The Arolsen Archives has initiated a crowd-sourcing project: Every Name Counts. It’s a call to assist the  Arolsen Archives in making 26 million newly digitized historical documents searchable by anyone online.  See: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/cseidenstuecker/every-name-counts

The project was originally launched to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day last January. Twenty schools near the archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany, were involved in a limited pilot, and there were plans to expand the project in 2021. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic people all over the world are at home and are now volunteering.  Before the pandemic the Arolsen Archives only used outside companies. Their own staff and artificial intelligence to do the indexing.

There are currently some 7,000 registered volunteers, but it is not necessary to register to participate.

The project’s online interface that requires going through original documents and then type basic information — name and birthdate — into a database. The names must be typed in correctly by at least two different people, and then checked again by the archives staff. Software that takes into account various spellings of names is employed. Conflicting entries are referred back to the archive’s staff of professional archivists and historians, who monitor discussion boards to answer questions about cryptic abbreviations, professions and confusing names. The project is being hosted on the Zooniverse platform, which is a crowdsourcing platform that allows volunteers to contribute to academic research projects by analyzing large data sets a little bit at a time.

The Arolsen Archives is committed to making all the names in its vast holdings searchable online by 2025.

See: https://www.timesofisrael.com/you-can-help-nazi-victims-families-learn-their-fates-in-online-archive-project/   There is a link to a  3-minutes video about the project included in the article.

See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/world/europe/nazis-arolsen-archive.html

Jan Meisels Allen

Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee

The 2019-2020 Katz Center in partnership with the Penn Libraries recently launched their web exhibition entitled: “The Jewish Home: Dwelling on the Domestic, the Familial and the Lived-In”, See: https://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/online-exhibits/jewish-home

“The exhibition highlights examples of the most formative and intimate of contexts for Jewish life: homes, houses, and households. Drawing from texts in the Penn Libraries’ collections and from around the world, the contributors interpreted Jewish domestic culture, architecture, clothing, landscape, and material evidence through the lenses of archaeological, anthropological, historical, legal, literary, and visual research."

“Among the topics discussed are Jewish domestic labor, home and homeland, the cosmopolitan home, ghettoized homes, traumatized homes, refugee homes, Soviet Shtetl homes, symbolic homes, embodied homes, health and hygiene, affordable housing, as well as homelessness within the framework of broad social and political contexts. Also treated are Jewish costume and clothing, Jewish domestic customs, including lighting Sabbath candles and inscribing marriage contracts, as well as the homes and hands through which Jewish books have passed. The periods of time covered span the ancient Near Eastern archeological sites of home, the ancient rabbinic home as a worksite, Fatamid Egyptian Jewish home interiors, early modern Jewish households of masters and enslaved people; modern representations of Jewish notions of home and office in the visual arts, including photography and engraving, and studies that approach the home as part of the built environment and design of local neighborhoods.”

Jan Meisels Allen

Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee

Ruchel, Rachel, shoshana…

Sharon F. Yampell

Voorhees, NJ USA

GenealogicalGenie@...

Jewish Genealogy Society of Toronto. Exclusive free MyHeritage webinar on Thursday July 30 at 10 am EST. 

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Toronto is proud to present MyHeritage Genealogy Expert, Daniel Horowitz, final exclusive free genealogical webinar this Thursday @ 10 am EST.

Families Reunited Thanks to Genetic Genealogy: True Stories Thu, Jul 30 @ 10 a.m. EST by Daniel Horowitz

As a global leader in family history, MyHeritage believes that every story count. Across a diverse range of cultures and backgrounds, our lives and family traditions are shaped by the generations that came before us, and we all have much to learn from our ancestors.

Registration URL: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4189115520003906319

Now if I could just sync my Brother’s Keeper (my master database) with my one tree on geni, it would be great!