About The LitvakSIG ALD (All Lithuania Database)

The ALD has data from many different types of records. The fields common to all data are: Surname, Given Name, Town, and Comments. You may also choose to search on All Fields.

There are five choices for searching the ALD.

Search:

- on an Exact string of characters

- on a Starting string of characters

- for any words that Sound Like the using the Daitch-Mokotoff (D-M) soundex system

- for any words that are Phonetically Like the word you are searching using Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching

- using the Fuzzy option - search for names or towns which are different from your request by 1 letter or pair of transposed letters. Fuzzy matching is a technique to find close matches that are misspelled or mistyped. For more information see Fuzzy

You may also use Boolean Searches like "Neiman AND Pikeliai" or "Neiman OR Naiman." Using AND narrows a search by combining terms; it will retrieve documents that use both the search terms you specify. Using OR broadens a search to include results that contain either of the words you type in; in combination with an "is Exactly" search, this will limit records to ones which have either of the exact spellings you specify. It’s best to use this type of search with the "Any Field" option selected so you can capture family names in fields other than the Surname Field.

Please be aware that the spellings of names -- both first and last -- may be different from the ones you are familiar with and accustomed to. In addition, some information on these lists that do not fit into our database template are noted in the Comments Field.

For more information, see Translation and Transliteration Standards