Ancestry.com has introduced the world’s largest online collection of Jewish family history records, teaming up with two leading organizations committed to the preservation of Jewish heritage– JewishGen and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC)
These partnerships will make millions of important Jewish historical documents available on Ancestry.com, many of which are online for the first time ever and searchable for free. These unique records, including photographs, immigration records, Holocaust records and memorials, can now be searched alongside other records already accessible on Ancestry.com, creating the largest collection of Jewish family history records on the Web with more than 26 million records documenting Jewish life.
Many documents digitized as a part of this agreement have never before
been available online, including two important JDC collections:
• Jewish Transmigration Bureau Deposit Cards, 1939-1954 (JDC), a collection of records showing the amount of money paid by American Jewish citizens to support the emigration of friends and relatives from European countries during and after WWII.
• Munich, Vienna and Barcelona Jewish Displaced Persons and Refugee Cards, 1943-1959 (JDC), a collection containing records of displaced Jews who were provided with food, medical care and clothing and emigration assistance by the JDC.
More than 300 databases from JewishGen will also now be available on Ancestry.com. These JewishGen databases represent 14 different countries and contain more than 5 million records, such as:
• The JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry, an invaluable collection with more than 1 million names of Jews represented in nearly 2,000 Jewish cemeteries around the world.
• Yizkor Book Necrologies, a list of the names of those murdered in the Holocaust which directs users back to the Yizkor Books themselves – memorials which offer vivid, first-hand accounts of the Holocaust and its aftermath.
• The Given Names Database, which enables one to learn possible European, Hebrew and Yiddish translations of an ancestor’s given name.
• A Holocaust Database of 2 million names such as Schindler’s List, which includes names of 1,980 inmates in Oscar Schindler’s factories in Plaszow, Poland and Brunnlitz, Czechoslovakia.
• Jewish Records Indexing (JRI-PL) Poland and All Lithuania Database, representing more than 2 million indexed names from databases in Lithuania and Poland containing vital information on the regions.
Originally posted on October 29, 2008 @ 11:17 pm