Glossary and Abbreviations
| Akta | Polish vital records, often seen as a column heading in vital record indices and extracts. |
| Cyrillic | alphabet used for the Russian language |
| Electoral/Voter Lists | Rolls of eligible voters (indexed from Russian newspapers) |
| Extract | a summary of the data obtained from a source document |
| Gubernia | geographical/political subdivision of the Russian Empire, similar to a province, which applied to the Kingdom of Poland from 1844 until World War |
| Microfilm | a film-based medium for photographing and viewing source documents |
| Shtetl | Endearing Yiddish term for a mainly Jewish town, village or hamlet in Europe |
| Transliterate | To replace letters of one alphabet by letters of another with the same phonetic sounds. |
| Vital Records | Birth, marriage, divorce or death records usually kept by a town registrar or other government-designated official. |
| Shtetl CO-OP | a group of volunteers working together to index the records of a town in the LDS (Mormon) microfilms. |
| D-M Soundex | "Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex"; a coding system which compensates for spelling variations in European Jewish surnames and European towns |
| FHC | Mormon (LDS) Family History Center, branch library |
| FHL | Mormon (LDS) Family History Library, in Salt Lake City, Utah |
| LDS | abbreviation for Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly used to denote the Family History Library and holdings related thereto |
| JHI | Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw; a JRI-Poland data source |
| JRI-Poland | Jewish Records Indexing - Poland |
| PSA | the Polish State Archives |
| REIPP | the former name of JRI-Poland |
| USC | Urzad Stanu Cywilnego = Civil Records Office, where vital records less than 100 years old are usually stored in each town. (Typically located in the town hall.) |