IAJGS Conference

The 2016 IAJGS conference in Seattle was a great success. Thanks to the organizers for all their hard work. The JewishGen Belarus SIG meeting (PDF, 1 MB) was held on Monday, August 8th, to an overflow crowd. The following developments were discussed:

  1. Re-design of the website by Nancy Holden and Alan Raskin. Thanks to Nancy and Alan for all their hard work.
  2. The uploading of approximately 27,000 records to the database (see the bottom of this message for more details). Thanks to all the translators who helped make this upload happen. These translations could not have been done without the support of donors. Please consider a donation to a district fund or the Belarus SIG general fund to show your support.
  3. Acquisition of Miriam Weiner’s Archive and Routes to Roots Belarus materials. Thanks again to Miriam for her generosity in sharing this with us. The indexing of surnames appearing in Miriam’s summary translation reports is underway and we hope to have the results for a few towns in mid October. Updates will be announced on this message board and the JewishGen Family Finder messaging.
  4. Call for volunteers to assume leadership roles as well as specialized roles (i.e. translation work, town coordinators) with the SIG. Thanks to all those who signed up via our online survey. Over the next few months we will be contacting those people about different projects. We are still in need of more volunteer translators. Please fill out our survey if you can help.

Researchers should make sure they are registered on the JewishGen Family Finder for their town(s) of interest to receive updates on ongoing/future projects.

Thanks also to our luncheon speaker Ron Doctor who talked about the work he’s done on the Kremenets records. Ron has done an amazing job and his work should be a model for future town/district based research. You can view/download Ron’s luncheon presentation (PDF, 1.5 MB).

Congratulations to Ron on receiving the IAJGS Lifetime Achievement award for his work with both the Kremenets records and the Ukraine SIG. It is well deserved.

Below is a listing of the newly uploaded records to the JewishGen Belarus Database:

These records can be freely searched using the JewishGen Belarus database search engine.

Thanks again to all the translators and donors who made this upload possible.