For those researchers who may have ancestors buried in major New York area cemeteries, an exciting new development began in 2006! Many of the local Jewish cemeteries put their databases on line. And others have followed, so that today, there are almost a million Jewish gravesites you can research online!
The following individual cemeteries have put their lists online and you can browse them at your leisure, either by town name or surname.
Another great research tool is Jewishdata.com; this is a fee based site that is free to members of the NY and LA Jewish Genealogy Societies. JewishData.com has tombstone photographs from:
Findagrave.com is a volunteer organization begun by a gentleman who was interested in the graves of famous people; for example, they have: New Jersey (907) and New York (4,117) and California (5,703) records. Findagrave has photographs from Baron de Hirsch Cemetery on Staten Island.
To find worldwide gravesites online, go to the JewishGen Worldwide Cemetery Database at http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/cemetery/. JOWBR is a database of more than 1.4 million names and other identifying information from cemeteries and burial records worldwide, from the earliest records to the present. Volunteers from all over the world have copied the information from cemeteries, and many have photographed the tombstones too! All available on line and at no charge! Just click here
Remember also that JewishGen has hundreds of KehilaLinks web pages; these pages were written by genners like yourself; you can view the KehilaLinks directory at at https://KehilaLinks.jewishgen.org.
Also, please note that JewishGen has wonderful databases to help you in your family research.. I would begin with the Jewish Community Pages (there are over 5600 of them). Each page tells about the history of the town, the governments, contains a map and wonderful links to resources and databases. These town pages can be queried at https://www.jewishgen.org/communities/search.asp.
Another wonderful part of JewishGen is the researcher database, where thousands of researchers have entered their family surnames and towns; to view our JewishGen Family Finder database go to http://www.jewishgen.org/JGFF/.