The Indexed Concordance of Personal Names and Town Names has more than 500,000 entries relating to the Jews of Kremenets-district towns. Each entry represents a name-town combination found in a Kremenets-district source that KDRG has translated or compiled (e.g., vital records, censuses, voting records, immigration records; see Sources Indexed in the Concordance (PDF) for a list of those documents. The Concordance entry tells you that a name is in an original source. It does not link directly to that source.
To help you locate your family names and towns in the Concordance, we have developed a Steve Morse One-Step Search application. When you use this application to search, you can specify up to four pieces of information:
Surname ("last name" for U.S. users), as it might be transliterated from Hebrew (e.g., Shapiro)
Given name ("first name" for U.S. users), as it might be transliterated from Hebrew (e.g., Aharon)
Surname, as it might be transliterated from Russian or Polish (e.g., Szapira)
Town associated with the name
Most users find that specifying only the "Hebrew" surname, possibly with a given name, works well.
Matching people's names: Your family names may be spelled differently in different sources (and differently from the way you spell them now). Instead of trying to match a particular spelling, you can search for surnames and given names in these ways:
sounds like: searches for names that sound like the name you have typed, using a Soundex system. For example, berg may match burg or barg, as they are all pronounced similarly.
starts with: searches for names whose first few letters are spelled exactly as you have typed them
contains: searches for names that include specific sets of letters anywhere in the name.
You can mix and match these types of searches, for example, if you know the given name exactly but don't know the exact surname.
Matching town names: If you want to limit your search to a particular town, choose the town from the list. To narrow down the list, type a few characters into the fFilter and select a town from the shorter list. Because people sometimes moved from town to town, we encourage you not to limit your search to just one town, as people may have records in multiple towns.
When you have specified all the information you wish to search for, click the "search" button at the bottom of the page. Your results will appear in six columns:
Surname (Hebrew)
Given name (Hebrew)
Surname (Russian or Polish)
Town associated with the name in the original document. Note that different entries might include the same name with different towns; for example, in a death record, a name might be associated with the place of residence (e.g., Kremenets) and the place of death (e.g., Vishnevets).
Source in which the name is found
Location in Source, such as the page number, image number, or item number within the source
Sources and locations: Entries in the Source and Location in Source columns use abbreviations. Each Source entry links to a description of the source, explains the Location in Source, and tells you how to access the source document.
Credits
Learn more about Morse’s One-Step Search applications.
Adam Bronstein, a member of our group, developed the Concordance search application for us. We are deeply indebted to him for lending his time and skill to this effort. And, of course, we are most grateful to Steve Morse for developing the search tool, for making it freely available, and for patiently providing assistance in implementing it.
Ellen Garshick
Co-Coordinator, Kremenets Research Area/Jewish Records Indexing-Poland
an activity of the Kremenets District Research Group