The search for your ancestral home is an
important element of Jewish genealogists' research. This effort
usually involves an iterative process of finding census
records, naturalization
papers, and ship arrival
records. These records have been discussed in previous sections. In this
section we will review additional resources available.
Books (see Reference
Materials)
Where Once We Walked. This gazetteer contains 22,000 towns in
Central and Eastern Europe where Jews lived before the Holocaust and
includes 15,000 alternate spellings.
It can be found at:
A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames. This series of
books by Alexander Beider contains the origin of names from the
Russian Empire, Prague, Poland, and of Ashkenazic origin. Shows the
origins of the name, name variants, and where the name was found.
While it is best to find your direct family records, if that fails this
may provide other leads to follow. These books can be found at:
On-Line Resources
JewishGen
provides
many tools for the genealogist researching his/her Jewish roots.
The ShtetlSeeker
allows you to enter the name of a town and country and returns all
towns with similar names. You can also ask for a listing of all towns
within a certain number of miles (you specify) from a given town. This
allows you to check out the neighborhood around a big town for something
that might look or sound familiar.
The Family Finder
allows you to search for a given surname and town/country and all
combinations of these. It returns a list of researchers who have entered
their family name and town that match your search. Over 300,000 entries
can be found in this database. Once you find a match, you can write to
the researcher(s) that match your request and compare notes about your
family name and town.
