The registers were created between 1919 and 1940 when Wilno (Vilnius) city and Wilno voivodeship were part of Poland. The registers contain detailed information about everyone who lived in Wilno at that time, as well as information about many visitors. This includes refugees fleeing the Nazis toward Vilnius in autumn of 1939. The registers will potentially hold discoveries for anyone whose family was in that general area, which today includes parts of Lithuania, Belarus, and northeast Poland. I urge you to check the free batch previews described below, even if you don’t think your family was ever in Vilnius. There have already been unexpected discoveries. There are countless mentions of locations outside the immediate Vilnius area.

As this is a very large project that will go on for years, we are releasing data in batches of about 5000 lines. Batch 7, 5033 lines, includes three large apartment buildings located at Niemiecka 29 and Wielka Stefanska 19 and 23. You can find these streets on our Vilnius interactive street map  (https://www.litvaksig.org/vilnius-map/). To help you determine if this batch or a previous batch is relevant to your research, you can review a file containing previews of all seven batches to date (http://tinyurl.com/VHR-previews). The batch preview is a bare-bones version of the batch spreadsheet containing just the full name and year of birth (or age) of each person. The previews are presented both in original order and alphabetically by surname. The previews also include instructions to qualify to receive the full batch data.

More information about the Vilnius household registers can be found on the VHR home page, https://www.litvaksig.org/research/special-projects/vilnius-household-registers.