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Monday, April 10, 2006
Clarification for Vilna City Researchers
Several researchers listed in the JGFF under Vilna have contacted me and asked for specific information on their family.
The Vilna vital records require translation and prior to that, sufficient funds must be secured to meet the costs involved.
At this point, the Vilna vital records for the years 1861 - 1865 are with a translator. These will be the first Vilna city
records to come out of translation. In addition, I have been working on records for other years and have amassed a long list
of names that resulted in the "Vilna Surnames" page on this website. This list is only partial, having been derived from 5
years worth of birth records. That list alone does not necessarily indicate you will not find your family, for in each additional
years records, there are many surnames that had not been discovered previously. People moved around as well, so even a
surname list derived from 10 or 15 years of vital records cannot be said to be complete.
Please check this web site often, since updates to the project status are listed here. That is part of the purpose
of this blog......a near real-time avenue allowing dissemination of new, useful information to the Litvak researcher.
Saturday, April 8, 2006
City of Vilna Researchers
A concerted effort was made today to establish contact with as many Vilna researchers as possible. I received responses
from many individuals, each asking a different set of questions. Due to JewishGen rules concerning the use of the
JGFF, my message was pretty bland [JGen crafted it]. The purpose of my message was to establish contact with Vilna researchers
interested specifically in the LitvakSIG Vital Records Translation Project. Many researchers who contacted me in return
are not everyday LitvakSIG participants in our District and VRI projects. This became obvious when reading some of the questions
posed to me. Here I'll try to answer some of them.
1. Many researchers asked for access to the records or translations. I can't send out original records because we
don't own them. They are owned by the Lithuanian Archives. In addition, the whole point of my contacting Vilna researchers
was to inform you of the Vital Records Translation Project and our work with the Vilna records. The translations
will become available once we have raised enough money to translate them. That is the object here - to have you Vilna researchers
fund the translations. You, as Vilna researchers will have access to the crown jewel of Litvak records [via the translations] -
a contiguous set of vital records covering the years 1837 - 1914. This includes birth, death, marriage, and divorce records.
There are approximately 2000 records per year over a period of almost 80 years, yielding 160,000 records. In order to
translate these records, we need your financial support. This effort alone will require somewhere in the vicinity of $100,000
to complete. So far, we have raised over $4000, and this is going towards the translation of Vilna vital records for
the years 1861 - 1865. The translations of these records are expected to be ready by the time the IAJGS conference rolls around
in August 2006. Many researchers responded to my query by giving details of their family and asking me to look them up. The
Vital Records translations for 1861 - 1865, when ready, will become the first available VRI source for Vilna researchers.
Until the time those records appear, researchers are invited to check for their surname of interest on the LitvakSIG website
using the All Lithuania Database [ALD]. Included in the ALD are several large Vilna databases covering a large time period.
Within the ALD, you will find the 1858 Vilna City Revision List, the 1915 Vilna city directory "Vsia Vilna", as well as the
1942 Vilna Ghetto Census. You can use these databases to help determine if your family indeed hailed from the city of Vilna
or at least to determine if your surname appears.
Also of use in your research is our FAQ page which is in the process of being updated due to the many questions which
have been raised. Please avail yourself of this resource.
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The Vital Records Indexing Project grew out of the newly gained access to the Lithuanian Archives
in the late 1990s. The Archives and the Family History Library [FHL or Mormons] came to an agreement which allowed
the filming of the metrical register books. These books cover the 19th Century and include 20th Century
records through 1915.
LitvakSIG came to agreement with the Archives and the FHL which provides LitvakSIG with digital images
[TIF files] of the vital records in exchange for translations we produce.
The Records
The images
contain records for 100 towns which were in Vilna and Kovno gubernias, with a few towns from Suwalki gubernia as well. Prior
to conversion to digital format, the records were contained on 225 microfilms. There are approximately 200,000 unique images
and with an average of 4 records per page, there are approximately 800,000 records in total. This estimate is after subtracting
20% of the films to account for the approximate number of duplicate pages, register book cover pages, etc. The list of towns
represented was developed by FHL and JewishGen and posted to the JewishGen web site. Updates to this list have been required
and LitvakSIG maintains the current version of this information – more on that later.
The Translations
The images provided to LitvakSIG are organized by the microfilm they came from, rather
than the town the records cover. LitvakSIG received the films as digital images and began translating various films. It was
immediately apparent this was not an efficient way to proceed, since records for many towns exist on a single film [sometimes
over 10 towns per film]. We have taken the 200,000 images and have reordered the images by town. We are now better able to
coordinate the translations on a town by town basis.
The Translators
The beginning of the translation effort saw a few volunteer translators come forth, although
the primary need is for paid translators. The project is of such a large scope it is necessary to employ paid translators.
Some of the translations submitted by volunteers are of good quality, whereas others had to be scrapped. We are currently
reformatting and correcting some of the early work to save that which is useable.
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