Nu? What's New? Vol. 21 No. 51

Underlined words are links to sites with additional information.

Major Additions to the Miriam Weiner Routes to Roots Foundation Website

Miriam Weiner is one of the pioneers of contemporary Jewish genealogy. In her 25+ years of research for her clients, she has made more than 100 trips to the countries of Eastern Europe, including: Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania and Ukraine.

Very early in her career she went to countries in the then Soviet Union and Poland to cajole archivists into giving her a listing of all their Jewish holdings. Acquisition of this information formed for the basis of Weiner’s two books, and later was the genesis of “The Miriam Weiner Routes to Roots Foundation (RTRF). She published this information at the Foundation’s website http://rtrfoundation.org as a searchable database. It is the most complete index to the Jewish record holdings in the archives of Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland and Ukraine. It shows the type of document, available years, which archive has the collection and the archive file numbers.

Whenever Weiner went to a city to do research for a client or take photos for her books and website, she would acquire copies of artifacts associated with the city or region. This might be a local telephone book, town map, name lists from the local Jewish community and other similar material.

In visiting archives through this region, Weiner acquired various document copies including city directories, Jewish vital records, indexes (birth, death, marriage, divorce records), family lists and census records (revizskie skazki), voter and tax lists, immigration documents, Holocaust material, property and notary records, army/recruit lists, police files and pogrom documents, school records and occupation lists, local government and hospital records. Also, she acquired numerous archive inventories as well as books published by the archives with lists of holdings. Now she is in the process of placing much of this information on the RTRF site searchable by surname.

New Surname Database for towns in Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Ukraine. The source is more than 200 collections with a total of more than 300 collections online once the project is completed. There are currently more than 1M names online with an anticipated 3M when the project is completed.

Maps. More than 80 town and regional maps located in Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Ukraine (https://www.rtrfoundation.org/maps.shtml)can be searched on the website. This is in addition to 75 Joint Operation Graphic Maps (JOG) maps of Eastern Europe created by the U.S. Army Map Service. Note: The JOG maps are being scanned now and should be accessible on the RTRF website in the next 4–6 weeks.

Ukraine Telephone Directories. A collection of 75 telephone directories from primarily small/medium-sized towns in Ukraine which Weiner has donated to the U.S. Library of Congress (LOC). These books are now searchable by surname via OCR at the RTRF website and also at Logan Kleinwaks’ website at http://www.genealogyindexer.org. You can click on the search results to see the actual page of the telephone book from the LOC website.

Of the 25 or so business directories, the following 14 are now searchable by surname via OCR on the RTRF website, with more being added continually. Seven of the 14 are in Russian/Cyrillic and appear via the OCR search.

Business Directories & Telephone Books
1. Address Book: Town of Lwow (Lvov), 1897 / 17,025 names
2. Address Book: Town of Lemberg (now Lviv), 1916 / 24,060 names
3. Telephone directory for districts of: Bydgosz, Gdansk, Krakow,
Katowice, Lublin, Lwow, Poznan, Wilna and Warszaw, 1934 / 88,560 names
4. Address Book for Poltava and Poltava Guberniya, 1914 / 9,614 names
5. Address Calendar, Podolia Guberniya, 1909 / 6,840 names
6. Telephone Directory for Boryslaw, Drohobycz & Lwow (& nearby towns), 1930 / 15,875 names
7. Telephone Directory for Lvov, Boryslaw, Drohobycz (& nearby towns), 1938 / 13,500 names
8. Address Calendar for Kiev Guberniya, 1914 / 1,960 names
9. Volhynia Address Book, 1895 / 5,540 names
10. Volhynia Address Book, 1915 / 3,600 names
11. Galicia Address Book, 1891 / 11,875 names
12. “All Russia” Business Directory, 1902 / 140,400 names
13. Vsia Rossiia — ”All Russia” Business Directory, 1903, entries from Mogilev Guberniya (partial)
14. Vsia Rossiia — ”All Russia” Business Directory, 1911, entries from Mogilev Guberniya (partial)

Image Database. There is a new drop-down menu for images, accessible from the RTRF website Home Page. Currently, there are 2,215 images from 358 towns in six countries, and Weiner plans to add more as soon as possible. (https://www.rtrfoundation.org/imagesearch.php).

Collection Descriptions are an important part of the new surname databases. Each collection links to a 1–10 page narrative about the origin or history of acquiring the collection, numerous photographs and/or antique postcards views of the relevant towns, and links at the end of each entry leading to lesser-known sources of information about the town.

Visit the RTRF site and browse the collections.

Index to Kyiv Birth Records 1920–1936 Now Online

Alex Krakovsky reports that Anton Zemanek as created an Excel spreadsheet that is an index to Kyiv, Ukraine, birth records from 1920–1936. There are nearly 180,000 entries. The index is in Ukrainian and appears to be alphabetical by year.

The columns are labeled Full Name, Date of Birth, Archive details of SAC and Year of Birth Registration

The index can be found at https://tinyurl.com/KievBirthIndex19201936.

RootsTech Connect 2021

RootsTech is going global in 2021 with RootsTech Connect! The entire conference will be held online from February 25–27. Registration is at no charge. Previous conferences were in person in Salt Lake City and attracted 20,000 people. It is not unreasonable that this online conference could attract 100,000 people. Register at the home page: https://www.rootstech.org/.

The conference planners are taking advantage of the online environment by asking people from all over the world to create videos highlighting different cultures, food, traditions, and more. Videos should be 90 seconds to 5 minutes and in MP4 format. Submission deadline is January 15. More details can be found at https://www.rootstech.org/get-involved.

FamilySearch Adds More Than 2M Records This Week

A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, more than 2M index records and images, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FamilySearch121420. This site provides direct links to the individual collections. Those identified with a dagger (†) are church records. They include records from Argentina, Brazil, Canada(†), Columbia(†), Costa Rica, Dominican Republic(†), Ecuador, El Salvador(†), England(†), France(†), Germany(†), Guatemala, Kirbati, Mexico(†), Micronesia, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Portugal, Samoa, South Africa, United States, Venezuela(†) and Zambia(†).

An addition 2.2M records were added to the Norway census of 1900.

Note that at the website, announced collections may not be complete for the dates specified and will be added at some later date. Also note that counts shown in the announcement are the number added, not the total number available in the collection, which can be greater.

New Collections at Ancestry.com

Ancestry has added/updated the following record groups at their site. The list with links to individual collections can be found at https://www.ancestry.com/cs/recent-collections. Announced collections may not be complete for the dates specified and will be added at some later date. There is also no indication of how many records were added to the updated collections.

Note the additions for Boston, Hungary and Lithuania.

Updated Collections
Hungary, Death Records collected by Rabbis in Various Counties, 1827–1940
Maine, U.S., Revolutionary War Land Grants, 1776–1780
U.S, Boston Arrivals of Jewish Immigrants from HIAS Records, 1882–1929
Vermont, U.S., Death Index, 1981–2001
Lithuania, Tax and Voters Lists, 1839–1949 (various years)
U.S., Newspapers.com Marriage Index, 1800s–1999
Southwest Louisiana, U.S., Deaths Index, 1861–1905

Additions to FindMyPast
FindMyPast has added Ireland, Belfast and Ulster directories for the years 1890–1947. They claim they are available online nowhere else. Also added were 42,000 records to their Sussex, Eastbourne newspaper collection.

The announcement can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FMP121720.

Every Family Has a Story

72 articles that have appeared in our journal, AVOTAYNU, each story focusing on the human side of genealogy—how genealogists have been personally affected by their research and how the research of genealogists has affected others.

Some stories will make you laugh, others will make you cry. Some will shock you, others will make you feel warm inside.

Addtional informaton, including an annottated Table of Contents plus a sample story, can be found at https://www.avotaynu.com/books/EveryFamily.htm.