Khag Sameakh! Just prior to Rosh Hashanah, Stanley Diamond, Project
Coordinator for Jewish Records Indexing - Poland announced an exciting new
project to index vital records for 82 towns in East Galicia that are
maintained in the AGAD Archives in Warsaw.

Those Galitzianers with ancestors >from West Galicia are already very familiar
with the JRI-Poland database of vital record indices. Now Galitzianers with
ancestors >from the current Ukrainian section of East Galicia will have access
to indices of those 19th Century records that reside in the AGAD Branch of
the Polish State Archives. East Galician researchers already know that the
LDS Church has never microfilmed these record registers.

The AGAD Archives (The Central Archives of Historical Records) in Warsaw is
the repository of more than 1,700 birth, marriage, and death registers for
the area of the former Lwow, Stanislawow, and Tarnopol voivodships (now Lviv,
Ivano Frankivsk, and Ternopil oblasts in Ukraine).

The goal of this JRI-Poland project is to create online searchable indices to
enable researchers to quickly locate records of potential interest.
Researchers will then be able to order these records directly >from the AGAD
branch of the Polish State Archives using the order form linked to the search
results.

Details of this project are available at the JRI-Poland web site, AGAD
Archives Page at <http://www.jewishgen.org/JRI-PL/agad/index.htm>. On this
web page is also a map of the region. The red circles on the map group towns
into seven separate indexing regions. This map was prepared by fellow
Galitzianer Tom Weiss.

There is also a link to a table that includes both the current and former
(Polish) names of the towns and the records available for each town. These
registers also include records for smaller towns in close proximity of those
listed in the table.

The first region within East Galicia to be indexed will be the area in the
far Northeast of the former Austro-Hungarian Province of Galicia. The 13
towns in this region whose vital records will be indexed are:

Brzezany
Kozlow
Kozowa
Mikulince
Narajow
Podwoloczyska
Skalat
Strusow
Tarnopol
Trembowla
Zalozce
Zbaraz
Zborow

If your ancestral town does not appear above but is near one of these towns,
don't be discouraged. The Jewish communities in many smaller towns near these
13 District and Sub-District towns of the former Galician Province of Austria
were required to register their vital events in these 13 towns.

This region has been designated as AGAD Region #1 or Tarnopol Region. Please
refer to the map that has been posted on the JRI-Poland website at
<http://jewishgen.org/JRI-PL/agad/index.htm> for more details. The Tarnopol
Region web page at <http://www.jewishgen.org/JRI-PL/agad/agad_tarnopol.htm>
provides more information including the approximate number of vital records
that will be indexed.

I will be serving as Coordinator for the Tarnopol Region initiative. To make
this initiative successful, we need volunteers to serve as Town Leaders for
each of the 13 towns in this region. Each Town Leader will be responsible to
raise the necessary funds to pay for the creation of the town's indices. If
you are interested, please contact me at willie46@aol.com.

This Initiative has already gained momentum. The AGAD Archives staff has
commenced indexing of Tarnopol birth registers. About 6,000 of the 16,710
birth records for Tarnopol have now been indexed. Information about how you
can help make this project successful can be found on the Tarnopol Region web
page. These indices will not be loaded to the JRI-Poland database until
certain fundraising goals have been achieved.

As work on Region #1 progresses, JRI-Poland will announce plans for expanding
the initiative and will then invite interested researchers to volunteer to be
Regional Archive Coordinators for other Regions of the AGAD Archives project.
To be kept up-to-date, subscribe to the JRI-Poland Mailing List. Instructions
for joining these lists can be found at
http://www.jewishgen.org/listserv/sigs.htm.

Please join me in thanking Steve Zedeck, Michael Tobias, Stanley Diamond, the
Polish State Archives, and all the volunteers that have made this project
possible.

Mark Halpern
Tarnopol Region AGAD Archive Coordinator
JRI-Poland