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 19^th Century and include 20^th 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.