Help Building Jewish Family Trees
JewishGen Provides Online Resources for Tracing Jewish Ancestors
Nov 2, 2008
This site is affiliated with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.
List of JewishGen Databases
- The JewishGen Family Finder Database consists of surnames and ancestral towns being researched by 80,000 Jewish genealogists worldwide. There are more than 400,000 entries.
- The Family Tree of the Jewish People contains data on more than four million people from family trees submitted by 3,000 Jewish genealogists worldwide.
- The JewishGen Holocaust Database has more than 1.9 million entries for Holocaust victims and survivors, compiled from numerous sources.
- The JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry has more than one millions entries from cemeteries and burial records worldwide. It covers multiple centuries and includes some photographs of gravestones.
- The JewishGen Communities Database has maps, historical names and jurisdictions for more than 4,000 Jewish communities.
- Jewish Records at the Family History Library is an inventory of the Jewish-specific resources at the LDS Family History Library in Salt Lake City.
- In addition, online JewishGen resources provide a one-step indexing process for locating records in the very large Ellis Island database of immigrants to the United States.
Online Discussion Groups and Mail Lists
Two other valuable support tools are offered by JewishGen.
There is an online discussion group and a search engine for the more than 100,000 archived postings from 1993 to date.
JewishGen hosts web pages for several "Special Interest Groups" (SIGs), whose interest is a geographic region of origin, such as Danzig or Warsaw, or special topics, such as Sephardic or Rabbinic genealogy. There is also a search-engine for these Jewish-oriented email lists, covering postings from 1998 to date
Databases by Geographical Region
In addition to these main databases, JewishGen has separate databases for Eastern Europe, Russia and Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, the Ukraine, Great Britain, Scandinavia, Israel, South Africa and America.
Some of these geographical areas have more than a single database within them. An example is Poland, under which there are:
- An index to more than 2.5 million Jewish birth, marriage and death records from over 450 Polish towns, as well as indices from other sources, such as census records, legal notices, passports and newspaper announcements.
- Over 3.5 million records for Poland, from a variety of sources, including: vital records, business directories, voter lists, passenger manifests, Yizkor books and other Holocaust sources.
- An index to more than 34,000 locations from 1929 business directories of Poland, with links to directory pages for each city, town and village.
- A utility for locating LDS microfilms of records from Poland, based on geographic coordinates.
A companion article describes the large collection of Jewish research resources at ancestry.com.
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