The B•R•I (Belarus Records Inventory)
To find your town or district's records in the Belarus Records Inventory, you need to start on the Records in the B•R•I. This defines the type of record.
To find the Detailed Inventory for your Town and Districts of Belarus, click on the type of record you wish to search. This takes you to an explanation of how the database was created and if you scroll down it takes you to your town or district.
OR, if you are already on the JewishGen Search for your Ancestors, scroll down to the type of records you wish to search: Revision Lists or Vital Records.
An Explanation of the Records in the B•R•I
Below is the contents from the Belarus Revision List database. Note at the far right the link to the Detailed Inventory.
The Detailed Inventory link opens to a description of current status of each time period and source. This Detailed Inventory link takes you to the B•R•I Inventory.
The Detailed inventory opens to a new screen. This enlarged view maintains a table for one town in one District. Note below two columns from the town, Antopol, in the Kobrin District of Grodno Gubernia. These two extracted columns for Antopol break down Status of records for Census 1784, 1806, 1811, 1850 1853 as shown below. Note that Details in blue indicate a hyperlink to further information.
An Explanation of Detailed Inventory
Searches can be done by town, uyzed (district), gubernia (province) and type of record. If you click on the "details" link in the search results the following information is given:
Town name - English transliteration of the Russian name around 1900.
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USBGN # - US Board of Geographic Names (USBGN) number for the town. Every locality in the JewishGen Gazeteer is identified by its USBGN number. This is particularly useful in resolving questions about a town that is listed in the inventory. Note that many of the towns appearing in inventory have not been matched with a USBGN number.
Uezd - district where town is located.
Gubernia - province where town is located.
Type of record - either birth, death, marriage, divorce or revision lists. Other types of records are not accounted for in this inventory.
Beginning year - first year of the record set. If there is a question mark that means that the precise year is not known and the record set needs to be reviewed to obtain an exact year. If no year is listed that means the record set needs to be reviewed to obtain exact year information.
Ending year - last year of the record set.
Number of records - number of records appearing in the record set. For translated records, this record count should be exact. For untranslated records, these record counts are sometimes approximate and in many cases are an undercounting by up to 20%. If no record count is given, the record set needs to be reviewed in order to obtain a detailed record count.
Definitions
- Status Categories: the status of the record set consists of the terms "translated", "not translated", "ready to translate."
- Translated and uploaded means records appear in the JewishGen All Belarus Database
- Translated and not uploaded records are available to you exclusively when you join a District Research Group
- Not translated indicates identified records that have not been acquired. Belarus SIG funds allow the SIG to try take the next step to acquiring records.
- A Record’s Details:
- The Details link opens up specific record and contact information, including an email address for the town/District coordinator.
- Contact person: this is a person who has volunteered to answer questions regarding specific record sets. The benefits of being a contact person for a town or entire district are that you will be given access to spreadsheets of the translated records for that town or district. The contact person can make those record sets available to researchers for a donation to a project fund and can use those funds for translation projects. If you are interested in being the contact person for a town or district contact the Help Desk.
