The Kremenets District Research Group has recently published its Indexed Concordance of Personal Names and Town Names, a master index that now has almost 73,000 entries. The group’s experiences in creating the Concordance suggest that it may be a fruitful way for genealogists to pool their resources and efforts for the good of all. This article describes how it was done. The Concordance is downloadable and searchable at <jewish gen.org/Kremenets/web-pages/master-surnames.html> or at <http://tinyurl.com/lueftt>.
At the 2000 conference of the International Association of Jewish Genealogy Societies (IAJGS) in Salt Lake City, Sheree Roth and I discovered that we both were trying to research microfilms recently released by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) (Mormons) with images of the vital records from Kremenets, Ukraine. Neither of us could decipher the handwritten Hebrew/Yiddish and Russian 19th-century records, but with help from IAJGS and LDS experts, I managed to find birth records for my paternal grandparents. I wondered how in the world I possibly could find more family among more than 15,000 records on seven long microfilms. The answer to that question came when I heard Stanley Diamond and Hadassah Lipsius describe the JRI-Poland Shtetl CO-OPs. Sheree and I formed the Kremenets Shtetl CO-OP and affiliated with JRI-Poland; perhaps a group effort with others searching for Kremenets ancestors would help.
Initially, we wrote to everyone listed in the JewishGen FamilyFinder who had indicated an interest in Kremenets and repeated this strategy periodically over the years, especially when we expanded the town project to include all of the towns in the Kremenets uyezd (district). Looking for volunteers to help translate the vital records, we posted messages on JewishGen discussion lists and wrote a brief letter to the editor of AVOTAYNU. At the same time, we contacted the LDS (Mormon) Family History Library and requested copies of the vital records (1870–1907) on CD-ROM. Litvak SIG and Belarus SIG did the same thing at the same time. When we learned of their efforts, I communicated with the other SIGS, and we developed a contract between the genealogists and the LDS under which we obtained CD-ROMs containing all the LDS vital records as digital images.
Because the volunteer translation system was unsuccessful, the next step was to seek professional translators; unfortunately, most charged rates that made the project look impossible. Finally, YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research in New York, helped find two translators with affordable rates. One continued through the project, but the other quit saying that the work was too hard. We began to raise money and eventually began to translate the records systematically and input the data into the spreadsheet templates we developed. Over the years, the CO-OP has used many translators, both volunteer and paid. After a time, all but one dropped out. Perseverance paid off, however, and in 2009 we completed our translation of the more than 15,000 vital records obtained from the LDS in 2001. When proofreading is complete, the translations will be posted in the JRI-Poland database at <www.JRI-Poland.org>.
Work in Progress
This is a work in progress. Even though we have completed the vital records translations, we are translating many other documents and adding names from them into the Concordance. Of the 72,543 Concordance entries, 57,965 are from 15,549 vital records; 5,115 from the revision lists (Russian censuses); 4,733 from documents obtained from the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People; 3,857 from yizkor (memorial) books, booklets, and other sources. These records cover a span of 635 years. (The earliest entry is from a 1375 Kremenets gravestone for “R’Nachman, son of our teacher R’ Avraham.”). Our “Introduction and User Guide to the Indexed Concordance of Personal Names and Town Names for Kremenets District Resources” identifies all the sources from which we have extracted names and is downloadable from the Concordance page of our website. Figure 1 is an extract from the Concordance showing its format and typical data.
As the number of completed translations increased, we noticed a large number of town names listed as record registration towns, currently 500 different ones. Kremenets had the most entries, of course, but 12 other towns each have more than 500 entries in the Concordance. My Doctor family names appeared in many towns throughout the Kremenets district and in other nearby districts. Apparently, over the many centuries covered by our documents, my ancestors moved around quite a bit, to and from nearby towns. The research group wondered what other names were traceable to towns other than Kremenets? E-mail correspondence with members of the group revealed that most were interested in several towns; towns that usually were within or close to the Kremenets district. Consequently, the group expanded its efforts to include other towns that were in the district at some point in time. We also included some towns outside the district that were geographically close and had religious, educational, or commercial ties to Kremenets, such as Dubno, Ostrog, and Rivne. The complete list of towns and the number of times each appears in translated records is shown in the Town List worksheet of our Concordance which is available online. The process of identifying and “mining” different data resources for the major towns is ongoing. The methods used now are the same as those used at the beginning.
The decision to expand geographically beyond the town of Kremenets was reinforced as we began to include documents other than vital records. Through our JewishGen’s yizkor book translation project, we contacted people translating yizkor books for towns in the Kremenets district. The same surnames we were listing also appeared in the books for those towns. As a result, the Kremenets group now is closely associated with the Kremenetser-Shumsker Association in Israel, as well as groups working on Feltsin, Lanovtsy, Pochayev, Vishnevets, and Yampol, all in Ukraine.
Despite its name, the Concordance is just a large index. We call it a Concordance because it indexes every personal name and town name encountered in our documents and other resources. We wanted to differentiate this “master index” from individual document indexes. As part of our translation process, we create a name index for every document we translate. That index becomes a supplement to the translated document that we put online. Although we believe all genealogy translation projects should include creation of a name index, unfortunately, indexing is not usually done. JewishGen’s Yizkor Books Translation Project, for example, is one of the few that creates name indexes that become an integral part of the online version of the translated document. We then convert each individual document index to the format needed for the Concordance and add the data to the Concordance. To make the newly translated information available quickly, we enter all data, even if the data has not yet been proofread. Proofread data is entered in a boldface font. In addition, we identify a woman’s married surname by appending an asterisk to it to differentiate it from her birth surname.
The Concordance has evolved over time and still is evolving. Initially it was just a Kremenets Surname List. As it grew, people on our e-mail list began asking for more information. We converted the Surname List to an index that identified where each surname was found. To further differentiate surname entries, we added given names. Recognizing that people with the same name appeared in different towns, we added the town name to each entry. We still wrestle with the problem of how to deal with entries that lack surnames but have patronymics. This is becoming increasingly important as we delve into resources that lack surnames. For example, in about 4,500 gravestone translations from Kremenets and Vishnevets cemeteries, most do not include surnames. A major challenge is to link the people mentioned on those matzevot (gravestones) to those listed in the various documents we have translated. In a project for the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy (IIJG), Daniel Wagner is creating and testing a computer program to accomplish this very task. When it is ready, we intend to apply it in our databases.
As the Concordance and our translation activities have evolved, so has our organization. A large number of volunteers and a few paid professionals do translation, data extraction, data entry, document formatting, and website maintenance. The products feed into the Concordance and eventually are posted on our website. To ensure continuity in this work over time, we recently incorporated as the Kremenets District Research Group, adopted by-laws, and elected a board of directors. This is enabling us to formalize our activities and to attract skilled, active managers for our various projects.
Future Effort
Still, the question remains: What determines the best geographical limits for our work? Answering this question is more complex than it might appear. The answer is, “It depends.” It depends on the available resources, including the volunteers and money available to do the work, on whom to approach for the necessary funding, and how to approach and motivate them. When we began our projects, we looked at other organizations. The Jewish genealogy world has several successful organizations, including Litvak SIG and JRI-Poland, that can serve as good and useful models. We began with a local model patterned after JRI-Poland’s Shtetl CO-OPs, but then expanded the model to cover other towns in order to:
- Show people interested in other towns that we have something for them, and
- Demonstrate that a focus on a single town risks missing ancestors and collateral family in other nearby towns. This is the JRI-Poland approach. Fund raising is local; the data range is both local and countrywide. Each Shtetl CO-OP raises money independently, but the data from each are merged with data from other towns into a single database. The Kremenets Shtetl CO-OP started the same way, but we soon expanded into a broader range of data resources than those JRI-Poland used. (Since then, JRI-Poland also has expanded its data horizons.)
Kremenets is one of the many towns/districts that is in a border region. Towns in the Kremenets District have been part of several nations over the past four centuries. Such towns do not logically “belong” to any single national grouping. This fact argues for a more local/district-based approach to data mining. It also argues for creating a new resource: a single index that incorporates data from all existing databases, something like our Concordance, or an expanded version of Avotaynu’s Consolidated Jewish Surname Index. Currently the Jewish genealogical world has many significant pieces of such a master index, but no proposal to bring all the pieces together. Perhaps the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy could take on this project.
Ron Doctor, president of the Kremenets District Research Group, coordinated a project that translated 15,500 vital records of Kremenets. He manages translation projects for yizkor books from Kremenets and Vishnevets and Russian revision lists from the Kremenets District. He also coordinates the Kremenets and Vishnevets Jewish cemetery projects. Doctor is a member of JewishGen’s Ukraine Special Interest Group Advisory Board, Past President of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon, and currently serves on its board. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
