How to JewishGen & FAQ

No. Ellis Island clerks did not write or change names. They checked passengers against ship manifests that had been filled out in Europe before departure. When a name changed, it was usually the family that changed it after arriving. If you cannot find a name in Global Search, the cause is more often spelling: the default Search Type, Phonetically Like (Beider-Morse), already groups spelling variants, and the search guide explains the others.

Start in the country where your family settled, not in Europe. The hometown is most often named in passenger manifests, naturalization papers, draft cards and vital records such as marriage and death certificates. Once you have a town name, look it up in Town Finder (Communities Database).

Town names repeat across Eastern Europe. Search the name in Town Finder (Communities Database) and compare the candidates by province or district. Then check each one against your documents: naturalization papers and ship manifests often name the district, a nearby city or a port as well as the town. The candidate that fits two or more clues is most likely yours.

Both can be right. Borders in Eastern Europe moved several times in the 19th and 20th centuries, so one town could be in the Russian Empire, then in Poland, then in the Soviet Union. The town name matters more than the country. Look the town up in Town Finder (Communities Database), which shows the country, province and district the town belonged to before World War I, between the wars, after World War II and today.

Post an image of the record on ViewMate. Volunteers there translate documents at no charge. You do not need to read the language yourself to begin.

The Social Security Death Index (SSDI) covers most U.S. deaths since 1962 and gives dates and places. The original application, form SS-5, is more useful: your ancestor filled it in, and it usually gives full name, birth date, birthplace and both parents’ names, including the mother’s maiden name. You can request a deceased person’s SS-5 from the Social Security Administration under the Freedom of Information Act. Ask for the full original, not the computer extract. Records of recent deaths are held back for several years.

No. JewishGen holds records from many countries, including South America, the UK, South Africa, Israel, North Africa and the Middle East, and its Research Divisions include Sephardic and Mizrahi regions. The database catalog shows what covers your area.

No. A family tree needs a document for each link between one person and the next. AI chatbots write text that sounds right whether or not it is true, and they often invent people and records. If you use one for ideas, check every name and date in a source.

No. AI chatbots cannot query JewishGen’s databases, so a request such as “search JewishGen for Moshe Goldberg from Warsaw” returns nothing from our records. Use Global Search yourself; it searches every JewishGen database at once.

Only for a general idea, and only for clean printed text. AI tools handle old handwriting, faded ink and Jewish religious terms poorly. For a printed page, such as a Yizkor book page, run OCR (text recognition) on it first and translate the extracted text. For handwriting, post the image on ViewMate and ask the volunteers.

Maybe, but treat it as a clue, not a fact. Family stories grow over the generations. Build your tree one generation at a time and support each link with a document before you accept the connection.

Use it as a lead, not a source. Online trees often contain errors, and one mistake gets copied from tree to tree. Find the original record for each person and each link before you add them to your own tree.

Start with the paper trail they left behind in their new country. Before you look for records in Europe, exhaust the records created in their destination country. Look for their marriage licenses, death certificates, social security applications, and especially naturalization papers and passenger manifests.

Neither may be right. A record is only as accurate as the person who gave the information, and people guessed, rounded their ages or misremembered. A record is most reliable for the event it was made to document: a birth record made days after the birth is stronger than a death certificate that gives the birth date from memory. Keep both versions, note who supplied each, and weigh the evidence. Records that disagree on an age are common.

The Russian Empire used the Julian calendar until 1918, while Western Europe used the Gregorian. The Julian date ran 12 days behind in the 1800s and 13 days behind in the 1900s. Add those days to convert a Russian Empire date to the Western date.

The Pale of Settlement was a massive designated territory within the western borders of the Russian Empire. From the late 1700s until 1917, the vast majority of Jews in the Russian Empire were legally restricted to living only within this specific territory.

At the end of the 18th century Poland was divided among the Russian, Austrian and Prussian empires, and it was not an independent country again until after World War I. In the Russian section, vital records had to be written in Russian from 1868. Look for your town’s records under the empire that ruled it at the time.

Search JewishGen first. Millions of records are already indexed in its regional and topical databases; the database catalog lists them. If the record is not there, check FamilySearch, which has digitized many European registers, or write to the state or national archive, which may search for a fee. A professional researcher helps with complex searches or archives that do not answer mail. If you visit an archive, contact it first, because access rules vary. Your region’s Research Division can tell you which records survive for your area.

All of them. A man could have a Hebrew name for religious use, a Yiddish name at home (Velvel), a local name for business (Wolf) and a new name after emigrating (William). Search each form. In Global Search, the Is Exactly type also pulls in JewishGen’s built-in name synonyms (see the search guide).

Not if you go back far enough. In Eastern Europe, permanent, inherited family surnames weren't legally required until the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Before that, most Jews used a patronymic system (e.g., "Yitzhak son of Moshe"). When governments forced families to adopt permanent last names, siblings didn't always choose the same one.

It depends on which empire ruled your town. Hereditary surnames were imposed on Jewish communities by a wave of decrees, one government at a time:

• Austrian Empire: 1787 — the first in Europe, covering Galicia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary
• German states: mostly 1807–1813 (Frankfurt 1807, Baden 1809, Prussia 1812, Bavaria 1813)
• Russian Empire: decreed 1804, enforced in earnest from 1835
• Congress Poland: 1821

Why it matters: records from before your region’s decree usually won’t use the family surname at all — you will be looking for “Yitzhak son of Moshe,” not “Yitzhak Goldberg.” And a surname that first appears around the decree date was brand new, so don’t expect it to trace back further.

Mostly no. When governments required fixed surnames in the late 1700s and early 1800s, families mostly chose their own, from a trade (Schneider, tailor), a place (Berliner), a parent’s name (Abramson), a house sign or an animal (Baer, Wolf, Hirsch), or a pleasant mix of gold, silver, rose and valley words. Documented cases of officials selling or imposing names are rare. Some governments did forbid Jews to take the names of established Christian or noble families.

Vel is Latin for “or” — the clerk’s way of writing “also known as.” An entry like “Katz vel Cohen” means one family answering to both names. In the decades after surnames became mandatory, plenty of families were still settling into them: siblings registered under different names, children recorded under the mother’s surname when a religious-only marriage wasn’t recognized by the state, and names shifted again with a move to a new district.

For you, a vel is a gift: it hands you the second surname to search. Whenever a family seems to vanish from the records, check whether they simply continued under the other name.

Almost never with certainty. Very few surnames are exclusively Jewish — Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors drew names from the same trades, towns, and given names, so a Schneider, Berliner, or Peters could be anyone. Even the classic priestly and Levitical names (Cohen, Katz, Levi) are strong hints rather than proof, since spelling variants of them exist in non-Jewish families too — and plenty of Jewish families carry names with no “Jewish sound” at all.

So never rule a record in or out on the sound of the name alone. It is the combination — name plus town, occupation, and family connections — that identifies your family, not the surname by itself.

It can be true. In 19th-century Imperial Russia, military service for Jewish men was very long and meant to force assimilation. Some young men injured themselves, for example by cutting off a trigger finger, or starved themselves, so that they would fail the medical exam.

Draft evasion. In the Russian Empire, young men were required to register for the draft in their late teens. Fleeing across the border just before they were called up was one of the most common catalysts for emigration.

Jewish vital records, marriage contracts and gravestones use the Hebrew calendar. To get the approximate Western year from a Hebrew year in the 5000s, drop the 5 and add 1240. For 5664, 664 + 1240 = 1904. For an exact date use the Hebrew and Gregorian Date Converter.

Jewish headstones follow a specific traditional formula. They typically start with פ״נ (Here lies). Next is the deceased's Hebrew given name, followed by "ben" (son of) or "bat" (daughter of), and then their father's Hebrew name. At the bottom you will usually see תנצבה (May their soul be bound up in the bond of life).

Start with JOWBR, the burial registry. Search spelling variants, because a Hebrew name may be recorded in a different transliteration. If you find nothing, note that burials in Israel are handled by local burial societies (chevra kadisha) with no single national registry, and that fallen soldiers are recorded separately by the Ministry of Defense. The place and year of death narrow the search. The Israel database page lists other Israeli collections.

Start with the Holocaust Database, which has more than 6 million entries from camp lists, ghetto registries, transport lists and post-war survivor lists. The records are incomplete, so a name that is missing is not proof that a person was not there.

Many victims were killed in mass shootings or in camps where records were destroyed or never made. Next search the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names, especially its Pages of Testimony, which are short memorial forms filled in by surviving relatives and friends.

A Page of Testimony names the person who submitted it, usually a relative or fellow townsperson, and where they lived. That person or their descendants may be family you have not met. If you know of victims who appear in no database, you can submit a Page of Testimony through Yad Vashem with what you know: a name, a town and a relationship.

The Arolsen Archives, in Germany, hold documents on victims and survivors of Nazi persecution, including the files of the International Tracing Service (ITS). If a JewishGen entry refers to an ITS record, the Arolsen Archives website has the original scans.

JewishGen is primarily an archive of historical records. While our database includes post-war survivor registry lists, we do not actively track the current whereabouts of living individuals. To connect with descendants of survivors, your best tool is the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF).

Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.

Faucibus in ornare quam viverra orci sagittis. Nunc congue nisi vitae suscipit tellus mauris a diam maecenas. Sed risus pretium quam vulputate dignissim suspendisse in est ante. Nisl condimentum id venenatis a condimentum vitae.

Erat pellentesque adipiscing commodo elit at imperdiet dui accumsan sit. Neque viverra justo nec ultrices dui sapien eget. Libero id faucibus nisl tincidunt eget nullam non. Tortor aliquam nulla facilisi cras fermentum odio.

Vitae elementum curabitur vitae nunc sed velit dignissim sodales ut. Feugiat in fermentum posuere urna. Et tortor consequat id porta nibh venenatis cras. Ac turpis egestas integer eget. Pharetra diam sit amet nisl suscipit adipiscing bibendum.