there anyways. For those documents not specific to the Palestine Mandate, and many of those that are, you can probably also find these same documents in British archives and other archives of former British territories.

I’ve posted the document using Google Docs, which allows anyone to browse the document as well as search it. Keywords used in the search are highlighted yellow in the document (orange when the current selection). Considering the original shape of the document, the OCR was surprisingly good and the searching works fairly well.

Example of highlighted search terms in the catalog

So check out my online catalog of the British Mandate of Palestine government publication index from the Israel State Archives.

I’m not sure where to put a link to this for future reference, but for the time being I’ve added it to the my list of links in the right column of the blog (scroll down to bottom right of this page). You can always search for this posting too.

Researching Jewish Relatives Who Passed Through Belgium

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I originally posted this summary in the Galicia mailing list back in September. It is more or less the same as what I posted then, but will the added mention of the new familysearch index when went live just recently.

In an attempt to help those who had family in Belgium at some point before and during WWII, I’d like to summarize the primary archives available and how to best access them (in my experience).

There are three primary archives in Belgium that I will point out:

1) The State Archives in Brussels (http://www.arch.be/), which holds the ‘Vreemdelingenpolitie persoonlijke dossiers’ which are files that were kept by a special department of the police on all immigrants entering the country. This was a centralized archive for the whole country, and in theory all interactions by immigrants with all levels of government, down to the local cities, was forwarded to this central archive.

2) The Felix Archives in Antwerp (http://www.felixarchief.be/), which holds the local versions of the immigrant files as above. Not all cities kept these files, but Antwerp did, and it is an important resource. It is especially important for those families whose relatives went to Antwerp before 1900, as the central archives in Brussels destroyed some of the older files in 1900 to make room for new files, and anything before 1900 may only exist in the local archives like the Felix Archives.

3) The Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance (JMDR) is a museum and archive set up in Mechelen, Belgium — the location where Belgium’s Jews were collected and deported to Auschwitz in 1942. The archives hold a number of interesting collections, the most important being the registers of all Jews in Belgium done in 1940 by the Belgian gov’t, at the request of the occupying German forces, the later registers done by Judenrat members in 1941 and the deportation lists from 1942. They also state on their web site that they are in the process of digitizing the immigrant files from the State Archives listed above, but this may only be the records of those deported, and may not include those people who got out of Belgium before the Germans arrived.

State Archives

So first the State Archives. These files are files that were kept by a special department of the police on all immigrants in the country. If your family moved from Galicia to Belgium at some point before the war, chances are there is a file on them here. The files can range in size from a single page up to dozens of pages. I have one record that is over 80 pages. The files contain all kinds of information, usually including the names, birth year and birth location of the parents of the person whose file it is. The files contain all interactions with the government, so may include letters from consulates on the person’s behalf, letters from relatives already in Belgium, dealings with the police, etc. The files can run well past WWII if the person continued to live in Belgium, or even returned to visit later. If your relative lived in Belgium in the 1920s and 1930s you can expect more than one photo of them in the files as well. In theory, everything from the local archives from the city your relative lived in should also be in these files, but as mentioned this is not always the case, and in particular if your family moved to Belgium before 1900 you should track down the local archives as well.

This collection was once held in a different archive that provided the records for free to family members, but this is no longer the case. You need to pay for all copies of documents. If the number of pages are small, they can be provided to you digitally online. If the number of pages is large, they will need to mail you CDs with the files on them. One other expense is that if you want to pay for these copies from outside of Belgium, they require a bank transfer, so you’ll need to factor in the international bank transfer into the total cost. My bank charges $35 for this service, which the last time I ordered files was well in excess of what the archive itself was charging me for copying the files.

To access these records, you can send in a request to archives.generales @ arch.be, and make sure to include in the subject ‘with regard to Section 5’ so it gets to the right department. When you send in a request, make sure to include as much information about the people that you have, such the full name, birthday, town of origin, name of spouse including maiden name, etc. The more information you provide the better. The index to this archive is on cards, and there are millions of them, so the more information you provide, the easier it is for them to look up the information. The maiden name is very important, as sometimes a record might be listed under the wife’s name instead of the husband’s name. Some people have suggested in the past that you need to show direct descendency from the relative to access their records, but I have not found this to be the case.

You will be directed to an archivist working in the right department, and they will help you to locate the files on your relatives. Once they have been located, you can choose to order copies of the files. One thing to keep in mind is that on the front of these file folders, the police frequently wrote down the names and file numbers of related people. So for example, it might list the file number of the person’s parents, or a sibling, or even occasionally a co-worker. Before ordering copies, you should ask the archivist if they can send you the names and files numbers lists on the front of the files they have found, so you can determine if any of the related files are also of interest to you. In many cases I have found people through these related files that I didn’t even think to look for at the beginning.

Once you’ve come up with the list of files you want you will be directed to the reproduction services department and you will e-mail them the list of files you want and after a little bit of back and forth to determine how you want them sent to you and in what format, they will send you an e-mail with a link that links back to their web site with an invoice for the whole order. You are expected to transfer the amount in Euros to their bank and include the confirmation number on the invoice in the bank transfer information. Once they verify that they’ve received the funds, they will send you the scanned files. Keep in mind that if you’re going to be ordering a lot of files and having them sent on CDs, you can ask them to scan to TIFF instead of JPEG if you want. They don’t like it, but they will do it if pressed. 

Felix Archives (Antwerp)

UPDATE: This section is mostly inaccurate at this point since Felix Archives seems to have eliminated their browsable index of the records now that the index is searchable on FamilySearch.org. I’ve left the post, but the instructions for browsing the indexes on the Felix Archives site will no longer work.

Many if not most Jews in Belgium lived in Antwerp (Anvers/Antwerpen) and this leads to the Antwerp city archives, called the Felix Archives. The web site is at: http://www.felixarchief.be/ and is in Flemish (Dutch). If you don’t speak Flemish, I recommend using a tool like Google Translate. If you use Google’s Chrome browser, or if you have the Google Toolbar installed in Firefox or IE, then you can have it automatically translate each page as you navigate the web site, which makes it very easy.

If you don’t have Google Translate, try following these steps:

For the main page, select ‘Uw huis, uw familie, uw stad’ from the left-side menu, select ‘Familieleden’ and then ‘Inventarissen en indexen’ and then ‘Vreemdelingendossiers’. This will bring you to a page that lists the indexes to the files they hold on immigrants from different periods – 1840-1874, 1875-1885, 1886-1900, 1901-1915 and 1916-1930. Keep in mind that the actual archives extends to 1970, but only the indexes up until 1930 are available, for privacy reasons.

The reason why the archive has put these indexes online while most archives do not do so, is because they offer no research from their staff at all. You cannot ask them to find records for you, you must do it yourself. Indeed, even if you find the records, you need to have someone physically go to the Felix Archives reading room, get the appropriate microfilm, find the record, and either print it or scan it to a USB hard drive. The good news is at least copying to a USB drive is free, so if you can find someone to go, there are no direct expenses involved.

Once you select a time period, you select a letter of the alphabet and then it shows the different index pages for that letter. These are JPEG images of hand-written indexes to all the files. Try looking up married couples by both the husband’s name and the spouse’s maiden name. When you find a person in the index, write down the file number.

One new tool available for searching for these file numbers is the new familysearch.org website which has computerized these index files. When searching the site, you may find a hit in these index files. Clicking on the link will allow you to view the image of the index page, and then record the file number. It doesn’t allow browsing like the original site, but it might be a good place to start, after which you can go to the original site and browse the files to see if you can find other relatives in the index.

Once you have the file number, you need to figure out the microfilm number that contains that file. Download the following PDF:

http://www.felixarchief.be/Unrestricted/Folder.aspx?document_id=09041acf80038b3b&format=pdf

In the PDF, look for the correct file range that includes your file. Starting on page 7 it lists all the files and which microfilm they are on. For example, the first line shows that files 1 through 59 are on Microfilm 2,234,925. It also shows where that microfilm is located – in cabinet 3, drawer 5. This is how you will locate the microfilm in the archive reading room. If you look on the web site you can reserve the microfilm for a specified time so you know you can get to work right away when you arrive. Don’t forget a USB drive.

Okay, so what if you can’t go to Antwerp? They offer one suggestion – to go to an online forum set up for people doing research at:

http://www.geschiedenisvanantwerpen.be/forum/

Go there and select the forum called ‘Opzoekingen’ towards the bottom. This is a forum where you can post a request for someone to send you a file. You should include the file number, the person’s name, the microfilm number and its location in your posting. I tried this and after about a week someone e-mailed me the file I was looking for. Of course, if you have family or friends that live in Antwerp, you might ask them to go to the archives and make the copies for you, especially if there are a lot of files that you’re interested in, since the people on the forum are volunteers doing it on their own time and may not be able to copy lots of files from many different microfilms.

Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance

Now for the JMDR (http://www.cicb.be/en/home_en.htm). The first thing to keep in mind about this archive is that it only holds records from 1940 when the Germans occupied Belgium through the end of the war. If you had relatives in Belgium before the war, but they managed to leave before 1940, it is unlikely that you will find anything here. After the expenses involved in the State Archives, and the difficultly accessing records in the Felix Archives, the good news here is that they will look up records for you here, and they will send them to you by e-mail for free. To have a search done of these archives, you should e-mail Ms. Laurence Schram (laurence.schram @ cicb.be) and ask her to look up relevant files on your relatives, again giving as much information on the people as you can – including maiden names for spouses and dates and locations of birth for everyone. She will respond with whatever files they manage to find. In my experience this took only a few days.

I hope this has been a helpful summary. Please post responses on your own experiences with these archives if they differ in the comments, and if I’ve missed anything please let me know.

UPDATE 3/29/2011: It appears that now that the images of the Felix Archive indexes are searchable on FamilySearch.org, that they are no longer browsable on the Felix Archives site itself. This is disappointing because it makes it exceedingly difficult to browse them effectively. You can view the actual index images on FamilySearch.org, but it’s over 5000 pages with no navigation aid.

UPDATE 8/15/2011: My own Felix Archives index browser is now up at trauring.net/antwerp.

UPDATE 1/1/2015: This article is not being kept up-to-date, and much has changed. For one, the actual files from the Felix Archives are now on FamilySearch, although not yet searchable. I will keep the Belgium page in the menu up-to-date as best I can, so check there for updates if you are interested in these records.