For at least the past two years and probably earlier Jerry Seligsohn of NYC
< JSelig3460@... > has been performing a wonderful genealogical service
by volunteering considerable time pouring through all the Byelorussian
files in YIVO's landsmanshaften collection and painstakingly extracting the
names and other relevant data for inclusion on the Belarus SIG website.
Although I have no known roots in Belarus, but I'd like to compliment Jerry
not only for undertaking such a massive project in the first place, but for
the fine job that he is doing.

Last week Jerry posted a message to this Digest to the effect that he
unintentionally and unwittingly recorded the names for the Szeniczer Ladies
Sick & Benevolent Society and/or the Szeniczer Sick & Benevolent Society
because the YIVO booklet on landsmanshaftn incorrectly placed these
societies in Belarus. Dolph Klein < kledolph@... > subsequently
posted that this is a society for Senice, Slovakia.

I'd like to express my sincere regrets to Jerry for *spinning his wheels*
on a town that turned out to be not in his area of interest. I'd also like
to thank Dolph Klein for providing the correct name of the town.

This leads to the point that I'd like to make. The JGSNY Cemetery Project
database < http://www.jgsny.org/searchcity.htm > also relied on the YIVO
landsmanshaftn guide as the source for the town name for the Szeniczer Sick
and Benevolent Society and its Ladies counterpart. We made a best faith
effort to match the name of a society with the correct town whenever it
could be determined. However, because many Eastern European towns have the
same or similar names it was often hard to do so. We still need your help
in this regard as there are still many societies whose correct town
location we are unable to determine. Those towns containing a question
mark after them are ones we guesstimated but are unsure of.

So please take a moment to check the JGSNY Cemetery Project database and
see if the town and country for your ancestral landsmanshaftn plot is
correct. Please don't respond if it's correct, but if it's not please
provide me with the correction using its spelling in *Where Once We
Walked*, which is the industry standard. Because we are trying to maintain
as scholarly a product as possible, we need definitive proof of a match
based on your family's personal involvement with the plot in combination
with full knowledge of your ancestral town -- no *I think's.* Otherwise
it's better to keep the question marks than to provide wrong information.

Because I suffer >from severe email stress (over 300 emails per week and no
secretary) please keep your response brief and simple -- pretend that I'm
in kindergarten <vbg>. Please provide only a) name of society and cemetery
location, b) incorrect town/country name, and c) the correct replacement.
Any questions about the JGSNY Cemetery Project should be answered in the
JGSNY Cemetery FAQ's at < http://www.jgsny.org/cemfaqs.htm >. Note that we
are not collecting the names of the burials in the landsmanshaftn plots,
which is the focus of the JewishGen On-line Worldwide Burial Registry
(JOWBR) < http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/cemetery/ >.

Thanks in advance for your help in improving the quality of the JGSNY
Cemetery Project database so that Jerry Seligsohn's unfortunate experience
in researching an incorrect landsmanshaftn at YIVO isn't repeated by
someone who inadvertently goes to the wrong cemetery because of an error in
our database.

Ada Greenblatt
Chair, JGSNY Cemetery Project
ada.Greenblatt@...