Jewish Families of Turek, Poland

This is a shell for Jewish Families of Turek.

Located in Wielkopolska Province at 52°02' N, 18°30' E, USBGN: -533,571.

Only a fraction of the Jewish records for this town survived the 20th century.

The Polish archives has metrical (BMD) records for 1837, as well as "civil" records from 1808-1825. These have all been indexed, but are not yet live on JRI-Poland. A link to the images is in the list, below.

There is also an extant Book of Residence, which is available to paid subscribers for the town on JRI-Poland, but it is also not in the public database. The Book of Residence appears to start in the late 19th century, through to the 1920s. Although a handful of people who were born in the 1860s appears in the data, it doesn't accurately capture the Jewish inhabitants of the town prior to the 1890s (approximately). See additional note below.

A few tombstones from the desecrated cemetery are located in a lapidarium elsewhere. There is a link to a photo gallery below. The images generally are not detailed enough to make out names, but the stones appear to be in decent shape.

There are a handful of other records, largely from other places - immigration and naturalization records from the UK and US that mention Turek.

External Links:

• JewishGen Locality Page: [http://data.jewishgen.org/wconnect/wc.dll?jg~jgsys~community~-533571]
• JRI-Poland: [http://jri-poland.org/town/turek.htm]
• Virtual Shtetl: [http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/city/turek/]
• Extracted list of Aktas for 1808-1822: [https://drive.google.com/open?id=1aRLfapqVY4nQdbOONZeozYSz_R79m5E0]
• Extracted list of Aktas for 1837: [https://drive.google.com/open?id=1eIEzHKOxo5FocFYgWiR0CqoVKF9-9XER]
• Original scans of Aktas for 1837: [https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/54/847/0/-/1/str/1/1/15#tabSkany]
• Photos of surviving tombstones: [http://www.kirkuty.xip.pl/turek.htm]

Books of Residents:

• The Polish archives has a list of all of the Books of Residents for Turek here
• The items indexed by JRI-Poland are signatura 2182 to 2197, i.e. from the period approximately of 1895 to 1930.
• There are additional books dating back to 1872 in the Kolo archives though (see link above). These are very large (up to 800 pages) handwritten books, in Russian, and covering the entire community (including the Jewish community).
• Maciej Kolski (website) is able to do researches for individual families, but this is a laborious process, as there is no index. He says that the Jewish community is largely clustered around houses 1-300 though.