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Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Birth Records for Schuchin, Lida uyezd sent for translation
The first records [all filmed births] for the town of Schuchin, Lida uyezd, Vilna gubernia have been sent to a translator.
Work should commence immediately and I expect to receive the first translations in late March 2008.
Novygorod Record distribution - Set 2
The second set of vital records for Novygorod [Vilna uyezd, Vilna gubernia] have been distributed to donors. This
set contained the following records:
Births: 1854, 1862 - 1867, 1870, 1871, 1876, 1877
Additional funding is required for Novygorod before additional records can be sent for translation, as the account balance
is under $100.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Second round of Novygorod records beginning to come in
The second set of Novygorod vital record translations began coming in yesterday. Additional translations are expected
to come in over the next few weeks. Once they are all received, the translations will be distributed to qualified donors.
This will exhaust our funds and put a temporary hold on translations for Novygorod. Additional funds received for this town
will be credited as of the date received. Additional Novygorod records will go into the translation queue once an additional
$500 is received.
1879 Vilna death index received
I forgot to post this, but the completed 1879 Vilna death index was completed on January 5th. Our volunteer has
now begun translating the 1878 Vilna death records.
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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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