Wisdom Wednesday: UK Jewish Records – Part Two

Luckily a place to start looking for online UK Jewish Records is the same site you have been using for your North American research. The massive site called jewishgen provides two ways to get to the same search screen to do a name search for an ancestor.  The first, www.jewishgen.org/database/uk, opens a screen whose heading says JCR-UK (Jewish Community Records-UK). Below are two data lists; one headed Jewishgen UK Data Base and the other called Jewish Genealogy Society of Great Britain.  From this page you can enter a name to search in all the databases listed.  “The combined databases contain more than 220,000 records referring to individuals in the United Kingdom — England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and Gibraltar, as well as the Republic of Ireland.” (Source: www.jewishgen.org, accessed 10 Oct 2012.) The second way to get to this search screen is www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk. You are first taken to a home screen and need to click ‘search the database.’

Other parts of jewishgen are its family finder (JGFF) and Family Tree of the Jewish People which can be found at www.jewishgen.org/jgff and www.jewishgen.org/gedcom respectively. Family Finder is a list of surnames and towns around the world being researched by almost 50,000 genealogists. You can search for someone else’s research on your family or add your research to the Family Tree portion of the site. 

The International Association of Jewish Genealogy Societies is heading up a cemetery project which has over 400,000 names in 22,000 cemeteries worldwide that you can find at www.iajgsjewishcemeteryproject.org.

The Jewish Genealogy Society of Great Britain offers other services besides their databases on jewishgen. Their home site is www.jgsgb.org where you will find membership information, regional Jewish genealogy groups to consult and publications to order. Their journal is called Shemot.

There is a site that specializes in UK Ashkenazi records, www.synagoguescribes.com.  “Synagogue Scribes offers a unique and fully searchable database of London Ashkenazi Synagogue records, with the emphasis on pre UK civil registration, which began on 1st July 1837.”

The Jewish Chronicle published since the 1840s has back issues at www.thejc.com. It has all the usual genealogical content: births, bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, and obituaries. On the home page scroll down, until you find ‘our 170-year archive’ near the right side. Unfortunately, you can search once free and then you must subscribe to the print version. Since postal costs usually make me wary of subscribing to UK publications, you may want to explore this option more than I did. Perhaps they would be willing to give you access without mailing paper copies of the present day newspaper to you, saving you the postage costs.

©2012, Susan Lewis Well