Where are the Records and What are the Records

Before you begin to try and find your family in online or through archived records on microfilm or in the original overseas archive

  1. Create an hourglass tree starting with the immigrant generation

  2. Choose your search the records town and dates your family lived in that town.

    • Our search town is Bobruisk

    • Round out the years that your family might have lived in Bobruisk according to your hourglass tree.

  3. Go to Routes to Roots Foundation and search archives for Bobruisk. Always click D-M soundex.

    RTR search box

    Here are the results:

    RTR search results

    These are the choices for the D-M search.

    Start with Bobruysk Uezd. By clicking on it you get a choice of records:

    RTR search results for Bobruysk Uezd

    Click on Census; note that the records for Bobruysk Uezd are in the NATIONAL HISTORICAL ARCHIVES OF BELARUS IN MINSK.

    RTR census results

    You can click on the archives for the address and email contacts. Note the years available to see if your family was living in Bobruisk at the time the records were collected. For later reference make a note of the Fond numbers in case you are looking for online transcriptions of these records or microfilms in the Family History Library catalog.

  4. To read more about Russian Revision Lists (PDF)

  5. To find what is online for Bobruisk, ask Google

  6. Most records that have been bought, donated, translated and transcribed are on the Belarus SIG. Here you can search by town or by surname or both. On the Belarus SIG there are the old records of under 1000 names in what is called the Belarus Static lists. Then there is the JewishGen Belarus Database.

    The Belarus SIG is an example of a very old SIG website where the information is hidden and takes a great deal of searching to find. The easiest way to find it is by using Google to search JewishGen.

    • search string: Jewishgen: Bobruisk (this brings up 22 Google search pages)

    • search string: Jewishgen: LDS films Bobruisk

    • search sting: Jewishgen: border changes Bobruisk (if you’re wondering about who rules Belarus and how it affected the movements of your family)

  7. JewishGen Belarus Database and its component databases.

    JewishGen counts on volunteers to find, purchase and translate records. Not all databases are the same. The description of each database is given preceding the spreadsheets that compose the data base entries.

    JewishGen Belarus database search form

    When you send in your search the results comeback with these headings

    JewishGen Belarus database components

    Notice that not all of these are primary records (translations from an archives). But once you have asked for Bobruisk and Minsk all your Component database results will be for that place.

    Digging deeper you will find that one of the Belarus SIG projects was the translation microfilms of Minsk area microfilms.

    To find out more about what these records contain click on the Record source.

    Bobruysk Bobruysk Minsk 1877, 1886-1888 1,192 More Details
  8. The LDS Family History Library

    The LDS has microfilmed only a handful of records (revision lists) pertaining to Bobruisk. Updated lists are to be found in their Family History Library catalog. Belarus SIG has several updated lists of films at their web site. One listing may be accessed in the Spring, 1996 issue of Avotaynu, as follows:

    • 1795: 1,925,366-378 (12 films?)

    • 1806: 2,008,324-326 (2 films)

    • 1816: 2,008,268-270 (2 films), 2,010,469 (1 film, also contains Borisov data)

    The Avotaynu article advises that since “most Jews did not have hereditary surnames in 1795, it is probably wise to inspect later films first.”

    For a complete listing of the films go to Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) Family History Library Catalog.

    Vitaly Charny has compiled the following transliteration from LDS microfilm #2008324, a list of Jewish surnames from the town of Bobruisk for 1811, from revision list (Revizhskaya Skazka).

    LDS Family History Catalog

  9. What are the records

    No one list of all the possible records exists on the internet.

    • Prenumeraten Lists, Russian newspapers (Vedomosti), and published books bring you additional possibilities for finding your family.

    • Prenumeraten Lists, by Berl Kaganview (view this book on left margin (in yiddish))

    • Minsk Vedomosti

    Published Books

    • Shtetl Finder Gazetteer, by Chester G.Cohen

    • Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR, by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted

  10. Content last updated Tuesday, September 05, 2017 at 08:47 AM US Eastern Standard Time