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Participate in the Grand Duchy Project
The first stage of the Grand Duchy Project is to complete the acquisition and translation of the 1784 GDL census for areas which are today's Belarus, Lithuania, Eastern Poland and Northernmost Ukraine. There are more than 2000 pages of documents, including over 110,000 names. We have also acquired many 1765 GDL lists and some other kinds of Jewish censuses going back in time to 1600.
We are now translating these records for our online database. Research groups are being formed to raise funds for the acquisition and translation of these records. If you are a coordinator for an existing research group for towns in Belarus, Eastern Poland, Lithuania or the most northern part of Ukraine, please contact us.
Since these lists are in Old Polish, written in the Latin alphabet, most of the names are recognizable, and skilled volunteers can transliterate some of the documents. All work is checked by other volunteers. Lists which are difficult to read and beyond the scope of most volunteers are translated by professional translators, who are familiar with Old Polish, Yiddish names, and with the terminology and archaic vocabulary of the day.
Every list provides additional information, such as the names of 18th century towns, taverns and villages. Many lists provide information about the landowners, including noble families and Magnates, whose collected papers are often very useful sources of additional important information about Jewish families and communities.
Cost estimates for kahal translation projects depend on a number of factors:
1) The size of kahal, number of people listed, and number of pages.
2) The quality of the documents.
3) The amount of information, which varies from excellent records, including given names and patronymics of heads of households, names of wives and children, lodgers, and hired help, occupations, who owned the house or property, to much poorer records, providing only a simple list of heads of households with a total number of people in the kahal.
4) Often there are only a few residents in the main town, but many families living in small villages, often in karchmas (taverns and inns). Identifying these very small villages (usually home to a single Jewish family) and matching them with modern place names can be as difficult as transliterating the names of people.
Each Kahal project will consist of GDL census records for an entire kahal - one or more town and surrounding sub-kahals, villages and taverns. For example, the records for the Raseiniai Kahal includes the nearby towns of Erzvilkas, Girkalnis, Lyduvenai, Nemaksciai, Siluva, and Vidukle.
We will soon begin posting funding targets next to town names on the Alphabetical List of Towns. There will be about 300 research groups. We will pool your funds with others interested in the same kahal. As funds are donated we'll show these growing totals, until a project has been fully funded. When each project has been fully funded, translations will be completed. Now we are providing a list of current kahal projects and their funding status on the Status of Current Projects page.
The kahal lists will be distributed as e-mail attachments to donors of $100 or to donors who fully fund a project, when each Kahal Project has been completed. You will receive this data at least a few months before it is put into our online database and before it is shared with JewishGen and linked to shtetl research groups and SIGs. You will benefit not only from having the data earlier, but the Excel format will enable you to sort and search in ways not possible in a database, thus much more useful for your study.
The minimum $100 donations will entitle you to the Excel spreadsheet for a Kahal Project, and additional donations of $75 will entitle you to an additional kahal translation. These donations may not come close to the total costs for kahal projects. So please consult the actual target cost and possibly additional kahal projects you want to support before deciding the amount you want to donate.
Volunteer kahal coordinators are essential to the success of this project, mainly by finding other interested researchers to share costs. Where volunteers help to reduce costs, this will enable faster completion and dissemination to donors. So you can help by contacting other researchers or potential transliterators who are also interested in a your kahal. All Jewish Family History Foundation staff are volunteers and our overhead is relatively minimal, so nearly all of your donations go to acquisition and translation of records.
Please refer to the 1784 GDL Project District and Town list. Towns/shtetls/kahals are listed under 18th Century Districts and there is also a very comprehensive alphabetical list of all towns. Remember that many documents are being translated, and in this process, new kahals, sub-kahals and smaller villages are being added to the inventory of towns. Please contact us to request further information about your town.
To check the funding goals and status of current, ongoing kahal projects: Status of Current Projects. Be sure to contact us for the cost of kahal projects that are not listed on the Status of Current Projects page.
If you want to volunteer to transliterate or translate Old Polish or Hebrew signatures for a town or kahal, or if you can organize a group of contributors, please Contact Us.
If you want to make a contribution (of $100 or any amount to support specific projects) go to: make a contribution.