The Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) Census Records Database

The Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) Census Records Database

In the late 1880’s the Baron Maurice Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) with the goal of rescuing the eastern European Jews from their difficult situation. To this end, JCA bought lands mainly in Argentina and in the late 1880’s started transferring entire families to agricultural colonies in Argentina, as well as few other countries including Brazil, Canada, and the USA. Those families were the ancestors of hundreds of thousands of Jews living today around the world.

The JCA held censuses in all the colonies frequently beginning in the early 1890s and up until the late 1940s. All these census records are stored at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, Israel, and this database will eventually include all the genealogical data from these censuses.

Different census records could hold different types of information. In the earliest records, up until 1892, all families appeared with the place of origin in Europe and family members that stayed in Europe. Later records did not include this type of information, only names, ages and sometimes indicated marriages with members of other families. Most census records included also non-genealogical information, mainly about the belongings of the family (size of land, number of animals, etc.). These are not included in this database.

Many census records were written once and then updated over the years. Some books have been updated several times and it was sometimes hard to tell to which year the ages correspond. Therefore, ages and years should be taken with caution. Also, sometimes a person or a family were crossed out in one of the updates. We indicated this in the Comments column. This usually happened when a family left the colony or when a person passed away or got married and established their own household.

In some books the relationships between the family members and the head of the family were not specifically indicated. In these cases, we wrote that the relationship is not indicated. Nevertheless, it should be noted that 99% of the times a household consisted from the head of household, his wife and their children.

The earliest census records were different from the rest of the records in that they included many details about the origin of the families, family members left behind and characteristics of the colonists –

• The description of the place of origin included many times Russian terms. We did not translate these terms. These are the terms that appeared most of the time – Mestetschko – small town or village; Selo – village (smaller than mestetchko); selenie – even smaller settlement; Uiezd – district; Guberniya – province.
• Family members who were not present in the colony at the time of the census were marked as “Does not live in the colony. Lives in …”. There is no information on whether these people later joined the families in Argentina.
• We did not include in the database the personal comments on the character of the colonists as these are not genealogical data and in some cases, descendants could find them offensive or insulting.

This database is a growing database and data will be added as books are translated. The collection includes many dozens of books from all colonies and these books first need to be photographed and then transliterated into Excel files. This is a continuous project which is the heart of the JCA translation project.

As of October 2022 there are 14,325 names in the database.

To view the database inventory, click here.

This project is the product of a very hard work, all done by volunteers. I would like to thank all volunteers taking part in this project, and particularly (in alphabetical order) Eduardo Crivisqui, Barbara Ellman, Estela Rappaportt and Mirta Scheffer. Without their tremendous work none of this could have happened. 

Searching the Database

This database is searchable by via the Latin America Database.