Some statistics: mortality in reverse

A warning to readers: this is a somewhat morbid discussion. I guess a consultancy at a life insurance company in 2006 has left its mark.

I recently was given a database of deaths containing about 500 deaths covering a district for 17 years in the 1920/30s. I found 2 people on the list who were from one family I'm researching. Only 2 people for an area that included that family's home shtetl! What was going on? Could I extract any more information from the database?

The average age of death was about 65 (excluding deaths over infants less than 12 months old). This means the overall annual death rate should be about the reciprocal of this: about 1.5% annually. This is a fairly crude basis: any actuary interested should let me know how this ought to be done.

Over 17 years this means that 25.5% of adults might be expected to die. So for any number of deaths the one might expect that they come from a group that is about 4 times that number. So 2 deaths in a family means that the size of the family should be about 8.

But this is only a statistical expectation, the real number could be higher (the family were healthy/wealthy) or lower (the family were poorly/poor). There is a strong correlation between wealth and mortality. What could be the range be? Statisticians use confidence intervals to define a range of likely results. I determined a 90% confidence range, using a roundabout method. I concluded that 2 deaths might mean between 2 and about 22 in the family.

I then looked at the numbers for other numbers of deaths over 17 years using the same overall death rate. My estimates are below [sorry about the layout]:

No of deaths .....Expected family size ....Lower limit ........Upper limit

5 ........................20 ....................9 ..................36
10 .......................39 ...................25 ..................58
20....................... 78................... 61.................. 98


Is this useful information? It told me at least that with high probability very few people in the target family had stayed in the home shtetl over this period - probably around 8 and almost certainly fewer than 22. This suggests that my failure to find significant numbers of people from this family in the home district in the interwar period and in Holocaust records (compared to the hundreds elsewhere at the time) is not a result of poor research technique - almost everyone had gone.

If anyone can suggest a better actuarial approach to this problem, please let me know.

New grand total for 2007

I've just received news of more donations for December 2007. The total for the year is now US$4,604 - a grand total.

Thanks for everyone's help!

Happy new year!

Forward to 2008!

2008, as I write, looms on the horizon. But the looming doesn't carry menace, but promise. Some of the promise is no more than hope - will we succeed in bringing in significant funding?

But some of the promise is guaranteed. There are a number of translation projects in the works - thanks to specific, generous donations this year - in particular for Salakas and Tauragnai - that will be completed in 2008. When we know how these cost out we will select further translation projects - and I do need group members to tell me what their priorities are.

I thank everyone who has contributed this year and who has helped make this a standout year.

I list below the donations to LitvakSIG for each year from 1999 that have been specified to Zarasai district. All figures are in US$.

1999....................228.00
2000................1,358.00
2001.................1,600.00
2002 ...............1,000.00
2003...................304.00
2004....................371.00
2005....................136.00
2006....................139.00
2007................4,054.00

This year's scale of donations means that we can make real progress. Please help keep this momentum going. If you haven't already, please think about a major donation - from yourself, from your family or from someone else who might be persuaded to contribute.

Ensuring the project's future

The Group has supported Zarasai district research over more than 8 years. Over US$5,000 has been raised by the group and, with general LitvakSIG funds, about US$12,000 spent on many thousands of records over the past 10 years. This has been fantastic work by a number of district and research co-ordinators.

We have gone away and looked at what remains to be done. There are probably more than 25,000 records still to translate for the District. Knowing current costs and estimating future costs, this will probably cost more than US$20,000. At current donation rates, it would take many years, and not before 2020, to gather this. I don't want to wait that long. I'm hoping you share this feeling.

I am therefore today starting a more active search for donors - including those at the US$100 level - but particularly for larger donors. The objective is to have the funds in hand within the year to be 100% confident that we can achieve the goal of 100% translation of Russian Imperial records for the District and its shtetls within a reasonable time. With help from Olga Zabludoff, Maria Krane and Linda Cantor, I have prepared a short presentation about the project. This is available as a pdf file.

I now need more help - and this is from you. I'm not asking you for the money (although if you want...), but for help in getting our message out to people who might be able to help. There are a number of ways this might be made to happen, that could include talking with:

(1) Individuals or charitable foundations that you know and who might be open to help.

(2) Individuals in your own families. I'm approaching the more successful members of my clan. Some of them have been thrilled to be brought into contact with long lost and never known cousins and are positive about helping.

(3) Your family as a group. Bringing together many small donations - perhaps in honour of a founding father or mother - has the potential to add up to a decent amount. I'm hoping that if even a small proportion of the 1,000+ people in my clan might be induced to give US$10 each, then that could be US1,000 raised.

The pdf presentation is the basic tool. It needs to be moved out to where it might do some good. Ask me for a copy.

It's easy for any one to donate http://www.jewishgen.org/Litvak/HTML/donate.htm for credit cards and http://www.jewishgen.org/Litvak/HTML/donor.htm is the form for a mail in donation.

Please use me as a resource; to talk with people, to answer questions, to persuade and to let me know how things are going: are there problems with the presentation? or the message? how could this be done better?

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me. If you have any other ideas for how we might achieve our goal, please let me know. If you can suggest other people I should be mailing, tell me. And if you find someone who might give a very, very big amount: we can use it - LitvakSIG has a range of projects that need support.

Remember: our work as a Group is all about delivering "the gift of the past for the Jewish family of the future". Please help me make this

Unlisted records

The CD-ROM for "Avotaynu" is an interesting source for information of all kinds. Searching through it recently I came across two articles by researcher Yakov Shadevich from 1995 and 1996.

The 1996 article lists Revision Lists in the Vilnius archive. Now the surprising thing about this is that these Revision Lists are not in our database of records and they're not in the rtrfoundation listing.

Those for district shtetls is as follows:

Antaliepte 1882
Breslauja (Braslav) 1816–27, 1871, 1874
Breslauja-Slabada 1816–27
Dubinovo (Dubene) 1816–27
Dusetos (Dusiat) 1870–71, 1883
Kamajai 1871, 1875–76
Pandelys (Ponedel) 1871
Papile 1858, 1865
Rokiskis 1871
Salakas (Salok) 1816–27, 1848, 1858, 1860, 1871, 1872–75, 1880
Tauragnai (Targin) 1816–27
Vydziai 1816–27, 1871, 1882
Zarasai 1816–27, 1863–64, 1883

For some of the shtetls - Papilys, for example - these records are not matched by anything we had databased and represent a wonderful research opportunity.

The 1816-27 records may provide the vital link to the 1784 Grand Duchy census.

I'll write about Mr Shadevich's other article in due course....

"Order, order"

The Speaker of the British Parliament traditionally intones "order, order" to open business. We say "order, order" when we have donations that allow us to place orders for new translations.

Thanks in particular to Maria Krane we are moving ahead with our first 2007 orders.

The tiny shtetl of Tauragnai has few records, so we're aiming to get them all. Interestingly one set of records from 1880 is a list of "Jews transferred from Salakas". There is also a similar list for 1875 for Antaliepte. There are no similar lists for other shtetls. What happened in Salakas to cause enough movement for special lists of this type?

Salakas researchers can look forward to the 1876 Salakas family list - to fill in the long gap between the 1845 and 1887 lists - and the 1901 Real Estate Owners list with a town plan. The plan could be quite exciting. There are also Real Estate Owner lists for Drysviaty, Pandelys and Rimse.

We have some money in hand for further projects - and I'd like your nominations of what to go for next!

Thoughts from the weekend

At the weekend I helped out at the JGSGB stand at the "Who do you think you are live" show at Olympia in London: Britain's biggest ever genealogical event. It was exhausting, but interesting and fun. One of the features at the show was celebrities being interviewed about their families (the BBC has a series that researches celeb's families).

I caught the end of one interview with a Jewish television personality - who said that his family had left Latvia because of "the pogroms". No, they didn't. (By the way, we know that his father's side immigrated to the UK from Latvia in 1893 and his mother's family arrived in the 1930s from, I guess, Germany).

Why is there this common misconception? and why did about 2 million Jews leave Russia between 1880 and 1914?

I think this idea gained currency for a number of reasons.

1. Coincidence of timing: The emigration accelerated after 1881. The most famous wave of pogroms in south Russia (Ukraine primarily) started in 1881.
2. 1930s emigrants: German/Austrian Jewish emigration in the 1930s definitely was motivated by antisemitic activity (eg Kristallnacht also called Pogromnacht).
3. Emotional simplicity: "Zadie, why did you come to America?" "Because of the Cossacks and the Pogroms."

But if the Cossacks and the Pogroms were so awful how come there were still about 4 million Jews in the Pale in 1914. Why didn't everyone leave? The only reasonable answer is that things were sometimes very, very bad, but only for very, very few (as made clear by Bartal in The Jews of Eastern Europe 1772-1881 at page 146). So why did our families leave?

I'm sure that someone somewhere has researched this thoroughly, and please, someone let me know what I should be reading on this.

I identify three types of cause for the emigration: push, pull and technical.

Push causes

1. Population growth was remarkable. The Jewish population in the Russian empire through the 19th century rose from 1.6 million in 1820, to 2.4 million in 1850 and reached 4 million by 1880. The marginal nature of the economy in the northern guberniya meant that there must have been problems supporting the population.
2. Periodic famines every 10-12 years would have become more problematic with urbanisation. 1868-1869 saw crop failures across the Baltic region from Finland down through Kovno and Vilna Guberniyas.
3. Economic stress was enhanced at the bottom end of the economy by the freedom of the serfs in 1861 which created new competition in many areas of Jewish activity and by continuing restrictions on education limiting Jewish access to the professions.
4. Government policy to Jews including economic restrictions introduced as "temporary rules" in 1882 (including as one element tacit support for pogroms).

Pull causes

1. Economic opportunity in the capitalist, industrialising nations (US, Canada, UK, South America) and in South Africa (diamond rush from 1871 and a gold rush from 1886).
2. Religious toleration in the West.

Technical causes

1. The so-called "second Industrial revolution" started in about 1850. New railways allowed easy movement around Europe - the first train arrived at Vilna in 1860. Screw propeller steam ships were developed - from about 1870 this allowed reliable, cheap transocean sea travel.
2. Development of the money economy in Russia and savings and credit institutions which allowed potential emigrant families to find the cash to send one pioneer to the West.

In summary: there were reasons to go, places to go to and the means to get there. The pogroms may have helped create a mood where the movement happened sooner rather than later, but they were not what it was all about.

What does your family history tell us about this?