Hi everybody,

To follow up on my first post, today we'll talk about town pages and how to find
them.

The core of our website consists of town pages, one for each of almost 150
towns in our database. Each town page is a portal to all we know about a town.

In addition to the basic geographic information (coordinates, map, names...)
you'll find there the list of all projects, datasets, articles, links, names, etc.,
related to this town.

In order to keep the page readable, the number of items of each topics we
display is limited. However, if there are more available, you will find below
each section a link to the full list (i.e. "see more Kishinev projects").

We have tried to make it easy for you to get to any of the town pages. Use
any of these three methods.

- If you know the district your town is in, use the clickable maps. Click on the
town's district and finally click on the town name. This takes you to your town
page. At each step you will see, successively, a district map, and the town
page. We'll describe these later.

- If you don't know your province or district but you have a pretty good idea of
how the town name is spelled, click on Towns and Districts on the top menu bar.

from the secondary menu, click on 'Alphabetical list of towns'. You will see a

browsable Town Page directory. Select the first letter of your town name to jump
to that section of the directory. Browse through the list and click on your town
name. This takes you to your town page. In the list, you will notice that some
towns have 'flags' next to the town name. If a flag is present it indicates that the
town has a "Town Leader" (T), a KehilaLinks owner (K), a Project List (P) and/or
a Document Collection (D). The next article will describe Document Collections
and Project Lists.

- If you are not sure how your town name is spelled and you don't know its
province and district, use the town name search box. It is in the upper right
corner of every web page on our site. This is especially useful if your town had
several different and dissimilar names. For example, at different times, Kishinev
was also known as Chisinau as well as in other languages like Yiddish,
Polish... Type any of these names into the search box, and a page will open
showing you all entries in the town database with any of those names. Select
the one you want by clicking on the View button at the right side of the listing.
This will take you to your town page. To produce a list of all towns in our
database, just leave the town search box blank (attention, you have to click on
the box to remove the default text 'Town Search') and click the GO button next
to the box. The resulting list has 7 columns plus a View button (the town,
district and province name in 1900, the modern town name, name in 1930 and
1950, and other names for the town). Clicking on the View button on a town
line takes you to the Bessarabia SIG Town Page.

If none of these methods work for you, try using the "JewishGen Gazetteer"
(http://www.jewishgen.org/Communities/LocTown.asp) and the JewishGen
Communities Database (http://www.jewishgen.org/Communities/Search.asp)
to obtain more information about your town and how its name was spelled.
(Hint: Use Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex rather than Beider-Morse. D-M Soundex
seems to be more accurate for town names.)


If after all this you still don't find your town on our website, it might be that
we don't have it registered on our towns database. That could be either because
the town is not on the Bessarabia SIG geographic area of research or we didn't
know that the town had a Jewish community. In this last case, please contact
one of our Leadership members so we can add the town to our database.

Ariel Parkansky