Tag Archives: jewish genealogy

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.

International Jewish Genealogy Conference in Boston

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Once a year the the IAJGS partners with a local Jewish genealogy society to have the International Jewish Genealogy Conference. Last year it was in Paris. The year before it was in Washington, DC (where I spoke about Utilizing Belgian Archives for Jewish Research). This year, in partnership with the JGS of Greater Boston, it will be in my hometown, Boston.

The conference is taking place at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, and will be from August 4-9. This is same place that the conference was held the last time the conference was held in Boston back in 1996. The hotel is in an amazing location for those who have never been to Boston. There are tons of things to do and see within walking distance of the hotel, from the historic district in Boston (Freedom Trail), to the first public park in America (Boston Common), to the shopping district (Newbury Street). There is a special conference rate at the hotel, available for up to two weeks before the conference in case you want to show up early and tour. To get the conference rate, you can book through the conference web site, until July 11.

For those who have never been to the annual conference before, IAJGS has put together a video on what you can expect:

If you’ve never been to one of the annual conferences, I highly recommend it. You’re sure to learn a lot, meet lots of people, and make connections with people and groups that are researching the same places and families you are researching. Registration is now open, with an early registration discount available through April 30, 2013. One other date worth mentioning is that all additions to the conference Family Finder must be submitted by July 1, 2013. The Family Finder is a directory of family names and ancestral towns that are being researched by attendees at the conference. The top five names and towns can be displayed on your conference badge, and up to eight names will be put into the Family Finder book that is distributed at the conference.

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.

Database of Polish Victims of the Nazis

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There’s an interesting database listing Polish victims of the Nazis, organized by a group of Polish government and non-government organizations, and sponsored mainly by Polish media organizations.

The site is connected to three Polish organizations: the Institute of National Remembrance, the Foundation for Polish-German Reconciliation, and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. It is also sponsored by a number of Polish media organizations, including the Polish Press Agency and several Polish TV stations.

The site, Straty.pl, is unfortunately only available in Polish. Luckily, it’s not too hard to use without knowledge of Polish, especially if you use Google Chrome and the built-in Translate feature. Even without Translate, you can get around the site. This is what the search page looks like:

Straty.pl Search Page

A quick translation of the fields:

  • Nazwisko (Surname)
  • Imię (Given name)
  • Imię ojca (Father’s name)
  • Imię matki (Mother’s name)
  • Miejsce urodzenia (Place of birth)
  • Data urodzenia (Day of birth)
  • Data śmierci (Day of death)
  • dzień (day)
  • miesiąc (month)
  • rok (year)
  • SZUKAJ is Search, and CZYSC is Clear.

You can search for a surname alone, but apparently not a town alone. If a surname has too many hits, it will force you to fill in additional search fields to help pare down the number of results.

Victims listed in the database include Polish soldiers who were killed, prisoners of war, resistance fighters, concentration camp prisoners, those persecuted for reasons of race (aka Jews and Gypsies), those executed by the Nazis, those sentenced to death by German courts, slave laborers, displaced persons, children, civilian casualties (such as from bombing raids), etc. This list is not exclusively, nor even predominately, Jewish.

The site was not set up as a memorial to Jewish victims of the Nazis, but rather as a database of Polish victims of the Nazis, some of which happened to be Jewish. In fact, one looking at the site might wonder if Jewish names in the database are more of an afterthought than a primary section of the database. There are many sources of data in the database, and each listing will tell you which source they came from, which can help you track down further information.

Data sources I’ve noticed include:

– International Tracing Service (Bad Arolsen) (http://www.its-arolsen.org/)
– Jewish Historical Institute (http://www.jhi.pl/)
– Polish Red Cross (http://www.pck.pl/)
– State Archive in Krakow (http://www.ank.gov.pl/)

Of course, when searching for information on Jewish victims of the Nazis, the most important database is the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names.

One important distinction between these databases, beside Straty.pl’s focus on Poles and Yad Vashem’s focus on Jews (with obvious overlap), is that Straty.pl’s database contains victims who are not necessarily people who were killed. Prisoners of camps, etc. even if they were not murdered, are contained in their database. For example, the database includes two people with the surname Trauring, the couple Ferdynand and Stefania Trauring, who I know to appear on Shindler’s lists. They show up in the Straty.pl database as prisoners of the Gross-Rosen sub-camp in Brunnlitz, which happens to be where prisoners working in Oskar Schindler’s factory were interned. Whether this couple survived the war or not, they are listed in the Straty.pl database as having been prisoners. That’s an important distinction.

The launch of the all new All Israel Database

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It’s hard to believe it’s been less than a year since the launch of the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA). Launched in January of this year, IGRA has achieved much, including having their website genealogy.org.il being ranked one of the top 40 International Genealogy web sites only 4 months after launching. Last week they reached a new milestone with the launch of their all new search engine for the All Israel Database, IGRA’s collection of 85 (and growing) Israel-related databases. I mentioned these databases about a month ago (when there were under 60 databases), and also mentioned a new search engine was in the works. Today that new search engine has launched:

IGRA’s All Israel Database search engine

The search engine was designed in conjunction with Brooke Schreier Ganz, based on her LeafSeek genealogy search engine. Brooke’s LeefSeek won 2nd place at the 2012 RootsTech Developer Challenge earlier this year, and IGRA worked with Brooke to enhance the engine to include such important features as the ability to search concurrently in both English and Hebrew. The search engine also supports phonetic searching, based on Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching (BMPM), allowing matches to be made to similar-sounding names, regardless of exact spelling.

The new search engine was developed through the hard work of IGRA volunteers, such as IGRA President Garri Regev, Database Coordinator Rose Feldman, Secretary Carol Hoffman, and website team-members Daniel Horowitz and myself, as well as many database volunteers who helped find, scan and transcribe the information in the 85 databases.

You may have seen an earlier version of Brooke’s search engine in use on the Gesher Galicia All Galicia Database, but this new search engine that we’ve designed is capable of searching in both English and Hebrew simultaneously, which is a major breakthrough and of course necessary for our Israel-focused databases.

I hope everyone reading this will stop and take a minute to check out the new All Israel Database and try it out. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask via the contact form on the web site, or in the comments below.