Jewish Ancestors from Eastern Europe: Town Names, Border Changes and JewishGen
How to find your Jewish ancestors' town when maps and names have changed, and the records and research communities, from JewishGen to Yizkor books, that make Eastern European Jewish research possible.
Millions of American Jews descend from immigrants who came from the Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary and Romania between the 1880s and the 1920s. Many families assume nothing survives: the towns were destroyed, the records were lost, the names were changed. In fact, a remarkable amount survives, and a large, generous research community has indexed much of it.
Step 1: Find the town
Everything starts with the shtetl or town. Look in American records:
- Naturalization papers, especially after 1906 (see Naturalization Records)
- Passenger lists, which from 1907 give the last residence and a relative left behind (see Passenger Lists)
- Gravestones, and especially landsmanshaft burial plots: immigrant mutual aid societies organized by hometown often bought cemetery sections. The society's name usually names the town.
- World War I draft cards and SS-5 Social Security applications
- Family letters, photographs and stories
Step 2: Identify the town on the map
Town names were recorded in Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, Ukrainian, Hungarian or Romanian, and borders changed repeatedly. A town your family called "Russia" may now be in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus or Ukraine. "Austria" often meant Galicia, now divided between Poland and Ukraine.
Use JewishGen's Gazetteer and Communities Database to search by sounds-like spelling and find the town's names in different languages, its modern country, and the districts it belonged to over time. That tells you which archives hold its records.
Step 3: JewishGen and other research groups
JewishGen, a free nonprofit site affiliated with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, is the center of Jewish genealogy. It offers:
- Databases of indexed records from many countries
- The Family Finder, where researchers list the surnames and towns they're researching
- KehilaLinks, pages for individual towns
- Research divisions for specific regions
Regional groups have indexed millions of records, including JRI-Poland (Jewish Records Indexing–Poland) for Poland and Gesher Galicia for Galicia.
Records in Europe
- Metrical books: in the Russian Empire, births, marriages and deaths of Jews were recorded by government-appointed rabbis. Many survive in regional archives, and many are indexed.
- Revision lists and censuses: the Russian Empire's revision lists recorded households for taxation, and can show several generations of a family.
- Civil-religious records in Congress Poland and Galicia
- Business directories, voter lists and tax records
Surnames came late
Many Eastern European Jews didn't use fixed surnames until laws required them, from the late 1700s into the early 1800s, depending on the country. Before that, people were known by patronymics (son of, daughter of). Jewish gravestones still give the person's Hebrew name and their father's name ("ben" or "bat"), which can extend your tree a generation.
Naming customs
Ashkenazi Jews traditionally named children after deceased relatives, not living ones, often with the same Hebrew name but a different Yiddish or English name. A child named for a grandparent tells you that grandparent had died by the birth. See Nicknames and Naming Patterns.
Yizkor books
After the Holocaust, survivors from hundreds of towns wrote Yizkor (memorial) books, describing their community's history, people and destruction. Many have been translated, at least in part, through JewishGen's Yizkor Book Project, and many are digitized by the New York Public Library and other institutions.
Holocaust records
For relatives who remained in Europe, the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names includes Pages of Testimony submitted by family members, often naming parents and spouses. The Arolsen Archives hold records of victims and survivors of Nazi persecution, much of it searchable online. These records can be painful, but they also preserve names that would otherwise be lost.
DNA and endogamy
Ashkenazi Jews descend from a relatively small population with many marriages within the community over centuries (endogamy). As a result, Ashkenazi testers share DNA with many distant cousins, and shared cM amounts look higher than the actual relationship. Focus on your closest matches and on large shared segments. See Shared cM Explained.