Different transliteration rules may have been used in different record
sets so one can't say definitively whether different English spellings
reflect different Russian spellings. I am trying to review older data
to bring some uniformity to the transliteration of names but it is a
slow tedious process. Almost all of the newly uploaded data does use
the same transliteration rules so it is likely that a difference in
the English spelling does reflect a difference in the original Russian
spelling. But I would be careful putting too much importance on the
exact spelling of names. There are numerous examples where a person's
Russian name was spelled differently in two different record sets. To
account for variations in spellings it is always recommended to search
for names using the "phonetically like" match options in the JewishGen
search engines to ensure that variations in spellings will come up in
the search results.

There is another issue with the 1874 Borisov revision lists that may
also explain the change in search results: in the original uploaded
data the fathers of the people recorded were listed as separate
household members even though those fathers were not separate entries
in the original record. Those fathers certainly existed but they
should not have been listed as separate entries in the database. In
this latest upload those extra entries have been removed and that may
explain the fewer search results.

Paul Zoglin
JewishGen Belarus Research Division


Matthew Klionsky's original message:

I've taken a starting look at this new data. Fortunately for me, there's
LOTS of new Revision List records involving names of my personal family
interest. I'm working to interpret the new data and integrate it with
prior info in my files, and I find myself with an immediate observation
of differences >from previously available information that probably results

from technical changes in how the new records were created, so I'm hoping

someone involved with translation/transliteration of the records can provided

a little insight..

I'll frame the question with respect to my KLIONSKY surname.ears ago,
when I first did a phonetic search for that name in the JGen Belarus
database, there were 'hits' for the 1874 Borisov Revision List, all pertaining
to households with a KLIONSKI spelling, and there was only one hit for any
Revision List (Minsk 1858; this used a KLONSKII spelling). Of the
additional Revision List hits pulled >from the newly added records with
a similar phonetic search, there's one hit >from 1850, 3 >from 1894, and the
rest >from 1858. Among them, these new hits use the following spellings:
KLIONSKIY, KLYONSKIY, KLEONSKIY, KLENSKIY and KLENSKY - and NONE of the
new hits used the KLIONSKI spelling used for ALL the previous 1874 hits.
Yet, it seems pretty clear that some of the people who appear on the 1874

lists are identical to those >from earlier and later lists. My question is,

do these spelling variants result >from application of some standard, fixed

transliteration rules, suggesting that households with different
transliterated latin-alphabet spellings also had different original cyrillic

spellings? Or, might all these spellings represent the same cyrillic
-spelled name, just transliterated differently into latin letters for
different lists, or in different transcription batches?

Matthew Klionsky
Chicago