Gesher Galicia is very proud to announce the launch of our new website at:

http://www.GesherGalicia.org/

The site has been restructured and redesigned >from the ground up,
including the addition of a new membership portal. Here you'll find a
pathway to all things Galician (including many resources for Polish
and Ukrainian researchers) with an easy and intuitive interface.
Sections of the website have been reorganized for ease of use,
including our "Research Projects" section -- with a full explanation
of our new "Galician Archival Records Project" -- a listing of all
Gesher Galicia regional programs and IAJGS conference programs from
the past decade, and updated informational pages about historical
Galicia. Two of our major sub-sites, the Map Room
(maps.geshergalicia.org) and the All Galicia Database (AGD -
search.geshergalicia.org) remain full of information, and they will be
undergoing some renovations in the near future to make their look
realign with the new main site layout.

We've just added nine new databases to the AGD including the Bobrka
Homeowners List (1845); the Chodorow Homeowners List (1883); the
Rozdol Homeowners List (1850); the Rohatyn area donations to Kollel
Galicia in Jerusalem (1925-1939); Stary Sambor Jewish Deaths
(1896-1907); Stary Sambor Jewish Marriages (1877-1907); Zloczow Jewish
Births (1825-1855; 1894); and Zloczow Jewish Deaths (1825-1855).

The ninth new database is the Brody Jewish Cemetery (19th and 20th
centuries), whose contents were completely photographed and
transcribed. This database represents the first cemetery information,
the first photographs to be directly linked to our records, and the
first Hebrew text to be displayed in our search engine.

There are also updates to existing databases: we just uploaded a huge
number of Jewish birth, marriage, and death records >from Lviv, adding
over 16,000 new records to these datasets. Even more Lviv record
updates will be added throughout 2013.

Other highlights of the new site include:

* Town pages: *

"Galician Town" pages have been created for over 420 towns and cities
that were formerly in Galicia. Get an easy overview of current and
past geographic information about your town of interest, including
former Administrative, Judicial, and Jewish Kehilla district
information; Google Maps of the town; modern photos of the town
automatically pulled in >from the photo service Flickr; videos about
the town automatically pulled in >from YouTube; and more.

Links are automatically generated to the relevant town pages on
JewishGen, JRI-Poland, Miriam Weiner's Routes to Roots database, the
New York Public Library's Yizkor Book database, and other genealogy
websites to make the page a one-stop shop for anyone researching that
town. Links to town Wikipedia pages and KehillaLink websites are
coming soon. Any relevant archival items we know about in the Gesher
Galicia inventory, such as landowner records or town cadastral maps,
are also pulled into the page, so you can see what surviving records
are currently known to exist in our inventory database.

Logged in members of Gesher Galicia will also see a list of all other
Gesher Galicia members who are researching the town, their surnames of
interest, and their contact information, including an easy way to
e-mail everyone at once without having to do a lot of cutting and
pasting. More Galician towns will be added in the near future.

*Family pages: *

We've also created almost 2,800 new Galician Family pages, based on
the surnames our members have indicated that they are researching.
These pages are similar to the Town pages in that they are a one-stop
compendium of links and information about the family name.
Abbreviated search results >from the All Galicia Database (AGD) are
displayed for each surname, with links to the full results.

*Inventory*

Our inventory pages have also been refreshed, to make it easier to
keep track of what records are known to exist for which towns, and
whether or not they've been acquired or transcribed yet. Our main
inventory page now has almost 1700 cadastral maps, landowner, voter,
tax, and school records, as well as Polish magnate documents, from
archives in Ukraine, Poland, and Austria. More additions to the
inventory >from the past few months of research are coming soon. We
also have an inventory of the LDS films of the Jewish vital records

from the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv, created

in cooperation with JRI-Poland. We have also posted a new inventory
of Tabula registers held in the State Historical Archives in Lviv
(TsDIal), created by Alexander Dunai, originally published in "The
Galitzianer."

*The Galitzianer:*

We've put online for the first time 93 articles (so far) >from twenty
years of back issues of our quarterly newsletter "The Galitzianer".
These articles are online in text format, often with their original
images and photos too, and the full text is fully searchable with our
search box. However, most of these articles are only fully available
to logged in Gesher Galicia members after the first two or three
paragraphs. Articles have all been tagged by category or categories
-- fourteen of them, >from Book Reviews to Military Research to Tips
and HowTo's -- and also by volume and issue number. Also available to
logged in Gesher Galicia members are the downloadable full original
PDF files of each issue. Tables of contents for each issue remain
freely available to everyone.

The new website has -- literally -- been years in the making....and a
huge thanks goes to GG vice-president, Brooke Schreier Ganz, for her
design, coding and creation of the site. Gary Liston created our new
logo. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our former GG webmaster, the
musical Max Heffler, who is probably thrilled now to have more time
now to devote to his genealogical pursuits. Also a special shout out
to Jay Osborn for keeping the Map Room growing and gorgeous. Special
thanks to Yoav Sharon in Israel for being the moving force behind the
Zloczow databases just added to the AGD.

If you spot any bugs in the system, please feel free to email Brooke
at: webmaster@.... Constructive criticism is always
appreciated. Thanks for your support of Gesher Galicia over all these
years. The best is yet to come!

Pamela Weisberger
President & Research Coordinator
Gesher Galicia
pweisberger@...