Databases
Where to actually look
Every collection used in this case, what it holds, what it costs, and the one thing that makes each one work. Most of them are free.
Go to Arolsen, type your surname, and then type it again the way a German clerk would have spelled it. No account, no fee. It is the largest collection of Nazi persecution records in the world and it is open to anyone.
Start here
Thirty million documents on Nazi persecution: camp registration cards, transport and transfer lists, labour deployment, death books, displaced-persons and postwar tracing files.
Search the town as well as the person. A village name returns the neighbours, and the neighbours’ records will place your family.
Pages of Testimony, filled in by surviving relatives, so they carry parents, spouses, ages and hometowns that no camp form records.
Read the submitter. A Page filed by a relative is a living-family lead, and the address and date on it are where to start looking for descendants.
Holds RG-31.136, the full digitisation of the Subcarpathian regional archive, roughly 488,000 images of the civil registers, browsable by fund, opus and file.
Use JewishGen to find the fund and file number first, then come here to read the actual page.
Births, marriages and deaths
Indexed vital records for Subcarpathia, Máramaros, Hungary, Galicia and much of eastern Europe, plus the 1921 Czechoslovak census and the burial registry.
Search surname plus town, never a given name first. Given names collide across languages; a village does not.
The transcription project behind the JewishGen Subcarpathia records, run by Roberta Solit. Also holds more than 25,000 tombstone photographs that are not on JewishGen.
Buy the scan when you need the image, but check first whether the index alone answers your question. It often does.
The All-Galicia Database, for anywhere that was Austrian Galicia: today’s south-eastern Poland and western Ukraine.
Search by locality when a surname returns nothing. Many towns are indexed by place but not by name.
Jewish records indexing for Poland, and the natural companion to Gesher Galicia for anything on the Polish side of the border.
Census and maps
Hungarian and Czechoslovak archival collections, including the 1921 census sheets that put a whole household on one page: everyone under one roof, with ages and birthplaces.
A census sheet is the fastest way to prove two people were family, because it shows them living together.
Camps
Prisoner and transport cards for Terezín, including people who arrived on the last evacuation transports in spring 1945 and were liberated there.
Prisoner records for Gross-Rosen and its very large network of subcamps, which absorbed many Hungarian Jews in 1944.
The same Arolsen camp registers, indexed and name-searchable by Ancestry, with the roster page images attached. A search here sometimes surfaces a person the free Arolsen search misses, and it holds the alphabetical intake rolls that let you read the names on either side of your own. The three men in this case sit one under the other in its 2 June 1944 roll, entries 322, 323 and 324.
Search the surname the German way too, and always open the image rather than stopping at the index card. Ancestry also carries the US census, naturalisation and passenger records that document a survivor’s life after 1945, and many public libraries provide free access.
Cemeteries and gravestones
Volunteer-built town pages. For this region they carry Marshall Katz’s photographs and transcriptions of about a hundred Subcarpathian cemeteries, taken over several summers at his own expense.
A gravestone names the father. When the civil registers run out, a stone can give you the next generation up.
Indexed burials worldwide, searchable by name, with plot positions and often the father’s name from the inscription.
Testimony and voices
More than fifty thousand recorded survivor testimonies, indexed by person, place and topic, so you can find someone who was in the same village or on the same transport.
Search the town. A neighbour’s testimony often describes your family by name.
Long interviews with central European Jewish families, published with their own photographs and captions naming everyone in the frame.
Roughly five thousand statements taken from Hungarian survivors in 1945, within months of liberation, and the Kassa log of deportation trains.
Books, directories and community records
Full-text search across digitised business directories, yizkor books, school and military lists from central and eastern Europe.
This is where you establish a negative. Finding that a family is absent from three editions of a directory is evidence about how they lived.
Memorial books written by a town’s own survivors after the war. They give the roundup date, the route, the names of the rabbi and the shochet, and how many households there were.
Many are also scanned in full on archive.org even when the translation on JewishGen is partial.
Write down every spelling of the surname, and the mother’s maiden name as well. Almost every collection above is a name index, and a name index only returns what you type. The method explains why that one step matters more than which database you choose.
Something missing?
If you know a collection that belongs here, or you are stuck on a region I have not worked in, write to me and I will add it. sgrajews@stanford.edu
