The Lithuanian State Historical Archives in Vilnius.
The most fruitful sources of information for anybody researching family roots are usually vital records (birth, marriage and death registers) and census records ("revision lists" in Russia or Lithuania).  The Vilnius Archives have 19th century Revision Lists and vital records for a large number of Jewish shtetlach , but unfortunately in the case of Kvedarna, no such vital records have been preserved.  They are thought to have been destroyed either in fires or during a war.

The main records in Vilnius are the census and the revision lists.  The 1784  Census  taken by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania includes details of the Kvedarna Jewish Com munity.  It is the earliest record giving the names of members of the Jewish community.

The situation with Revision Lists drawn up under the Czarist regime is not so good; most of those relating to Kvedarna have been lost.  However details of the Jewish community of Kvedarna sometimes appear as part of the Revision Lists for the Rasseiniai district.  So far it has been established that this is so in the case of the Revision List  for 1816, and of Additional Revision Lists for 1816 ,  1841  and 1874, all of which are in the Vilnius archives.

Rhode and Sack in their monograph (Jewish Vital Records, Revision Lists and other Holdings in the Lithuanian Archives, Avotaynu 1996) list Revision Lists for Kvedarna for 1851 also.  Presumably this is part of the Rasseiniai District list also.

The 1858 Revision List for Rasseiniai district , which has been acquired by the Jewish Genealogical Society, has records for 9 towns in addition to Rasseiniai itself, but these do not include Kvedarna.  It was thought that the community of Kvedarna might have been included  in one of the adjoining shtetlach,  but this has turned out to be not so.  It would appear therefore that the 1858 Revision List for Kvedarna has been lost - but there is an outside chance that it may yet turn up among the records in the Vilnius archives.

  The archives in Kaunas also have a number of documents relating to Kvedarna.  In the absence of a full set of Revision Lists, these records are a very useful source of information.  

• 1845 list of members of the Kvedana Jewish Community who could not pay their taxes  
• 1846 list of members of the Kvedarna Jewish Community who could not pay their taxes  
• 1846 Community List (Box Taxpayers List)
• 1848 Community List (Box Taxpayers List)  -  incomplete  
• 1885 Community List (Box Taxpayers List)
• 1885 List of members of the Kvedarna Jewish Community who were entitled to vote for the election of the Rabbi      
• 1890 list of merchants residing in Kvedarna  
• 1891 list of members of the Kvedarna Jewish Community who were entitled to vote for the election of the local administration 
• 1910 village plan , showing numbers of the lots
• 1910 list of owners of real estate, with lot numbers linked to the village plan 
• List of members of the Kvedarna Jewish Community entitled to vote in the election of a Rabbi in September 1912
• List of men of Raseiniai district who did not report for military service in 1912    (Click here to see a  page from this document)
• List of men in Raseiniai district who did not report for military service in 1915
  
• References to Kvedarna residents in lists for other towns      

  The Hamelitz Database contains names which were published in the Hamelitz newspaper, of a number of Kvedarna residents who made charitable offerings in the Kvedarna shul on various occasions between 1895 and 1903.
 

  The Hamagid Database   contains the names of some residents of Kvedarna who donated to a relief fund for Perisan Jews which were published in a list published in the Hamagid newspaper in 1872. (Most of the names in this particular list lack surnames; they are in the traditional Jewish form of "Yaakob ben Yitzchak", and are therefore of limited assistance in tracing family members).
 

  The Poor Jews' Temporary Shelter in London maintained registers of all who passed through it.  (See the page on  Emigration from Kvedarna ) .  The registers for the years1896 to1914 have survived, and the names that appear therein can be searched on a database .   For an example of the information available from this source, click here .
 

    Holocaust records:    Yad va-Shem has the testimony of a group of survivors dealing with the extermination of the Jewish community of Kvedarna, and a list of residents   of Kvedarna who died in the Holocaust, and the names of some survivors.  
 

  New York Burials:  Ada Greenblatt - although she has no roots in the Rasseiniai district - very generously visited all of the Landsmannschaft and Benevolent Associations (Burial Societies) for immigrants who came to the US from that district, and were buried in the New York area.  Amongst the burial plots visited were two maintained by the Chwadoner Benevolent  Association . (Chwadoner Unt.Verein), the landsmannschaft for Kvedarna.  They are  located at Mt. Hebron Cemetery, Flushing, Queens, NY, and  contain a total of 164 graves.