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Join a GDL Research Group
The Grand Duchy Project is in different stages for different areas of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth. Our first goal, to complete the acquisition the 1784 GDL census for areas which are today's Belarus, Lithuania, Eastern Poland and Northernmost Ukraine has been accomplished. We now have more than 2000 pages of documents, including more than 100,000 names. We also have 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, and simultaneously acquiring the 1765 census for the GDL. During 2005-2006 we will also focus on acquisition of the 18th century Kingdom of Poland records, primarily in collaboration with existing research groups.
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. If you have an established group for any of the additional areas of the Kingdom of Poland, please contact us about records acquisition.
Since these lists are in Old Polish, written in the Latin alphabet, most of the names are recognizable, and skilled volunteers can transliterate most of the documents. All work is checked by other volunteers. Lists which are difficult to read are beyond the scope of most volunteers. Every list provides additional information in Old Polish: the names of 18th century kahals, 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. Translation of this material must be done by professional translators, familiar not only with Old Polish, but also with Yiddish names, and with the terminology and archaic vocabulary of the day. Many important descriptive words, including those for occupations, have significantly changed over the centuries or been lost altogether.
Research groups are being formed to raise funds for the acquisition and translation of these records for a searchable database on our website. Based on two years' experience in transliterating and translating a wide variety of GDL census records, we will be able to estimate the costs for each kahal.
Costs will depend on a number of factors:
1) The size of kahals;
2) The quality of the documents;
3) The amount of information varies from excellent records including names of heads of households, patronymics, 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 town, but many families living individually in separate karchmas (taverns and inns). Identifying these very small places (usually home to a single Jewish family) and matching them with modern place names can be as difficult as transliterating the names of people.
5) The acquisition cost, usually based on the number of pages in a kahal.
Each Kahal Project will consist of GDL census records for an entire kahal and usually its surrounding sub-kahals, villages and taverns. For example, a group would receive the census records for the Raseiniai Kahal which 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. For the GDL there will be about 300 research groups. We will pool your funds with others interested in the same kahal (including the towns and taverns). 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.
The kahal lists will be distributed as e-mail attachments to donors of $100 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 the 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 spreadsheets. These donations will not come close to the actual 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 also help by contacting other researchers or potential transliterators/translators who are also interested in a your kahal.
Y Once funding is complete, and translation is underway, individual donors will be given assistance in researching our GDL records to find their families, prior to Kahal Project completion and records distribution. Y
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 taverns and inns are being added to the inventory of towns. So it will continue to grow; your town may not yet appear; what was a tavern at a crossroads in 1784 later became a town of considerable size. Please contact us to request further information about your town.
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.
If you want to volunteer to transliterate or translate Old Polish or Hebrew signatures for a town or kahal, Contact Us. If you want to make a Research Group contribution (of $100 or any amount to support specific projects) see the Make a Donation Page.