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The Jewish Records Indexing Poland project (JRI) aims to make available, through a searchable database, indexes from a variety of (mainly) 19th century Polish Jewish records held on microfilm. Some of you may have taken the opportunity to look at the work that has already been done in the JRI-Poland database. If you have not seen it yet, you can access it on http://www.jewishgen.org/jri-pl/jriplweb.htm. The impressive results are due to the dedication of volunteers and the funds raised to help defray the costs of transliterating, copying, and mailing the data.
In researching my FAJFER family for nearly six years, I had already done a small amount of transcribing of indexes in the LDS films of Kalisz. If other researchers had also done the same or were prepared to contribute in other ways to support the work, it seemed better to co-ordinate rather than duplicate our efforts. This is the basis of the Shtetl CO-OP. At the International Jewish Genealogical Seminar held in New York in August 1999, I agreed to take on the role of Shtetl CO-OP Co-ordinator for the town of Kalisz.
At the end of February 2000, I contacted
via e-mail and letter all those who gave the town of Kalisz as one of the
places they were researching on the Jewish Genealogical Family Finder (JGFF)
on Jewishgen. Given that there were a significant number of us (about 80)
researching Kalisz and given the size of the task, I suggested that it
would be helpful if we too could get material for "our" town on-line. As
with all projects, the task needed to be broken down into small stages
and co-ordinated sensibly. Below is the information I sent to the Kalisz
researchers.
| I have made a preliminary survey of the
15 films which contain Jewish vital records from Kalisz and which cover
the years 1809 to 1892. They contain some 25,000 records. There are some
indexes on the first film, though these are far from complete. There are
no indexes from 1817 until 1836. Most of the subsequent years are indexed.
As you are probably aware, from 1868 the films are in Russian, though I
have found that the full birth record text itself contains the name of
the child in Roman script as well as Cyrillic. I don't know if this is
true for all the Russian Kalisz records.
I see the project taking the following
shape:
Phase 2 would be to allocate to volunteers the unindexed records and work to create and subsequently check these indexes. Phase 3 would be to pay for someone to transliterate those Russian records where no Roman script equivalent is given ie the marriages and deaths and some of the births. It is possible that some of you have the experience, skill and time to undertake this task - however, it is likely to be something that we will need help to complete if the task is not to become laborious. Phase 4 would be to investigate the availability of other Kalisz records, not filmed by the LDS, and see whether we had the resources,to have these copied and/or transcribed. Such projects have already been successfully undertaken by other Shtetl Co-ops and I am sure that, by the time we reached this stage, there would be a wealth of experience to guide us on the best way to go about this. Phase 5 (which we might be able to do sooner, rather than later) involves creating a database of names from the Kalisz Yizkor book. I have a copy of the book in Yiddish/Hebrew (which I can't read too well). I was also given a copy of the English version by David Weingot, a fellow member of the JGS of Great Britain. He has also created an index (of which I have the paper copy) and he has agreed to give me a copy on file which we can make available online. Phase 6 - not sure at the moment - we may have run out of steam before then. If not, we might consider whether we wanted to organise a trip to Kalisz and/or those places where other records on the town can be found. Again, we would want to take advice from those who have already done such things on the best way to go about this. |
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