Apr_23_2006


	The Grand Duchy (GDL) Project: Finding Families in 18th Century Records in Belarus, Lithuania and Poland (No charge or JGSLA members; $5.00 for guests. You may join at the door)

Monday, April 24, 2006, 7:00 p.m. at the Skirball Cultural Center
(for directions)

Pre-meeting Program at 7:00 p.m.: Genealogical Research in the United Kingdom

Speaker: Lorna Kay

Lorna Kay, chairman of the Manchester Regional Group of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain, will explain how to research records in the United Kingdom, emphasizing the various archives available and current online databases, including the ongoing “Free BMD” project which contains transcriptions of the civil registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales. She will highlight databases available exclusively to JGS Great Britain members and describe new research projects currently being worked on by their volunteers, including her personal project for digitizing the marriage registers for Manchester synagogues. A handout with useful website links will be available, and she will discuss the JGS Great Britain newsletter, Shemot, and their latest publication “A Guide to Jewish Genealogy in the United Kingdom.”

Speaker: Lorna Kay had been dabbling “gently” with her family tree until she attended the 21st International Conference in London in 2001 when she became absolutely smitten with the whole thing. Realizing there was nothing in Manchester to help with genealogical research, she started a regional group of the JGS Great Britain. It held its first meeting in November 2001, and is now the fastest-growing regional branch of the JGS Great Britain. In July 2002, Ms. Kay visited Ukraine to go back to her family roots in Kamenets Podolsk. She has also traced her maternal side back to 1759 in Latvia and paternal side back to 1810 in the Ukraine.

Program at 7:30 p.m.: The Grand Duchy (GDL) Project: Finding Families in 18th Century Records in Belarus, Lithuania and Poland

Speakers: David B. Hoffman, Ph.D. and Sonia Hoffman

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was home to the ancestors of 80% of the Jews alive in the world today. During this “golden age,” before this area became part of the Russian Empire, Jews enjoyed a large degree of self-government and economic security. The Hoffmans are translating and analyzing thousands of pages of census-tax records from the latter half of the 18th century, for the areas which are now in Lithuania, Belarus and parts of Poland and Ukraine. They will describe the information that these records contain about communities (kahals) and families, and the historical context for these findings. They will demonstrate how researchers have identified their families in these records, though they did not yet have surnames. Many shtetl research groups are participating in this project to create a patronymic online database and to more fully recreate the history of their shtetls going back to the 17th and 18th centuries. For more information about the Grand Duchy Project, go to: www.jewishfamilyhistory.org.

David B. Hoffman, Ph.D., is the President of the Jewish Family History Foundation and serves on the Board of Directors of the JGS Los Angeles. He co-founded and is the Past-president of the LitvakSIG. Sonia Hoffman is President of the JGS Los Angeles and coordinates the Grand Duchy Project of the Jewish Family History Foundation. She served as coordinator of the Bialystok Shtetl CO-OP for JRI-Poland. They have edited a family newsletter/family history journal for a large extended family since 1992. They have published numerous articles in Avotaynu and Roots-Key, and have spoken at five IAJGS annual conferences and for many other genealogy societies around the world.

Resources with more information to read before the meeting:
An example of following records from the 19th century back to the 18th century: http://tinyurl.com/hpcnj
Political districts of the Grand Duchy in 1784 (click on name of district for a district map): http://tinyurl.com/zhf68
Alphabetical list of towns in the Grand Duchy in 1784: http://tinyurl.com/k58gf
Read the Jerusalem Post article: Tracing family back to the mid-1600s is now possible
It's All Relative: A Grand Project
By Schelly Taladay Dardashti
Published in the Jerusalem Post, Nov. 18, 2004