Dear Friends and Researchers of towns with records in the Piotrkow
Trybunalski, branch of the Polish State Archives (PSA).

Jewish Records Indexing - Poland is pleased to announce the initiative to
index all of the Jewish vital records housed in this branch of the Archives
and not filmed by the Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS). The Piotrkow
branch holds the records for the cities of Piotrkow Trybunalski and
Radomsko and twelve nearby towns.

For information about the JRI-Poland/PSA project, click on "Polish State
Archives" in the box at the top on the home page
<http://www.jewishgen.org/JRI-PL>

To view a list of the towns whose partial, or complete, Jewish vital record
registers are contained in the Piotrkow Branch Archives, click on "Status
Report: PSA Projects Underway."

Until now, it has been difficult for many of us to connect the families we
know to the families found in the records filmed by the LDS. Access to late
19th century Jewish vital records in the Piotrkow branch will provide
important breakthroughs for many of us researching our backgrounds in this
area. This is the period when most of our parents, grandparents or
great-grandparents lived in Poland.


The Piotrkow PSA project

To manage the project, the following structure is being put in place:

1) The Archive Coordinator will be responsible for the overall project.

2) Assistant Archive Coordinators will be responsible for guiding Town
Leaders for the towns in the project. We are seeking additional dedicated
individuals to fill these positions. Please consider volunteering.

3) The Archive Inventory Specialist will coordinate the process of making
inventories of the LDS films for each town. (See 4a)

4) Town Leaders will be responsible for:
a. creating an inventory of the existing LDS films of records for
their towns.
b. raising funds for the data entry of indices by professionals in
Poland.

Volunteer Town Leaders are already in place for the following towns. Please
contact them if you would like to help in any way:

BELCHATOW Roni Leibowitz Ronisl@...
RADOMSKO Gloria Berkenstat Freund
glory1@...
TOMASZOW MAZOWIEKI Hadassah Lipsius kesher@...
TUSZYN Leah Jordan Bisel lbisel@...


We are seeking Town Leaders for each of the following ten towns:

GROCHOLICE, KAMIENSK, PIOTRKOW TRYBUNALSKI, PRZEDBORZ, ROZPRZA, SULEJOW,
SULMIERZYCE, SZCZERCOW, UJZAD and ZARNOW. Please copy this message to
researchers who you know have an interest in these towns.

The Indexing Process

Many of you have already made use of the extensive indices available at the
JRI-Poland web site. This data is the result of the volunteer-driven Shtetl
CO-OP initiatives that have been indexing the Mormon films for these towns.

On the other hand, the indexing of the NON-filmed records is all done in
Poland. A budget / fund raising target will be created after the number of
records to be data-entered has been estimated. This is interpolated >from
the number of records in the last few years in the film inventories of each
town.

Funds will pay for copying index pages and data entry by a professional in
Poland. Since late 19th century records are in Russian, the data entry is
in Cyrillic and this is converted to the Polish spelling by JRI-Poland
software.

Once the indexes have been added to the JRI-Poland web site, you may simply
order any original record you wish >from the Polish State Archives by mail
for a small fee.

Updates on the JRI-Poland/PSA Piotrkow project will be available at:
http://www.jewishgen.org/jri-pl/psastat.htm. Click on "Status Report: PSA
Projects Underway" which is the last line in the heading of this page.

We hope all researchers with interest in Piotrkow Trybunalski and nearby
towns will participate in this project.

Sincerely,

Gloria Berkenstat Freund
Piotrkow Trybunalski JRI-Poland/PSA Coordinator
Glory1@...