
Salute! to the IGRA Database Volunteer Corps!
IGRA Database Volunteer Corps, We Salute You!
The All Israel Database of the Israel Genealogy Research Association recently passed the 2.5 million record mark. The database includes not only records from Israel starting in the middle of the 19th century but also records from Jewish communities around the Mediterranean Basin and Middle East.
During this period of over 150 years the residents of Israel have been under three different governments: the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate and the State of Israel. The materials come from more than 50 archives public and private, and seven libraries. The documents from which the information is extracted are currently in Hebrew, English, French, Yiddish and Greek.
The success of the AID database could have been achieved only with the time and effort of a dedicated group of volunteers from around the world. Over the last 10 years since the beginning of this collection there have been over 70 volunteers with a hard
core of about 25 volunteers continuously contributing their time and effort.
They go to various archives to scan the material, prepare the scans, upload the material to a special website for transcription, transcribe the information required for the database, proof the transcriptions, and transliterate the names into a second language, thus allowing the database collection to be searched both in Latin or Hebrew characters, allowing researchers who don’t know Hebrew or don’t have a Hebrew keyboard to search the collection.
The devotion of the volunteers has allowed this material to be made available at a time when most of the archives in Israel have yet to make scans or searchable indexes available on the internet.
For all of your efforts to the IGRA Database Volunteer Corps, the IAJGS Salutes you!
Doris Loeb Nabel, Chair, IAJGS Salutes!
With Bill Israel and Susan Ginsberg Kobren
Nominated by the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA)