Links for Jewish research

[Carla]

I found these sites useful for Jewish research when i was tracing my ancestors.....

www.jewishgen.org is a good place to start and for background information

www.jewishgen.org/JCR-UK helps to identify surviving records of different communities

FamilySearch has a help section about London Jewish Records

You can also check out the website of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain

Also for Spanish and Portuguese Jews the Bevis Marks Synagogue records in London are brilliant.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

Carla the familysearch link takes you to the front page, do you know where on the site the London Jewish records are and we can update the post to link to there.

 

[Carla]

This link takes you to a page that has all sorts of information about Jewish ancestry and recommendations to other web pages
https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Jewish_Genealogy_Research

Also when you go from the main page of Familysearch (which is the LDS site) click
Browse All Published Collections which is half way down the page on the left. In the 'filter by collection name' type in the word Jewish and two collections will come up. It is more complicated but the German records helped me.

I will be honest in that I found the old site easier to negotiate!

 

[Alexander Bisset]

I will be honest in that i found the old site easier to negotiate!

The old site had dramatically fewer records on it, they were confused and badly indexed, the worst of it was the mixing of guesswork records (the submitted by member) and the actual transcribed index records from the original parish records. This meant that unless you were extremely careful you ended up relying on someone else's mistakes and guessing.

The new site whilst it takes a whole lot more effort to get used to is dramatically better in its search capabilities. Its this familiarity with what we knew that causes most people to have the reaction you have posted. Once you get over the learning curve, and I agree it is probably a needlessly steep learning curve, then you will wonder why you ever liked the old site.

The biggest problem is that the default settings don't limit records by country and so you tend to get a whole lot of "possible" results including stuff in USA that you just aren't interested in. So what seemed a simple search before now feels needlessly complicated. However in the past you were typically filling out a lot more boxes as several fields in the old search were mandatory eg: "region" and "country" were mandatory. If I had a pound for every time I set British Isles, Scotland in the old family search I'd be rich. For the new search because country isn't a mandatory field you end up with results you aren't interested in and so you get lost and disheartened and yearn for the "simplicity" of the old site.

However once you realise some of the basics and perhaps bookmark a couple of shortcuts to the collections that interest you most then you will find the new site a whole lot more productive.