Leadville, Colorado Jewish Names Collection: 1879-1930

Background

The Leadville, Colorado Jewish Names Collection 1879-1930 contains data on more than 1,300 Jewish residents of Leadville, Colorado, who lived in the city between 1879 and 1930. Data collection took place over nearly three decades through the extensive research of volunteers and staff at Leadville’s Temple Israel Synagogue and Museum.

Each of the over 1,300 names are accompanied by vital and demographic information as well as residential and workplace addresses for each year between 1879 and 1918 and for the census years of 1920 and 1930. Also included are URLs to biographies for each surname, researched and written by museum staff and volunteers. The primary sources used for the database were Leadville city directories, national census records, the 1885 Colorado State Census, digitized historic newspapers through the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, and immigration, birth, marriage, and cemetery records.

The database was also instrumental in creating a series of digital maps which convert the residential and workplace addresses into an interactive format for visitors to the Temple Israel Synagogue and Museum and its website. The maps are accessible through a web browser here: http://www.jewishleadville.org/mapsbyyear.html

The Temple Israel Synagogue and Museum website where all components for this collection can also be found directly is http://jewishleadville.org/. This museum is open to the public for tours.

Note that synagogue records have not been found and there were actually two congregations in Leadville at the time. The other was the Orthodox Knesseth Israel circa 1886-1937. For more information, read http://jewishleadville.org/aboutorthodoxjewsinleadville.html.

135 burials with 117 headstone images for Jewish Leadville in the Evergreen Cemetery are included on JewishGen’s Online Worldwide Burial Database (JOWBR) and can be searched at https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Cemetery/.

Other Colorado datasets are searchable through the JewishGen Unified Search at https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/all/.