Yiddish Center: Audio books in Yiddish

The Yiddish Book Center and the Jewish Public Library of Montreal produced the audiobook Kinder-yorn (Childhood Years) as part of Y.Y. Trunk's seven-volume Poylen (Poland: Memories and Images).

The work is considered one of the most important memoirs of Jewish Polish life. The author began the work two days after he arrived in the US in March 1941.

According to the Yiddish Book Center, "He knew that Europe’s Jews were facing an unimaginable disaster, and his book has been called a 'portable literary gravestone for a destroyed community.'"

Two Fellows of the Yiddish Book Center have returned with an additional 200 Yiddish audio books on tape. They will be digitized and made available for free online.

Poyln has also been translated into English and published by the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada.

For those who can read Yiddish, click here . Sample the audio book here.

Digital Preservation: What do teens know about it?

What do teenagers know about digital preservation?

Learn more on the new Library of Congress digital preservation blog, The Signal.

The first line - "It’s many adult’s worst nightmare: how to entertain and (try to) educate 30 8^th graders for an hour?" - brought back memories.

As co-founder of the Las Vegas (NV) Hebrew High for post-bar/bat mitzvah students, I had major misgivings about teaching family history to a class of eighth-graders. Having taught English to this age group at the Iran-America Society in Teheran long ago, I knew it wasn't easy.

However, the Las Vegas class turned out to be one of the best I've ever had. Students used the major reference works from day one and understood how to navigate the sometimes strange phonetic spellings in Alexander Beider's books. They contacted grandparents and long-lost relatives and asked questions, wrote reports, created family trees and they involved their parents and extended families.

So I was intrigued by digital archivist Butch Lazorchak's post today in The Signal.

He advises that the first thing to do is to try and think like the teens, and used the example of a Florida middle school class trip to Washington, DC.

It wasn't the first time the LOC has worked with students on digital culture. In 2009, high school students from Virginia visited. The “Digital Natives Explore Digital Preservation” video illustrates their knowledge, ideas about preservation and who should do it.

The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP; say it "n-dip") at the LOC has participated in the National Book Festival and hosted Personal Archiving Day events, but there are differences in outreach to adults, teens and eighth-graders. Here's the program that focused on digital photos.

There were some interesting items in a 2010 Pew study of myths about how teens use cell phones and social networks. It indicated that after texting, the most popular features were taking and sharing photos. The middle-school students' program focused on helping them understand "how to capture, describe and preserve their own digital photos," About half the group used digital cameras, while the others used phones.

The split is important, because the primary distribution (and possibly only long-term storage) strategy for many of the phone users was to upload their photos to a social networking site such as Facebook.

We explained some of the issues with using a social network site as a primary storage option (history has shown that those sites don’t stick around forever), and talked about how it’s best to save your photos across a range of devices (thumb drives, CDs, external hard drives, online storage) and geographies (your house in Florida, your friend’s house across town, your grandma’s house in Seattle).

And we were pleasantly surprised by the student’s degree of knowledge on the issues. Most of them recognized that their digital photos were “at-risk” in some way (one had filled her camera by shooting 800 photos in one day and was worried about how to save them when she ran out of space), and many had perfectly reasonable back-up and replication strategies already in place. Our presentation “teased-out” more detail on these strategies, and got both the students and their parental chaperones to think a little harder about saving their photos with something that resembled a long-term strategy.

NDIPP attempts to raise awareness of digital preservation issues and encourage people to take personal action to preserve their own materials in today's absence of comprehensive tools to help them do so. According to the author, "the personal photographs of the students at South Lake could become the valuable cultural heritage materials of tomorrow, but only if the students take care of them first."

Read the complete article at the link above.

LOC: New preservation blog launched

The Library of Congress digital preservation program is now part of the blogosphere, according to an LOC announcement today.

Part of the potential audience for the new blog are genealogists and family history researchers:

"The audience for us to interact with is potentially vast, as we are very interested in personal digital archiving: helping individuals and families preserve their digital photographs and other digital files that document their lives."

The new blog - The Signal - authored by digital initiatives manager Bill LeFurgy, who writes in the initial post that the official program name is the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, or NDIIPP (say N-DIP).

In 2000, Congress directed the LOC to undertake a national digital preservation program to address the large-scale challenge of digital preservation. Huge amounts of digital content were being created with no print equal, and that some content was needed to create records of the times we live in.

However, the amount of information was larger than what could made accessible. Because so much data could be lost, Congress created NDIIPP to lessen that risk.

Over the last 10 years we have built a national network of collaborative partnerships to help preserve important digital content, build new tools and develop best practices. The partnerships span different communities, including universities, federal and state government agencies and the commercial creative content industry.  This is a new approach. Libraries, archives and other memory institutions traditionally have worked separately to acquire and manage their collections. But digital is different—it calls for a new kind of capacity that is difficult for a single institution to build on its own. The only practicable way forward is collaboration: in building technical infrastructure, in sharing knowledge, in developing best practices and in assigning roles and responsibilities for stewarding digital collections.

Concerning preservation, he writes that technology is the easy part of digital preservation programs, but that social is the harder part. He talks about collaboration and the Internet, and mentions the LOC website digitalpreservation.gov which provides a rich collection of information and resources.

They have spoken to experts, list tools and services and shared global information. Future plans include looking at the spectrum of data, from large scientific databases to modest personal digital collections of documents. Interviews are planned with people from many fields.

Check out the new blog and provide feedback.

JTA: Online news archive launched

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency - known simply as JTA - has launched a free, searchable online digital archive with some 250,000 articles dating from 1923.

JTA is near and dear to Tracing the Tribe's heart as that organization, in 2006, contacted me and requested that I begin a genealogy blog. A year later, due to reorganization, Tracing the Tribe became independent.

In my talks with various JTA people over the years, I always stressed that its archives would be of immense value to genealogists and family history researchers. As plans were made to make the archive available, I was delighted.

On Tuesday night, May 3, the archive was launched at a celebration held at the Center for Jewish History, in New York.

What can you find in the archive? Here are some tidbits from just a simple search.

--The first article on the the Babi Yar massacre 
-- The founding of Israel.
-- Many articles on Jewish women through the decades.
-- The Holocaust.
-- A 1930 story on how upper class Persian Jews were becoming Bahai.
-- A 1932 story about a 1,000-year-old Polish synagogue formed by Portuguese Jews in the year 933 (Hebrew year 4693) in Wronke - on the river Warthe - in Posen.
-- A 1924 article about elections in a village near Mogilev, Belarus - spelled Mogileff in the article - named Slobodoa Davidovka, Mozyr district, and the agricultural colony Kormi, in Mogileff district.

(NOTE: There seem to be some search engine vagaries - JTA should have consulted with Steve Morse! - which the last article above showed. Searching for Mogilev did not show that election article - although there were many more modern ones. I used an old spelling, Mogileff, to see if there were other articles for the town and that spelling brought up three. A search for "Persia" showed that at some point in time, Hamadan was spelled Amadan and Isfahan was Ispahan (useful information for future searches). A phonetic parameter would be a useful addition to the search engine. For now, if you know other spellings of the towns you are looking for, try all of them.

However, you can search by keyword, by date/decades, and there are additional search tips. You can also save your searches by registering at the archive. It's free; click the Sign Up logo on the upper right of the archive home page. Do check out your ancestral towns, surnames and more!)

JTA was founded in 1917 towards the end of World War I by Jacob Landau to transmit vital information about what was happening in Jewish communities around the world. It was originally called the Jewish Correspondence Bureau and, was the first news agency that gathered and also disseminated news around the globe.

JTA correspondents, since that date, have reported what they could confirm at the time, although some facts in their articles were later corrected through research. Events covered by the agency would never have been documented.

The JTA Jewish News Archive is a powerful reference tool that offers a perspective on current events and modern Jewish history that is not available anywhere else. With free access to nearly a century of reporting about global events affecting world Jewry, the Archive will not only serve as a rich resource for both the casually curious as well as students and scholars of modern Jewish history, it will also transform the way the next generation of Jewish leaders and activists learn about their heritage.

Until now, there has been no authoritative site that provides a comprehensive chronicle of modern Jewish history, as seen through the eyes of journalists. From the aftermath of World War I, to the rise of Nazi Germany, through the Holocaust, the creation of the modern State of Israel and right up to today, JTA journalists have been reporting on stories and issues affecting Jews around the globe. The JTA Jewish News Archive holds over a quarter-million articles They provide a unique lens through which to view world events that no other news organization provides.

Read the bulletins that were sent out during the Holocaust and see the information that was available, contrary to conventional wisdom that said Americans didn't know about that tragedy while it was happening.

The digital archive effort was spearheaded by Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna, who is also a JTA board member. He said that "The JTA Jewish News Archive has the potential to spark an interest in the past that will transform the future."

According to a JTA article, the nonprofit Digital Divide Data helped create the archive. The group serves Southeast Asian disadvantaged youth. Young Cambodians digitized the files.

The effort was also supported by the Gottesman Fund; The Righteous Persons Foundation; The Charles H. Revson Foundation; Elisa Spungen Bildner and Robert Bildner, in honor of Norma Spungen; George S. Blumenthal; and the Grace and Scott Offen Charitable Fund.

See a video about the archive here.

UK: British Library, FindMyPast to digitize 5 million pages

The British Library and findmypast.co.uk will digitize 5 million pages of family history records.

For the first time, India Office Records and 100 years of electoral registers will be online and fully searchable.

The British Library holds the national collection of electoral registers covering the whole UK. These registers offer a huge number of names, addresses and other genealogical information.

"Digitisation of the electoral registers will transform the work of people wishing to use them for family history research," said Jennie Grimshaw, the Library's curator for Social Policy and Official Publications. "Printed electoral registers are arranged by polling district within constituency and names are not indexed, so the process of finding an address to confirm names of residents is currently incredibly laborious. Digitisation represents a huge breakthrough as users will be able to search for names and addresses, thereby pinpointing the individuals and ancestors they're looking for."

The project will involve the scanning of UK electoral registers covering the century that followed the Reform Act of 1832, along with records of baptisms, marriages and burials drawn from the archives of the India Office. When available online, these collections will enable historians, genealogists and family history researchers to make connections and track down details of ancestors and others at the click of a mouse - work that would previously have necessitated visits to the Library's Reading Rooms and many hours of laborious manual searching.

Also included are holdings from the East India Company archives and the India Office. These 18th, 19th and 20th century records offer information on Britons living and working in the Indian sub-continent up to the 1948 independence. There are more than 1,000 volumes of ecclesiastical returns of births, marriages and burials; applications for civil and military service; and pension payment details.

The resources will be available online at findmypast.co.uk and in the Library's Reading Rooms from early 2012. Online requires a subscription or pay-as-you-go. Library access will be free and it will receive copies of the digitized images of this project.

For more information, click here.

Sweden: ArkivDigital offers free weekend access

Are you searching family that lived in Sweden?

That country will celebrate Genealogy Research Day on Saturday, March 19. Genealogical societies, archives and libraries will be hosting events many localities.

ArkivDigital and its online service - ADOnline2 - will be free this weekend on Saturday and Sunday.

According to a communication from ArkivDigital, "We hope that this offer also will help genealogical societies and archives to demonstrate what modern genealogical research is all about."

The site is the biggest private provider of Swedish church and historical records online. Some 500,000 images are added each month to the current 24 million images available. The digital color images are available via online subscriptions or as CDs.

There is a list of Swedish counties. Click on each county to see the parishes and volumes available.

Genealogists know that good digital images are as readable as the original register pages. While previous efforts were made to photograph the registers, ArkivDigital believes it was important to do it again, in color.

The site details the imaging (1948-1963) of records by the Mormon Church and recent changes in technology:

Future - digital photographs in color

During the 90's and 00's both SVAR and Genline digitalized many of the old microfilms. Many people think that the original books at the archives are as black, and in many cases, unreadable as those images sometimes are. Fortunately that is not the case. It is the copies that are black and hard to read because the technology in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s was not as advanced as today and the copies have been transferred several times since then, making the digital images copies of copies of copies. Since ArkivDigital photograph the old unique source material using modern technology the readability is far superior to the old images.

The site offers a good example of the old imaging (left) versus the new image (right):

Tracing the Tribe is sure that all of us have seen record images as difficult to read and wished that new projects would be undertaken to produce better images.

The procedure for obtaining free access this weekend is somewhat complicated, but check out the instructions here.  It involves installation of the ADOnLine2 program.

Do look at the ArkivDigital site if Swedish records are relevant to your research.

Morocco: Jewish documents to be digitalized

An Oregon anthropologist has received a grant to digitize Jewish Moroccan documents.

In Rabat, Morocco, on a 2005 Fulbright research grant, Lewis & Clark University assistant professor of anthropology Oren Kosansky worked with community leaders and discovered a genizah (photo left) - a room or depository found in synagogues, where old religious documents no longer needed are kept and then periodically buried.

Tracing the Tribe reminds readers that such collections are often rich resources for family information and provide details not available elsewhere, which will surely benefit genealogists and family history researchers looking for information on Jewish families in Rabat.

Kosansky has now won a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to develop a digital archive of Jewish Moroccan documents from the 18th-20th centuries. The online archive will enable open access to international researchers interested in North African Jewish culture and allow them to share ideas and information. The project will also offer a new model for intercultural and international collaboration in the creation of technological resources to share historical information.

What is a genizah and what may be found in one? The most famous of course, is the Cairo Genizah.

“In Judaic tradition, documents containing references to God are forbidden from being destroyed,” Kosansky explained. “Most obviously books and papers on religious topics such as the Torah are deemed sacred and treated in a ceremonious fashion, but any item with religious or legal references—such as a wedding announcement or business contract—would also be kept.

“In this case, I found literally thousands of books and documents pertaining to virtually all facets of Jewish life in Morocco, especially as it was transformed during the 20th century. My first thought was, ‘How can I save these materials from burial, so that they can be consulted by community members and scholars.’”

The Rabat community once had thousands of residents, but decreased to less than 100 following major emigration to Israel, France and elsewhere. The research materials remained in Rabat.

“Written materials are very important in Judaism,” Kosansky explained. “It is a very textual culture. These documents offer great insight into a culture and a community of people that once thrived here. They offer an opportunity to investigate elements of a society that has not been fully explored by those of us in the academic field. For the Jewish community, it represents something perhaps even more valuable—an opportunity to reflect on how their traditions have been shaped by modern life, colonialism, technological change, and global networks of migration, communication, and commerce.”

The community leaders allowed Kosansky to go through hundreds of sacks containing thousands of documents to determine which documents were appropriate for burial and which represented significant historical texts suitable for preservation. They gave him the documents for preservation and he donated them to the Jewish Museum in Casablanca. The collection includes handwritten letters, unpublished manuscripts, community records, as well as published materials in Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew and French.

The project raised questions on how to build such a specialized archive, and how to respect legal, ethical and social differences across societies:

“There are so many issues up for consideration,” Kosansky said. “For example, what, if any, are the copyright issues for such old documents? And what are the copyright laws in Morocco? Are their private documents we shouldn’t digitized out of respect for some individuals or the Jewish community? Who should be consulted on such ethical considerations?”

He will begin the project when he directs the university's first overseas program in Morocco in spring 2011. While there, he'll be locating experts in the US and in Morocco in digital archives, information access, intellectual property law and Jewish history to address the legal issues, begin digitization and build the website.

Read the complete article at the link above for more information.

Ancestry.com to acquire Swedish Genline.se

Ancestry.com announced today that it has agreed to acquire the leading Swedish family history website Genline.se, according to a GlobeNewsWire press release.

The offer of US$6.7 million was accepted by the Genline board of directors.

Genline has more than 17,000 paying members and 26 million digitized pages of Swedish church records from the 16th-20th centuries. In 2009, it reported income of US$2.4 million.

Genline also operates Familjeband.se, a web-based genealogy software and community for people interested in family, genealogy and local heritage, and Bygdeband, a social networking archive that enables local heritage societies to digitize their archives.

Chicago Tribune: Digitizing 130 years of photos

The venerable Chicago Tribune has begun digitally archiving its extensive photo library, which includes historic photos and negatives dating back to the 19th century. The original vintage archive photos will be available to collectors once re-archived in digital form.


There are 130 years of photographs - most never published - in the archive.

The paper is partnering with Image Fortress Corporation and Masterpiece Marketing Group, on the multi-year initiative, to provide the online digital archiving of these photographs, integration with the paper’s editorial and business systems and to market the photos.

Once digitally archived, the original vintage photos are now being sold to collectors and individuals worldwide who are interested in these unique, authenticated, historical collectibles. The revenue will support the program.

Thousands of photos are digitized each week and include Hollywood stars, musicians, singers, politics, space, places such as Chicago and New York, sports, transportation and military.

For more information, view the The Tribune Photo Archives website.

Historic Newspapers: 40 million pages to digitize

A partnership between the British Library and online publisher brightsolid will digitize some 40 million pages of historic newspapers over 10 years.

According to the press release, brightsolid (FindMyPast, AncestorsOnboard, Friends Reunited and GenesReunited) is taking on the project's commercial and technical risks, with no direct costs to the British Library.

Some important points from the press release:

-- The firm will digitize content from the British Library Newspaper Library, which it will then make available online via a subscription website to launch next year. It will be available for free to users onsite at the British Library.

-- The goal, according to the press release, is to build a ‘critical mass’ of material for researchers – particularly in the fields of family history and genealogy."

-- The project will include out-of-copyright material from the
newspaper archive – pre-1900 newspaper material – and the partnership will also seek to digitize in-copyright material, with the agreement of relevant rightsholders. This copyrighted material will, with the publishers' express permission, be made available on the planned website.

-- The Library’s newspaper hard-copy collections will be moved from the current building at Colindale to a purpose-built storage facility (£33m funding) in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire. Access to the collection will be via microfilm and digital copies at the Library’s main site at St Pancras from 2012. Read more here.

-- It will help the collection remain relevant for a new generation of researchers, who are more used to accessing information via laptops than travelling to a physical location.

Copies of scanned materials will be held in the library in perpetuity.

Parts of this resource will be available online for the first time. The Library's collection spans 350 years and includes 52,000 local, regional, national and international titles. Its Newspaper Library in North London is used by 30,000 researchers in many subjects, including family history and genealogy, and the resources are mostly hard copy and microfilm.

A minimum of 4 million pages will be digitized in the first two years.

The Library's Dame Lynne Brindley outlined how the partnership will transform access to this collection and added that the success of the 19th Century British Library Newspapers website demonstrated the public’s huge appetite for digitized historic newspaper content:

“Historic newspapers are an invaluable resource for historians, researchers, genealogists, students and many others, bringing past events and people to life with great immediacy and in rich detail. Mass digitisation unlocks the riches of our newspaper collections by making them available online to users across the UK and around the world; by making these pages fully searchable we will transform a research process which previously relied on scrolling through page after page of microfilm or print. brightsolid have an excellent track record of digitising archive materials and making them available to new audiences – I look forward to announcing the web service resulting from this partnership, which will launch and then steadily grow from next year.”

Digitized material will include extensive coverage of local, regional and national press across some 350 years, and will focus on specific geographic areas, along with periods such as the census years between 1841 and 1911. Other categories will be developed.

It will help the newspaper collection to remain relevant for a new generation of researchers, more used to accessing research information via their laptop than travelling to a physical location.”

Chris Paton's Scottish Ancestry has a five-minute video of the announcement.

Tracing the Tribe looks forward to more information on the planned new subscription website.

Newspapers: Southern Israelite Archive expands

Did you have family in Georgia, or across the South? Here's a newly-expanded resource that may provide information on your Southern Jewish heritage.

The Digital Library of Georgia and the Cuba Archives of the Breman Museum announced the expansion of the Southern Israelite Archive to more than 48,000 images..

The Southern Israelite Archive now includes issues 1959-1983, spanning 1929-1986.

The paper began as an August temple bulletin founded by Rabbi H. Cerf Straus in 1925. it became so popular that it became a monthly newspaper. It was sold and moved to Atlanta, circulated across the state and then throughout the South.
In October 1934, a four-page weekly edition began along with a monthly already-estblished magazine. , supplemented by its established monthly magazine edition. The monthly edition was discontinued in 1973 to concentrate on the growing weekly. In 1987, the Southern Israelite change its name to the Atlanta Jewish Times and published 32-page issues. Today owned by Jewish Renaissance Media, its readership is more than 25,000.

"Even in these earliest years, the paper not only covered the news of the southern Jewry, but also the issues that involved Jewish populations throughout the nation and world, including the Holocaust and later the creation of the Jewish state of Israel."

The Southern Israelite database is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia, a GALILEO initiative that shares Georgia's history and culture online. Digitization is made possible by the Cuba Archives of the Breman Museum and the generosity of the Srochi family of Atlanta.

Other newspaper archives available through the Digital Library of Georgia include the Atlanta Historic Newspapers Archive (1847-1922), the Macon Telegraph Archive (1826-1908), the Columbus Enquirer Archive (1828-1890), the Milledgeville Historic Newspaper Archive (1808-1920), and the Red and Black Archive (1893-2006). Access these archives here.

Judaica Europeana: Online access to 10 collections

A two-year project has been launched to digitize, for online access, Jewish culture collections at 10 European institutions.

The European Commission provided $2 million for Judaica Europeana's $4.13 million project, which will digitize 10,500 photos, 1,500 postcards and 7,150 recordings, along with several million pages from books, newspapers, archives and press clippings, from the project's partner libraries, archives and museums. It is part of a larger EC project to digitize general cultural resources.

The project will be headed by the European Association for Jewish Culture and the Judaica Collection of Frankfurt's Goethe University Library. Other partners are:

= European Association for Jewish Culture Judaica Collection, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Library, Frankfurt am Main
= Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris
= The Jewish Museum of Greece, Athens
= Hungarian Jewish Archives, Budapest
= Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, Rome
= Amitié, Bologna
= The Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw
= Jewish Museum London
= The British Library, London
= MAKASH Advancing CMC Applications in Education, Culture and Science
= The Central Zionist Archives at the World Zionist Organization
= Paris Yiddish Centre – Medem Library

Judaica Europeana (JE) will also work on other digital collections for comprehensive coverage of Jewish life in European cities.

An aim of the project is to demonstrate how the addition of Judaica content leads to improved use in discovery, delivery, and cultural heritage resource integration for multilingual multicultural use by scholars, cultural heritage professionals, educators and students, cultural tourists and the general public.

Upcoming Judaica Europeana (JE) Events:

15 March 2010, Berlin:
Digital Access to Jewish Heritage Collections: JE and MICHAEL
Portals
14 April 2010, Jerusalem:
JE Seminar, Israel Association of Judaica Librarians
21-23 April 2010, Florence:
JE: Applying Semantic Web Technologies to access European Jewish
Heritage
3 May 2010, Tel Aviv:
The European Digital Library: Europeana and JE
25-29 July 2010, Ravenna:
Judaica Partners presentations on urban Jewish studies and Judaica
collections
30 July 2010, University of Bologna, Ravenna Campus:
The JE Digital Humanities Workshop

For more information, see the website above.

Vatican: Secret WWII documents to go online

The World Jewish Congress reported that the Vatican will place online some previously secret WWII-era documents.

According to Zenit, the Catholic news agency, the Vatican will post online some documents from its archives.

The move came at the initiative of Pave the Way Foundation, a US -based group that promotes inter-religious dialogue and strives to defend wartime Pope Pius XII from allegations that he ignored Jewish suffering during the Holocaust.

Pave the Way offered to digitize some 5,125 descriptions and copies of documents from the closed section of the Vatican archives, ranging from the period of March 1939 to May 1945, ‘Zenit’ reported. These would then be posted on the websites of both the Vatican and Pave the Way.

The group's president Gary Krupp told Zenit that the documents had been "previously published and mostly ignored,” adding that their online publication was "not meant to be a substitute for the full access" to the Vatican archives, but would “show the unique efforts of Pope Pius XII and the dangers he was forced to operate under a direct threat from the Nazi regime."

Media reports, according to the WJC, said the documents would not include material directly related to Pius XII.

Holocaust: Wisconsin survivors speak

The Wisconsin Historical Society has posted interviews with Holocaust survivors who settled in that state.

Of some 140,000 survivors who came to the US, more than 1,000 settled in Wisconsin.

Six million European Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis and their allies during the 1930s and 1940s. As Nazi tyranny spread, millions of other people were also killed by the Third Reich.

Wisconsin Historical Society archivists interviewed 22 Holocaust survivors and two American witnesses between 1974 and 1981. These oral histories are now available digitally and in their entirety for the first time, uncensored and unfiltered.

The collection includes 156 hours of audio and 3,400 transcribed pages. Each interview is on a testimony page with a biography, summary of the interview, audio players for each tape side and download options for the audio, transcript and photographs. Each interview has been transcribed (available as a PDF). Each tape side produced some 10 transcript pages; full transcripts run from 30-190 pages.

As is the case in such projects, transcripts show gaps due to recording conditions and linguistic complexity, along with background noise, strong accents and lapses into native languages.

More than 15 different languages appear on the audiotapes. Footnotes and editorial insertions help identify place names, and translate German, Polish, Yiddish and other foreign expressions.

Each cassette tape was converted to mp3 digital format. Stream or download any tape side from the links in the Audio and Transcript Information section. Most mp3 files are about 15 MB (25 minutes). With a broadband connection, they will download in about 30 seconds at 64 kps.

Survivors donated more than 200 photographs available for viewing; most are post-war.

In these interviews, men and women recall Berlin during the rise of the Third Reich, Kristallnacht and other anti-Semitic violence, the Warsaw and Lodz ghettoes, and conditions at Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and other less-famous concentration camps.

They describe the fates of their families, starting life over again in postwar Europe, and emigrating to the U.S. and Israel. They also discuss being new American immigrants and life in Wisconsin's Jewish communities between 1945 and 1980.

The survivors lived across Europe: Poland, Greece, the Netherlands, Ukraine. Their families were middle-class, wealthy and working class; some were devoutly observant while others were secular. The youngest person interviewed was a toddler during this period, the oldest was in his 30s, while most were teens.

One American witness was a US Army captain who liberated concentration camps; the other was a United Nations administrator who helped resettle survivors.

Choose from 24 full testimonies or listen to brief excerpts.

Among the interviews:

-- A teenager's Gentile friends turn against him- Fred Platner
-- A rabbi recalls Kristallnacht in Berlin- Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky
-- Rescued from death's door at Bergen-Belsen- Magda Herzberger
-- A survivor's kindergartener comes home in tears- Cyla Stundel

There are activities and lesson plans for teachers and readers may learn more about the project.

There is an excellent caveat for teachers who may plan to use this material.

We have not censored or suppressed any survivor's recollections. Many interviews contain passages with vivid eyewitness descriptions of horrifying cruelty, which may not be suitable for younger readers and listeners.

Teachers and parents should understand that recollections of life in ghettoes and concentration camps could shock and frighten children who have never before imagined such brutality.

Hearing these anecdotes through the actual voice of the person who survived them can be very distressing, especially when the speaker becomes audibly upset.

If an oral history contains highly sensitive passages, we have noted it in the interview summary. It's possible that oral histories without a notice contain distressing information for some listeners.

Educators of older students may find interviews with sensitive content to be particularly effective teaching tools. Most speakers were teenagers when they lived through these terrible events. Teachers of younger students should personally review audio and transcript passages before introducing them to children.

This digital collection was created through the generous support of the Helen Bader Foundation of Milwaukee and private donors.

Thanks to Sally Jacobs, the Practical Archivist, for the tip to this resource. At her day job, she helped to create this free online digital collection.

Bad Arolsen: Post-war digitization complete

The International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany has completed the digitizing of documents on displaced persons and emigration after WWII.

See the press release at International Tracing Service (ITS).

“This part of the ITS archives has hardly been explored so far,” said Udo Jost, Head of the Archive Division. “It offers excellent insights into life after survival, as well as the wave of migration which resulted from the war.”

This week, ITS forwarded copies of the documents to its partner organisations in Israel, the US, Poland, Luxembourg and Belgium.

The documents provide information on the fate of those who were rescued from concentration camps, forced labour and, in some cases, war captivity. This inventory specifically comprises documents from German, Austrian, Italian and British camps for displaced persons, as well as emigration lists, files and dossiers from refugee organisations such as the UNHCR, and lists of Holocaust survivors compiled by Jewish organisations.

Among the preserved DP camp documents are 350,000 CM1 questionnaires issued by the Allies. The forms documented what the people had experienced and the reasons for their desire to emigrate.

The digitization of the entire inventory of post-war documents took 18 months and can be viewed and searched on-site in Bad Arolsen.

This week, ITS forwarded copies of some.3 million images of documents from refugee organisations and Austrian, Italian and British DP Camps to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC), the Institute of National Remembrance (Warsaw), the Documentation and Research Centre on the Resistance (Luxembourg) and the National Archives of Belgium (Brussels).

For more information, click here.

Ohio: Bravo to Bravo!

Attorney Kenneth A. Bravo is the new president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Cleveland.

A partner with Ulmer & Berne, he has extensive experience in both business litigation and white-collar criminal defense, holding a J.D. cum laude (Ohio State University Moritz College of Law) and BA (Rutgers University).

The nonprofit JGSC was formed in 1982 and is dedicated to encouraging local Jewish family history and genealogical research.

The society maintains a research library, encourages the collection of genealogical material and family histories, and its meetings are free and open to the public.

The society's next meeting (Sunday, February 7) will provide information on and a demonstration of the Cleveland Jewish News digitized collection, such as the Jewish Independent Obituary Index.

Click here to go to the Index search tool; read the notes to understand what is included in this index. Tracing the Tribe has previously reported on the CJN's digital archives and has a personal connection (TAYLOR/TALALAY) to the city.

For more information on the group and its future programs, click here.

Ohio: 18th century records online

More county documents are going online.

This time, Hamilton County, Ohio is in the news with its project putting documents - some back to 1791 - online.

The story detailed some 1.1 million Probate Court documents that will make research life easier for genealogists and historians.

To see the documents - including birth, death, marriage, estate, naturalization and other records - click here, then -> Records Search -> Archive Search.

Records and dates:

Estates 1791-1984
Wills 1791-1973
Trusts, 1791-1984
Guardianships, 1791-1984
Marriages, 1808-1983
Minister's Licenses, 1963-1975
Birth Records, 1863-1908
Birth Registrations/Corrections, 1941-1994
Death Records, 1881-1908
Naturalizations, 1856-1906
Probate Court Journal Entries, 1791-1837
Physician Certificates, 1919-1987

Some records are only for the index books (some are standard alphabetical, others only by first letter of last name), others require a search by volume or other methods.

The initiative is that of Probate Court Judge James Cissell. This isn't his first project using technology to preserve and make accessible public records.

In the 1990s, he was Clerk of Courts when that court created a Web site that made available online millions of pages of criminal and civil court cases and won national awards. Today, the site has further evolved, allowing access all the time to court documents, and also allows attorneys to electronically file suits and other documents.

Cissell, who took office in 2003, says the new site contains some of the oldest state records, such as birth, death, marriage, estate, naturalization and other records. Researchers may find anything from late-18th century guardianship records to personal moments of Hollywood stars, such as actor Spencer Tracy's marriage license.

"There are many, many folks who wish to trace their genealogy. By doing this, people will not have to come to our office in Cincinnati," Cissell said.

Prior to Cissell's new project, only records from 1983 were online. Cissell decided to preserve 1,600 books (each weighed 30 pounds) with 1.1 million pages by digitizing them and putting them online.

The Probate Court is partnering with the University of Cincinnati, which had stored some of the old records after fires. The court staff did all the work to place the documents online except for $95,000 for the digitization.

According to Cissell, the documents will also have to be stored on microfilm because that's the official way such records are to be kept.

"It's going both directions. By the time we're done with this, we may be the only court in the country that has all of the records in both formats, which, I think, is a hell of an accomplishment," Cissell said.

More than 10 million pages must be digitized and microfilmed. Cissell further added that it was necessary as "all that microfilm is wasting away," and that "we have 4,000 rolls of microfilm of records which are quickly disintegrating."

Tracing the Tribe did a cursory check for naturalizations and found more than 30 for COHEN and COHN in the very first register. If your immigrant ancestors spent time in Hamilton County, Ohio, you might find interesting information in these newly accessible documents.

For excellent details on how to work with this collection, view Diane Haddad's Genealogy Insider post.

Colorado: Three great January programs!

While most people might not think of Colorado as a hotbed of Jewish genealogy, Tracing the Tribe knows better.

Ellen Shindelman Kowitt and her colleagues in the Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado are doing a fantastic job in educating their community, organizing multi-session courses, and inviting experts to speak.

Three programs will take place during January.

-- Sunday, January 10, 9-11am
How to find naturalization records and why they are so useful for researching family history, with Joan Grady, PhD. There is no charge. Congregation Har HaShem, 3950 Baseline Road, Boulder.

Grady teaches several courses, including one on genealogy, at Arapahoe Community College's Adult Education division, has presented to local and national groups and her articles have appeared in genealogical magazines.

In addition to earning a PhD, MA, MLA and BA, she completed the BYU Certificate for genealogy with a special emphasis on the British Isles and is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists. She's been a public and private education teacher, principal and superintendent.

-- Thursday, January 14, 6.30pm
Digitized Documents: Footnote & Family Search Pilot, with Janice Prater. There is no charge. Congregation Emanuel, 51 Grape Street, Denver.

Come learn about the exciting research tools on Footnote and FamilySearch. Footnote enhances your genealogy research through the use of digitized documents from the National Archives and Library of Congress.

The FamilySearch Pilot Site is a focus of the LDS and Family History Library; thousands of volunteers are working world-wide to make indexes and digitized images available to researchers. As these records become available, genealogists will benefit from this ever-changing site with expanded search capabilities.

Prater is Colorado Genealogical Society past president and editor of British Connections, a publication of the International Society for British Genealogy and Family History. She has worked in the Denver Public Library's Western History/Genealogy Department for eight years, and now volunteers in the same department and archives.

Tracing the Tribe has previously written about Ellen's eight-session Jewish Family Tree Initiative: Workshop and Mentoring Series. Here's the information on the next session of this great course, which will take place at Temple Sinai, 3901 S. Glencoe Street, Denver.

-- Sunday, January 24, 9.30-11.45am
Maximizing the Internet to Jump Start Research: Jewish Resources Online.

Learn how to successfully navigate Internet resources for tracing Jewish family history. Get pointed in the right direction and jump start your research. This lecture will focus on resources that identify, index or explain specifically Jewish documents, gravestones and traditions; JewishGen, Holocaust Research, Jewish Archives in the U.S. and Israel, Blogs and more.

The lecture and workshop are part of the series supported by the Rose Community Foundation. Sessions are led by members of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado and developed to help people get started in Jewish family history research.

Each session includes an instructional lecture and a hands-on workshop to assist with the creation of family trees and historical research utilizing genealogical resources and techniques. Mentoring assistance outside of class will be available.

There is an $18 one-time fee for non-members to cover a book and materials; the course is free for JGSCO members. For those who have already attended one session and paid the fee, the other sessions are free. Attendance is not required for all eight sessions, so feel free to jump in to the sessions you want.

Questions on any of the JGSCO programs may be sent to Ellen. For more information, click on the Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado's site.

Pittsburgh: 125 city directories online!

Searching for relatives who lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? Here's a collection of 125 directories dated 1815-1945.

The directory collection is "Historic Pittsburgh City Directories," in the University of Pittsburgh's Digital Research Library. Thanks to ResearchBuzz for this head's-up.

Search parameters: simple keyword (even an occupation) or advanced search; author or title. Results show which city directories contain the keyword and a count of how many hits in that specific directory. Click on "results detail," learn more about the specific directory and see the lines that matched your search.

You can also explore the community for that directory. Click on "Table of Contents," and see that directory's contents, including maps and advertisements. Click on those items and link to other pages.

Save images of pages of interest with a mouse right-click. While ResearchBuzz noted the option to view the page as an image or PDF, it didn't seem to work properly.

While ResearchBuzz did sample searches for SMITH and "clockmaker," Tracing the Tribe used a surname (COHEN/COHN) and keywords that might be more useful to our readers.

Here's one of the useful titles for Tracing the Tribe's readers:

The Pittsburgh Jewish community book; comprising the names and addresses of members and the history of Jewish organizations, also a history of the Jewish community of Pittsburgh. Publication Info: Pittsburgh, Pa., Jewish criterion, [c1917]-

A general search for COHEN produced 98 hits in the following resources (adding COHN produced more):

-- Wiggins' directory of Greensburg and Westmoreland County for 1890-91 containing, in alphabetical order, the names, occupations and residences of the inhabitants of Greensburg, also of a list of the taxpayers in the township, giving the assessed value of real estate and personal property.

-- Harris' Pittsburgh business directory for the year 1837 : including the names of all the merchants, manufacturers, mechanics, professional, men of business of Pittsburgh and its vicinity.

-- 1920 The Pittsburgh social secretaire.

-- 1917 The Pittsburgh Jewish community book; comprising the names and addresses of members and the history of Jewish organizations, also a history of the Jewish community of Pittsburgh.

-- 1898 Directory of all business and professional men and official guide of Beaver County, Penn'a. : together with a complete map.

-- 1913-17 Directory of the philanthropic, charitable, and civic agencies of the city of Pittsburgh. Vol. 1

-- Directory of Pittsburgh and Allegheny cities, 1864-1865.

-- The Pittsburgh and Allegheny blue book, 1895, Vol. 9.

-- Pittsburgh Allegheny business directory, 1875-6 : containing a complete classified and alphabetically arranged list of the business houses of the cities and adjacent boroughs

-- 1878 A confidential business report of Pittsburgh and Allegheny.
Author: Business Men's Protective Association.

-- Directory of Homestead Borough, West Homestead Borough, Munhall Borough 1902

-- Directory of Pittsburgh and Allegheny cities ... 1861-2 through 1895 (not a complete series)

-- 1850 The Pennsylvania business state directory: containing the names of professional men, mercantile firms, and manufacturing establishments, together with all the courts, post offices, public institutions, banks, corporations, companies, hotels, associations, & c. & c., throughtout the state, also the principal firms of the city of Cincinnatti, Ohio, and Baltimore, Maryland ;

-- 1854-5 Ulman's Pennsylvania business directory and eastern, western, and southern circular : for the year 1854-5,

-- c1880 Watson & Co.'s classified business directory of Pittsburgh, Allegheny, and prominent towns within a radius of forty miles.

Hits for COHEN ranged from one (and also a COHN) in the 1861-62 Pittsburgh and Allegheny City Director, page 55:

There were 17 hits for COHEN (and a few COHN) on several pages in the 1869-70 book. On page 101, see:

Scrolling through more recent books, numbers rise with the growth of the Jewish community in the city and surrounding areas.

On the Historic Pittsburgh site, there are top tabs for Full Text, Maps, Images, Finding Aids, Census, Chronology and the HSWP Catalog. Under Images, find more than 13,000 historic photographs in 44 collections, including the recently added 27-image Hebrew Institute Collection (1915-1970).

Read more here.

Illinois: Digitizing the records

The availability of digitized records spurs interest in genealogy research.

More people, regardless of where they live, will be able to access more records and find the information required to advance their family's history.

In Pekin, Illinois, a project is making general research easier for Tazewell and Mason counties.

This week, Tazewell County Genealogical & Historical Society member Carol Hiller finished scanning in the last pages of two large history texts and converting them to CDs: “The History of Tazewell County, 1879” and “A Portrait and Biographical Record of Tazewell and Mason Counties, Illinois, 1894.”

Both books, which are 794 pages and 712 pages respectively, are now available on CDs, which the Genealogical Society is selling to any history buff who fancies one — or anyone who knows a history buff who would fancy one.

Both digitized books are searchable by name and are in PDF format, which can be read by the commonly used program Adobe Reader, Hiller said.

The article, by Tara Mattimoe, covers the advantages of such projects, covering the cost of reprints versus inexpensive scanning to CDs. With budget problems facing many groups, the for-sale CDs ($20 each) are expected to bring in needed funds.

The books offer personal accounts and memories, biographies, drawings, geographic features, houses and settlements, soldiers and more.

It took several months to scan the books and convert them to PDF format.

The project could be replicated by other societies using rare materials from their own libraries.

Read the complete story for more details.