Organizing Belarus

Guys, I know of the cemetery in Vorotynschina, an agricultural Jewish colony near Mogilev and it is not on the list. I don't know how to post in the discussion groups. Where do I take this info?

Andrei

Regarding the cemetery list described by Randy, that link no longer works as the Belarus section at JewishGen was significantly reorganized. New link (under "Record Sources") is at: http://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/tools/cemeteries/index.html

JewishGen/Belarus now organizes first by Region/Gubernia then districts/Uyezd, each of which has its own page and a list of major towns (some of which have their own pages). The gubernias are: Grodno, Minsk, Mogilev, Vilna and Vitebsk. See "http://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/regions/index.html" for details.

The "Shtetls of Belarus" lets you look up a town and learn the Gubernia and Uyezd it's placed in, as well as geo coordinates. Very useful. My own interest is the Granadier/Grenadier/Grandir families of Turov in Minsk Gubernia, Mozyr Uyezd.

-- Eric

It would be terrific if you could edit and reorganize the project page, adding subprojects for the major districts.

The Lida district has a pretty active group. We can perhaps use it as a test for Belarus.

I'm going to bring up building Geni projects for this district at the IAJGS conference and will see what the response is. We can reconstruct families back to at least 1790 using revision lists.

If you can organize the front page, when I think it will be easier to get people to fill in the towns on the various district pages.

OK, I believe I've created a reasonably good foundation for organizing the page. I followed the c. 1900 regions identified by the Belarus SIG at JewishGen, rather than the modern ones, since their reasons for doing so are good. If regional sections grow unwieldy in the future, they can be subdivided easily by districts, which are listed under each region and linked if there is already a district-specific project (like the Lida one). That listing may also encourage people to create more district-specific projects.

I moved most of the small projects that were in the "Related Projects" section into the page itself, reserving that section for projects that aren't under/within the Jews of Belarus project. I'll finish up within a few days by adding some brief historical notes and also links to major resources for Belarus genealogy research.

I've added about a dozen more Belarus-related Geni projects that I discovered, expanded the Belarus info a little, and added links to a few offsite resources. I invited people with requests for additions to post to this discussion. I believe my work is done for now.

Thanks so much for all the improvements. Let's hope it takes off. It's about time for the Belarus group to get into collaborative genealogy.

Looks good to me.

Eric H Mercer
Please add: Jewish Families of Słonim, Grodno Region, Belarus - משפחות היהודים בסלונים, מחוז גרודנו, בלארוס

I'm researching my Wishingrad family. The Wishengrads are Levites. They lived in several towns in Brest including Brest-litovski, Chernavchitsy, and possibly Kobrin. I had genealogist Yuri Dorn look up the Census records there and he gave me some names back to about 1760, the eldest being G'dal Vishnegrad. A fourth cousin of mine - related to G'dal - has gotten the same info and more. I'll add the names to a family tree when I have time. Another family name from Belarus is Cohen. I'd love to learn more about this side of my family.