Jewish records published on genealogy website

If you have Jewish ancestry, you’ll be delighted to know that the online genealogy service MyHeritage has now published more than four million Lithuanian Jewish records that date back to Catherine the Great’s Russian empire and up until the Holocaust.

The records have been translated into English and cover 145 years from 1795 up until 1940 – present-day Lithuania, areas in Poland and Belarus and the neighbouring countries.

The records have been compiled and indexed over several decades by a US charity – LitvakSIG. They include census data, tax, voter and conscription lists and Shoah databases. (The Shoah database is a record made by the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre Yad Vashem and its partners to record the names and biographical details of every victim of the Holocaust, including those who were murdered, those who survived and those whose fate is still to be determined.)

LitvakSIG said it wanted to share the resource to “promote widely” its research into Lithuanian-Jewish genealogy. The charity expects additional records to be included in the future.

MyHeritage founder and CEO Gilad Japhet called the collection a “valuable resource for anyone of Lithuanian-Jewish origin”. He added that some of his own ancestors appeared in the collection.

The resource, “Lithuanian-Jewish Records from LitvakSIG, 1795-1940”, can be searched for free but for full access you will need a MyHeritage subscription.

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