Expert’s Choice
Genealogist Jeanette R Rosenberg OBE is on the UK’s ITS Oversight Committee
JewishGen ( jewishgen.org) might not be the first website that you think of when it comes to researching relations who were caught up in the Holocaust, but it is one of the more important ones. The Holocaust InfoFiles ( jewishgen.org/infofiles) offer 15 topics to help your research and provide contextual advice. Three of these can be found on the website: the Holocaust Database ( jewishgen.org/databases/ holocaust), the Yizkor Book Project ( jewishgen.org/ yizkor) and the Yizkor Book Necrology Database ( jewishgen.org/databases/yizkor).
The Holocaust Database contains information about Holocaust victims and survivors, and holds over 2.75 million entries drawn from more than 190 component datasets.
Yizkor Books are invaluable to genealogists. They were written after the Holocaust as memorials to Jewish communities that were destroyed, and were usually put together by Holocaust survivors. They contain descriptions and histories of the community, biographies of prominent people, lists of the people who perished and so on. The books often include photos, maps and other memorabilia.
The Yizkor Book Project exists to facilitate access to Yizkor Books and the information contained within them. The Necrology Database indexes the names of people published in Yizkor Books in the Yizkor Book Translation Project. This database directs researchers back to the Yizkor Book itself, where more complete information can be found. Importantly, the database allows surnames to be searched using soundex, because most of the names were transliterated from Hebrew and Yiddish, and their spellings may not be as we are used to seeing them written.
WIENER HOLOCAUST LIBRARY
w wienerlibrary.co.uk
Based in Russell Square, Bloomsbury, West London, the library looks after archives, published and unpublished works, cuttings, photographs and eyewitness testimony on the Holocaust and Nazi era. It’s worth exploring the blog entries, which can be filtered by category, and include everything from the latest coronavirus precautions to background on a recent exhibition on Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust. It also has material relating to other cultures persecuted by the regime: a 2019–2020 ‘Forgotten Victims’ exhibition focused on the Roma and Sinti. Make sure you visit wienerlibrary. co.uk/external-resources, which leads to some interesting projects and databases.
Can You Describe The Scrapbook To Me?
This particular scrapbook is the 52nd of 133 donated by Norah Worth, who lived in the village of Gayle near Hawes, where the museum is located. Norah gave each of her scrapbooks a theme, adding additional files on that theme when the first one became full. She collected as much material as she could