Developing the plan....

Why do we need a plan? That almost sounds like a silly question. Making a plan helps people to put in their viewpoint and gains commitment to what comes out of the process. It means we have priorities for our work and we have clear ideas of goals and outcomes. We haven't a plan right now.

My idea for making our plan is to work on two main levels:
- a district wide level; and
- a shtetl level.

The district wide level will focus on the translation of the district revision lists. We'll need to gain some feel for the numbers and types of records included there and then identify priorities.

The shtetl level plans will look at what's been translated for each shtetl, what's untranslated and taking account of the probable number of interested researchers we can set priorities for each shtetl.

For some shtetls there may be no records to translate. In those cases there are two main areas of possible translation activity: the district level records, and yizkor books - many of which have not been translated for the district's shtetls.

At the same time there is scope for other activity that should be useful:

1. Shtetl family trees - Steve Bloom has posted on this subject for Salakas.

2. Emigration studies - where did people go and when. This may help with ideas for developing your research as people from the same shtetl often went to the same place.

3. Creation of shtetlinks - websites for each of the shtetls - to bring together yizkor book material, trip reports, photos, family trees and anything else that's relevant.

So in the end we can create a priority list for each shtetl for all this possible activity over the next few years.

Let's hear from you, please!

Records translated and available: first step to a plan

We have constructed a complete list of all records for the district. This includes all records on the terrific www.rtrfoundation.org website and those we already knew about.

This exercise threw up some interesting results.

There are a stack of district wide records which have not been translated - these range from an 1811 census for Braslav Uyezd, through1837 and 1864/71 censuses for the NovoAlexandrovsk Uyezd and more recent records. Some will overlap with shtetl level records, but some of the dates suggest previously unsuspected resources. A list is at the links on the left hand side of the blog or at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddtjn9x2_5ck6z52 .

For many shtetls there are lists that will be essential to proving connections between isonomic groups (I hope I just made that up: families of the same name) that remain untranslated. All the lists are sorted by shtetl at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddtjn9x2_6fk4t6q and you'll see what's on the ALD and what's not.

The last major group of records for research are vital records (births, marriages, deaths and divorces). These are primarily the territory of the VRT project - but in the district only Suvanaiskis is so far included in that effort. The extant records are listed here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddtjn9x2_2d9czd6 . These are mainly early 20th century records that can have a lot of interesting information.

Why is this the first step to a plan? because we now know the lie of the land. I ask researchers to contact me to indicate which records they think should be the priority for their shtetl.