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Inheritance, Business, Property and Court Records
The things that I have been talking about that we have put in our Catalog do not reveal all of the possibilities. To my mind, these are the least interesting records and the easiest to look for. When I do genealogical research, I usually look for other possibilities: perhaps in the business transactions, the purchase or the inheritance of property, that had to be registered there, or some form of documents in alphabetical indexes. It takes luck.
Sometimes we'll find your ancestor's will, some record of the inheritance of property after his death or the purchase of some property, and so on. It is just chance, just luck for certain properties and certain people. None of these court records have any indexes. Perhaps they will have them at some time, but up until now they have been inaccessible because they are listed in chronological order, by the hundreds, just wills without any indication of whose wills they are.
We also have the records of many other institutions. Kaunas guberniya administration administered all sites and all aspects of life in Kaunas guberniya. It had different departments, for example the Medical Department of Kaunas guberniya. If your ancestors were in medicine, as pharmacists, doctors, dentists or anything medical, we ought to have personal files for them, perhaps with photographs. It's possible that they are there. We have lists of these doctors and other medical men, and to my mind, all of them were Jewish. Non Jewish names are a rarity at that time. We have various other possibilities for finding records. It involves going through volumes and volumes of records, arranged only in alphabetical order, selecting possibly important files by often-inaccurate titles, and looking through them page by page. This is the reason this research takes such a long time.
I want to remind you that all the records that I can find, anybody can find. There are private researchers who can read Russian. We have a research room. Please come and do research yourself. Everything is accessible and everything is free.
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