Dear all:

When it comes to indexing Jewish records >from Germany, we are not alone!
This is a very good thing, given the overwhelming amount of recorded
information about German Jews has come down to us. Allow me to introduce
Projekt JuWeL, which seeks to index all of the Westphalian and
Lippe-Detmold Jewish and Dissident (Quakers, Baptists and other minority
churches) records for the period 1815-1875 that are found in the state
archive in Detmold. At least 95% of these are Jewish.

Projekt JuWeL (the acronym means "jewel") is a collaborative effort of
three organizations:

1) The North-Rhine-Westphalian State Archives;

2) the Verein fuer Computergenealogie (society for computer genealogy),
aka CompGen;

3) the Westfaelische Gesellschaft fuer Genealogie und Familienforschung
(Westphalian society for genealogy and family research).

This project has been mentioned here on the GerSIG at least once since
its inception over a year ago, but it deserves another exposure.

http://vereine.genealogy.net/wggf/?Die_WGGF:Projekt_JuWeL describes the
project. The link just below the title gets you to the project home page.

Work is proceeding nicely. Of the three regions that the archive has
records for, Muenster (west) is complete; Arnsberg (central) is being
done now, and Paderborn (east, incl. Lippe) is yet to come. The database
crossed the 50,000 record mark 2 months ago, and the results are already
searchable: http://des.genealogy.net/juwel/search/index

JuWeL uses the DES data-entry system that CompGen developed.
http://docs.genealogy.net/des/en/ is an English-language introduction to
it. I have found it easy and relatively intuitive to use.

Please visit the links I've posted and see how indexing work is being
done. And feel free to sign up and index!

Roger Lustig,  Princeton, NJ USA, research coordinator, GerSIG