June 2011

Dear Kremenets District Friends,

For the past couple of years, the Kremenets District Research Group (KDRG) has been extracting and processing records from the Ellis Island Database that mention towns of the Kremenets District. We now have extracted all records for the towns of Shumskoye and Vishnevets and we have indexed two sets of un-indexed fields: Person at Destination, and Nearest Relative at Origin.

The data are in an Excel 2007 spreadsheet, “EIDB Master.xlsx”, which now is available for download on the Kremenets Shtetlinks website, http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Kremenets/web-pages/eidb.html. The spreadsheet has 1,041 records... 356 for immigrants from Shumsk, 684 from Vishnevets, and 1 (so far) from Vyshgorodok. We soon will add almost 1,500 records from Kremenets. Records for other towns will be added as processing and proofreading are completed.

Please be sure to read the document titled, "Guide to EIDB records from the Kremenets District". It explains some fine points for using the spreadsheet. In addition, we have posted a PowerPoint presentation given by KDRG Board Member Susan Sobel at the 2010 Annual Memorial Meeting (Askara) of the Kremenets-Shumsk Society in Israel. It describes some of the more interesting ways to use the newly indexed fields.

As you peruse the spreadsheet, you will notice that (1) a large number of entries are grossly misspelled in the EIDB transcription and therefore are very difficult to locate by standard methods, and (2) a large number of name entries were indexed incorrectly by the Ellis Island folks and lead to the wrong manifest. As described below, our project has corrected both of these problems.

To extract records from the EIDB using town names, we had to recognize the many ways in which town names could be spelled. We used a variety of approaches to create a glossary of town name spelling variations and used this glossary to extract town-based records from the EIDB. We found 81 variations in spelling for Shumsk and 205 variations for Vishnevets. These are shown in the EIDB Master spreadsheet, in a worksheet named “Variant spelling of town names”.

Data from the spreadsheet also are in the One-Step searchable “Indexed Concordance of Personal Names and Town Names”, on our Shtetlinks website. Be sure to read our "Introduction and Guides ..." document. It tells you how to use the cryptic entries that are in the “Source” and “Location in Source” columns of the Concordance. Basically, we have used the Passenger ID (PID), a unique value for each passenger, as the index key in the Concordance. The Passenger ID (PID) can be used in Steve Morse's One Step Search Engine for the EIDB (http://www.stevemorse.org/ellis/pid.html) to locate the manifest image. However, we found that 5.2% of the Ellis Island database entries we examined had PIDs that lead to the wrong manifest. In these cases we have determined the URL that will take you to the correct manifest. Since most of these URLs are extremely long, we have used Google’s URL shortening algorithm to provide you with “shortened” URLs. These shortened URLs are in the PID column of the spreadsheet and are used in the “Location in Source” column of the Concordance as an index term.

We hope you will help fund our work by making a donation to our Kremenets account at JRI-Poland. Contributions to "Jewish Records Indexing - Poland" may be made by check, bank draft, money order, or credit card. Be sure to specify that your contribution is for the Kremenets Shtetl CO-OP. Send your donation or credit card information to:

Jewish Records Indexing - Poland, Inc.
c/o Sheila Salo, Treasurer
5607 Greenleaf Road
Cheverly, MD 20785 USA

Telephone:  (301) 341-1261
Fax: 1-810-592-1768 (24 hours)
E-Mail: ssalo@capaccess.org
Donations Webpage: http://www.jewishgen.org/JRI-Pl/creditcard_online_form.htm

Be sure to specify that your donation is for the Kremenets Revision List Project or for the Kremenets General Fund. When you send your donation, please send me an e-mail message to let me know the amount you contribute and the date of mailing so that we can be sure the donation gets applied properly. If your employer has a matching gift program, please think about matching your donation through that program.

The Kremenets Shtetl CO-OP is affiliated with Jewish Records Indexing – Poland, Inc. (JRI-Poland), which is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. Your contributions are tax-deductible in the U.S. and Canada to the extent permitted by law.

Ron

Ron Doctor
Co-Coordinator, Kremenets Shtetl CO-OP/Jewish Records Indexing-Poland
An activity of the Kremenets District Research Group
http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Kremenets/web-pages/index.html

Researching DOCTOR (DIOKHTER), VARER, AVERBAKH, KORENFELD ... all from
Kremenets, Oleksinets, Yampol, Vishnevets
and KAZDOY (KOSODOY), DUBINSKI, DUBOWSKY ... all from Kiev, Uman, Odessa