Sitting on the passenger side of the coach, Reiza Flier swept her beady gray eyes over the family’s small home. At approximately 40 years old, this mother showed expressions of defiance and anticipation, even if she also felt sadness for […]
Researchers band together to index records from Visokaye, Belarus
In the best tradition of Jewish genealogy, a number of the members of the Wysokie-Litewskie Internet mailing list have pooled their resources in a three-stage initiative to obtain genealogically relevant records from the town of Vysokaye (Visoko-Litovsk), Belarus. While the cost […]
Rural Jewish Population of Minsk Guberniya, 1795–1914
Although Jews typically are viewed as urban dwellers, there was a considerable rural Jewish population in early modern Eastern Europe. The census of Jews in the Polish crown lands conducted in 1764-65 indicated that, of the total number of Jews in the […]
Resources to Find Any Location in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Similar Resources for Imperial Russia and Imperial Germany
The three large 19th-century European empires—Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia—all collapsed either during, or as a result of, World War I. New countries and altered boundaries emerged, often with different names or different spellings of geographical locations. Fortunately, finding aids for […]
Bibliography for Records of the Former Soviet Union
At the IAJGS conference in Los Angeles, July 2010, Professor Benjamin Nathans presented a report on the archives of the former Soviet Union. As part of his talk, Professor Nathans distributed the following list of sources. His book, Beyond the […]
How the Virtual Shtetl Project’s Website Can Help Genealogists
Much has been written about the Virtual Shtetl Project, but no detailed discussion of what this project can do for genealogy researchers has appeared until now.1 The website www.shtetl.org.pl/ has many resources for genealogists interested in researching the Jews of […]
Vilnius and Belarus: Genealogical Travel
“Do you speak Yiddish?” my newfound cousin queried on behalf of her father, a Holocaust survivor who had settled in Paris after the war. I had located him through research at Bad Arolsen in the International Tracing Service records. His […]
Book Review: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. 2 vols, by Alexander Beider.
Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. 2 vols, by Alexander Beider. Avotaynu, 2008. $118.00. To order: http://www.avotaynu.com/books/DJSRE2.htm When the first edition of Alexander Beider’s massive Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire came out in […]
Book Review: My Future Is In America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants. Edited and translated by Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer
My Future Is In America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants. Edited and translated by Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer. Softcover, 330 pages. Published by New York University Press in conjunction with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. $25.00 In 1942, […]
The 1897 All-Empire Russian Census
The 1897 All-Empire Russian Census was the first and only census conducted in the Russian Empire prior to World War II. Its major interest and value both for personal genealogy and for the history of Jewish communities is that the […]
Jewish Surnames Adopted in Various Regions of the Russian Empire
This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the IAJG Conference in Chicago, August 18, 2008—Ed. Generally speaking, it is relatively easy to distinguish Sephardic surnames from Ashkenazic surnames. For example, if one sees two lists, the […]