JewishGen Ukraine Research Division
How to use our website
Introduction
Our RD's website is town and district oriented. Three features are present on every page of the site:
- Two search boxes are in the upper right corner. One is for
general searches. The other is for town name searches (see the next section).
- The top menu bar allows navigation to anyplace on the site.
- The bottom menu provides direct access to our site map, Board member contact information, our donations page.
The bottom menu also has links for some of the popular social media sites.
The first button is a direct link to the our RD page on Facebook. The following three will allow you to share or comment our website pages with your acquaintances through your own accounts on Twitter, Google+1 and Facebook.
How to find your town page
The core of our website consists of town pages, one for each
of almost 800 towns in our database. We have tried to make it easy for you to
get to any of the town pages. Use any of these three methods.
- If you know the province and district your town is in, use
the clickable maps. Click on the town's province. Then click on the town's
district and finally click on the town name. This takes you to your town page.
At each step you will see, successively, a province map, a district map, and
the town page. We'll describe these later.
- If you don't know your province or district but you have a
pretty good idea of how the town name is spelled, click on Towns and Districts
on the top menu bar. From the secondary menu, click on 'Alphabetical list of
towns'. You will see a browsable Town Page directory. Select the first letter
of your town name to jump to that section of the directory. Browse through the
list and click on your town name. This takes you to your town page. In the
list, you will notice that some towns have 'flags' next to the town name. If a
flag is present it indicates that the town has a Town Leader (T), a KehilaLinks owner
(K), a Project
List (P) and/or a Document
Collection (D). The next section describes Document Collections and Project
Lists.
- If you are not sure how your town name is spelled and you
don't know its province and district, use the town name search box. It is in
the upper right corner of every web page on our site. This is especially useful
if your town had several different and dissimilar names. For example, at
various times, Radyvyliv was known as Radzivilov and as Chervonoarmeysk. Type
any of these names into the search box, and a page will open showing you all
entries in the town database with any of those names. Select the one you want
by clicking on the View button at the right side of the listing. This will take
you to your town page. To produce a list of all towns in our database, just
leave the town search box blank and click the GO button next to the box. The
resulting list has 7 columns plus a View button (the town, district and
province name in 1900, the modern town name, name in 1930 and 1950, and other
names for the town). Clicking on the View button on a town line takes you to
the Ukraine RD Town Page.
If none of these methods work for you, try using the JewishGen Gazetteer
and the JewishGen
Communities Database to obtain more information about your town and how its
name was spelled. (Hint: Use Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex rather than Beider-Morse.
D-M Soundex seems to be more accurate for town names.)
Document Collections and Project Lists
Document Collections and Project Lists contain the primary
content of our website. Every town, district, and province page has sections
for Document Collections and Projects that relate to that town... unless no
material currently is available. These sections contain brief descriptions of
the Collection or Project, along with a hyperlink to its location. Most content
is on KehilaLinks websites where it the KehilaLinks 'owner' maintains it.
Content for a town, district, or province that does not have an active
KehilaLinks website is on the Ukraine RD site.
We have provided you with several ways to get to the
Document Collections and Projects for your town. The easiest way is to go to
your town page. There you will find lists of all relevant Document Collections
and Projects for your town, along with a brief description of each item, an
indication of its status, and the location of the item (e.g. on a KehilaLinks
website, or at an external website or archive).
Master Index of Document Collections
You can browse through our Master
Index of Document Collections. This Master Index page also is accessible by
selecting 'Most Visited' on the 'Get Started' top menu, and clicking on Master
Index of Documents. In the Search Form that comes up, leave all the entries
set to their defaults, 'All...', and leave the Keyword field blank, then click
the Search button. The Master Index of Document Collections has six columns:
- Geographic Area
- Collection Name
- Time Frame
- Type of Collection
- Location of original documents for the collection
- View buttons
Clicking on the View button for each Collection (it looks
like a magnifying glass) takes you to a page that provides a detailed
description of the Document Collection. That page also contains a list of towns
for which the Collection is relevant. Click on the town name or the magnifier
at the right side of the town line to go to the Ukraine RD Town Page that
lists information for that particular collection and town.
Clicking on the View button that looks like an open book
takes you to the web location that is the source of the document collection.
You can sort the Master Index table by any column. Just
click on the column heading you want to sort by. Click again to sort the column
in inverse order.
A Search Form at the top of the Master Index of Document
Collections page allows you to narrow your search to a specific province,
district, town, document type, or keyword. Each box in the Search Form has a
dropdown menu that enables you to select an entry for that box. The circled
question mark in the Search Form heading brings up a Help page. This Help page
explains your search options and defines all the terms in the Search Form.
Master Index of Projects
A Master
Index of Projects
is available on the Research Menu. It works
in a way very similar to the Master Index of Document Collections. To see the
entire Index, leave all the default selections set to 'All...', leave the
Keyword search box blank and click Search. The Master Project Index that appears has 4 sortable columns plus a View button.
- Geographic Area
- Project Name
- Coordinator
- Status
The View button
takes you to a page that has a detailed description of the Project for the
geographic area you selected, a hyperlinked list of Document Collections
related to the project, and a list of project tasks and the status of each.
You can narrow your
search to a specific province, district, town, or project status by using the
drop down lists in the Search Form at the top of the page. The circled question
mark in the Search Form heading brings up a Help page. This Help page explains
your search options and defines all the terms in the Search Form.
Example
We begin on the Home
page with the clickable maps showing the nine provinces. We'll use the town of
Odessa to show how you can drill down to original documents and their
translations.
- Clicking on Kherson guberniya takes you to an enlarged map of that Province. The map shows all the districts (counties) in Kherson province, along with a few key towns in each District. A hyperlinked list of the districts and key towns is to the right of the map. This page also has links to articles and related links for Kherson province.
- Click on Odessa District and we go to a page that has a map of the District showing the location of key towns, a list of its towns, and a list of related document collections and relevant links, if this material is available for the district. (In this case Russian Census information for Odessa district has not yet been entered in the database, so it is not shown on the district page.) Move your mouse over a town name and a 'balloon' and pointer pop up showing you the location and some basic information about the town.
- Click on the town name Odessa. Now we see an aerial map of the town, information about the town, lists of projects completed and in progress, lists of document collections, related links, and a link to the JewishGen KehilaLinks website for the town.
- Clicking on any item takes you to a page showing the work that has been done on that item. Let's look at the project titled 'All Odessa 1902 Directory Indexing', under Projects. This Project uses the '1902-3 - All Odessa Directory' listed under Document Collections. Click the View button for the Project. This takes us to a page that provides a detailed project description. On this page, click on the link next to 'Web address of the Project'. This takes us to the Project page on the Odessa KehilaLinks website. Here, we see the original document in Russian and a translation in English (scroll to the right), each shows page numbers in the original document where each name occurs. Pick a name and note the page number(s) associated with it. At the top of the document click on the 'All Odessa Directory' hyperlink. We now are in the original document and we can click through to the page we noted to get information about this person.
Other towns, projects, and document collections will be similar, but detailed content may differ. As we mentioned earlier, almost all this content is on a KehilaLinks website or on an external website. The 'owner' of that website controls how the data are presented.
The Top Menu Bar
The top menu bar is available from every page of our
website. It offers multiple ways to access all the information on the site. Now
that you understand our Town orientation, Document Collections and Projects, we
hope you will find each section of the Top Menu Bar is fairly intuitive. So
we'll just guide you through the menus and leave it to you to explore more
thoroughly.
Home Page
Begin on our Home page. It features our clickable map of
Ukraine. You can use it to click through to any province, district, or town
page, each of which has considerable content. You also can access the clickable
map from Towns and Districts on the Top Menu Bar. The Home page also shows our
most recent 'What's New' messages.
Get Started
The Get Started menu is where you are now. It has sections
that describe the work of our RD as well as several 'how-to' sections like
this one.
'Get started with our RD' has links to three pop-out
documents:
- Introduction to Ukraine RD
- The Ukraine RD FAQ
- Ukraine RD Projects (This is a work in progress. It will be
significantly modified soon).
'Get started with this Website' has two items on a pop-out
menu:
- How to use this website (this document)
- Site Map for this website (which also is on the bottom menu
bar)
'Most Visited' has 3 pop-out items:
- 'Ukraine clickable map'. This map is the same as the one on
our Home page, but the page includes descriptions and hyperlinks for Projects,
Document Collections, Articles, and Related Links that are relevant to all of
Ukraine.
- 'Alphabetical List of Town Names' was described in previous
sections of this document.
- 'Master Index of Documents' was described in previous
sections of this document.
Towns and Districts
We previously discussed one of the menu choices under Towns and Districts: 'Alphabetic List of Towns'.
Towns and Districts also has other sub-menu items:
- 'List of Lost Towns'... We have not been able to locate these
towns or information about them in any gazetteer or other source. Please
contact us if you can provide information about any of these towns.
- 'Maps' has a collection of maps that may be useful to you.
Research
The Research Menu has 1 submenu and several other sections:
- 'Ukraine RD Searchable Databases' has four sub-menus.
- 'Master Index of Projects' was discussed above.
- Ukraine RD Master Index of Document Collections was
discussed previously.
- JewishGen Database, is intended as a master index for all datasets concerning the geographical scope of our RD. It is a work-in-progress. Our RD is actively developing datasets for inclusion in the Database.
- 'Links to other Online Research Resources' is a structured, annotated list of resources available on JewishGen, our RD and on other important external websites. Be sure to browse through the list. Some of the material under this item was carried over from the old website and will be moved to KehilaLinks websites and town pages.
- 'RD's Discussion List Archive' includes all messages posted
to all JewishGen Discussion Lists since May 1998. It includes an advanced search form that allows you to select any or all Discussion Lists.
- 'InfoSheets' are brief (1 to 3 pages) documents that provide information about key issues relating to Ukraine RD as well as tutorials that teach you how to initiate and carry out specific types of projects.
Photos, Travel, and More
Everything on this menu is pretty standard and intuitive. No
special instruction is needed. The submenus are: Photo Gallery, Travel Reports,
Stories, People, Recipes, Book Reviews, and Other Articles. Items under Other
Articles that relate to towns, districts or provinces also are listed on the
relevant geographic pages of our website.
About Us
The contents of this menu item also are pretty standard and
straightforward. Sub-menus include:
- Names, contact information, responsibilities and biographies of our RD's 'Board of Directors; '
- A list of our RD's 'Key People', Town Leaders and
KehilaLinks Owners with their contact information;
- Our RD's 'News Archive' and 'Newsletters' contain important previous communications with the Discussion List. It may be useful for you to browse through these submenu items.
- 'Subscribe to our RD Mailing Lists' gives you instructions for subscribing to our discussion list, one of the primary ways we communicate with you.
- 'Our RD on Facebook' takes you to our Facebook page where you can read previous posts, subscribe, and post your own messages... and, of course, 'Like' us.
Donate/Contribute
'Donate' tells you how you can make a monetary contribution
to JewishGen and our RD. You can designate your donation for general use
or for specific towns or projects.
'Contribute' identifies some of the primary ways you can
contribute your time and skills to assist our work.
'Town Leaders Needed' lists the towns in our concerned geographical area that
currently lack town leaders. Since we have about 800 towns in our database, and
less than 100 Town Leaders, there are many opportunities for you to contribute
to the RD while advancing your own family history research.
'Acknowledgements' is a work-in-progress. It is here that we
recognize the outstanding efforts of our volunteers.
We hope Ukraine RD's website will help you further your
research. For many of us, working with Ukraine RD is a way to 'give back' for
all the assistance we received with our own research. If you need help, please
call upon us. If you can help move the RD forward, please contact us. We take
our tag line seriously... Ukraine RD, where Jewish genealogy is personal.
Best wishes,
XXXX
Ukraine RD Coordinator
www.jewishgen.org/XXXX
where Jewish genealogy is personal
