New Jewish Family History Collection on Ancestry.com

Today Ancestry.com introduced the world’s largest online collection of Jewish family history records, with more than 26 million records documenting Jewish life. Ancestry.com has partnered with two leading organizations committed to the preservation of Jewish heritage – JewishGen, an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City that maintains the world’s premier Jewish genealogy website, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), an overseas humanitarian aid organization committed to providing relief for Jews in more than 70 countries.

These partnerships will make millions of important Jewish historical documents available on Ancestry.com, including photographs, immigration records, Holocaust records, maps memorials, and more. All records from the JDC and JewishGen included in this release are searchable for free on Ancestry.com. Two collections from the JDC are available for the first time online on Ancestry.com, including:

• Jewish Transmigration Bureau Deposit Cards, 1939-1954, a collection of records showing the amount of money paid by American Jewish citizens to support the emigration of friends and relatives from European countries during and after WWII.
• Munich, Vienna and Barcelona Jewish Displaced Persons and Refugee Cards, 1943-1959, a collection containing records of displaced Jews who were provided with food, medical care and clothing and emigration assistance by the JDC.

Above: Sample Displaced Person and Refugee Card from JDC 

More than 300 databases from JewishGen will also now be available on Ancestry.com. These JewishGen databases represent 14 different countries and contain more than 5 million records, such as:

• The JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry, an invaluable collection with more than 1 million names of Jews represented in nearly 2,000 Jewish cemeteries around the world.
• Yizkor Book Necrologies, a list of the names of those murdered in the Holocaust which directs users back to the Yizkor Books themselves – memorials which offer vivid, first-hand accounts of the Holocaust and its aftermath.
• The Given Names Database, which enables one to learn possible European, Hebrew and Yiddish translations of an ancestor’s given name.
  A Holocaust Database of 2 million names such as Schindler’s List, which includes names of 1,980 inmates in Oscar Schindler’s factories in Plaszów, Poland and Brunnlitz, Czechoslovakia..
• Jewish Records Indexing (JRI-PL) Poland and All Lithuania Database, representing more than 2 million indexed names from databases in Lithuania and Poland containing vital information on the regions.

To search these collections and other records documenting Jewish life on Ancestry.com, visit http://www.ancestry.com/JewishFamilyHistory.