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Saturday, August 19, 2006
LitvakSIG elections at the 2006 IAJGS Conference in New York
I just returned from the 2006 IAJGS Conference in New York held this past week. There was a lot of significant activity,
including the LitvakSIG elections, several talks of interest to Litvaks, as well as a side trip I made with Olga Zabludoff
to YIVO.
The election of the SIG Board of Directors resulted in a new Board fixed at nine members due to a motion which passed
prior to the actual voting. The voting commenced and the result was essentially a Board consisting of only a few existing
members, with the rest being newly elected. The newly elected Board held a meeting, after which it was announced that Howard
Margol was selected as LitvakSIG President, Aaron Roetenberg as Treasurer, and Merle Kastner as Secretary.
Howard approached me and asked me to stay on as the Coordinator of the Vital Records Indexing Project however, the suggestion
was made the project be split up by gubernia. In theory, that is a good thing because I won't have to handle the entire project
on my own. There are plenty of records to go around for translation and no one can easily say it ought to be a one person
job. I was told that Aaron Roetenberg, in addition to being elected as Treasurer, would also be coordinating the vital records
for Kovno gubernia. Until this point in time, Richard Hoffman has been our Treasurer, and that job alone requires a significant
amount of effort. I believe the tasks of Treasurer and Kovno gubernia vital records coordinator are best kept separate. I
initiated discussions on this subject, and I believe it might turn out some of the larger Kovno towns might be excluded
from Aarons responsibilities. It only makes sense. As things develop on this subject, I will be keeping you informed via this
blog.
Also discussed after the election was the subject of the LitvakSIG and JewishGen vital records projects, and how they
will function now that the coordinators of the JewishGen project are LitvakSIG Board members. Everyone recognizes there are
issues here and further discussions are required in order to pave a way forward. Again, I will keep you all informed here
in these pages.
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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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