Projects and Data
Membership
LitvakSIG is a membership organization. Annual membership dues of US $50 per person and additional contributions to our General Fund support our operations, (including this website); our publications; and general activities like sponsoring speakers at the annual international conferences and other events. Members are given access to additional content and research resources (eg. archives catalogs and in-depth scholarly articles) through our members website and are entitled to vote in our annual election during the annual LitvakSIG meeting which is held at the IAJGS conference during July or August. Our membership year is January 1 to December 31 each year.
Translation Activities
The bulk of our activities are our geographic-specific Research Groups or Projects, whose primary purpose is to identify and collect data from available records for Lithuania from the Russian Empire Period (1795-1918) and Independent Lithuania (1918-1940). A number of shtetlach now in Belarus and Poland fall under our aegis. Each of these groups and projects is separately funded by dedicated contributions raised for their specific purpose.
Over the past 19 years we have received over US $825,000 in dues and donations from almost 2,000 individuals, corporations and foundations as well as donations of thousands of privately translated records. Together we have translated more than 2,500,000 records. This shows great generosity. There are still many hundreds of thousands more records to translate and we sincerely hope you will support us by becoming a member of LitvakSIG and by contributing to one or more of our groups and projects.
LitvakSIG welcomes the opportunity to speak with individuals or organizations who are able to provide challenge grants or major contributions to our efforts.
Our Groups and Projects are organized as follows:
Research Groups (DRG or GRG)
There are 14 district research groups (DRG) and 1 guberniya research group (GRG) matching administrative districts ("uyezds") of the Russian Empire period (1795-1918). These research groups are responsible for translating all available records, ie. revision lists, family lists, tax lists, voter lists and vital records for the entire district, including all shtetlach in the district.
Special Projects
While we endeavor to keep the majority of our data acquisition projects under the Research Groups, sometimes that is not practical or possible from a coordination or funding standpoint.
For example, where a particular list is very large it may be treated as a project by itself, distinct from the District Research Groups.
One example is the project to translate the Lithuanian Internal Passport (IP) Files, a collection rich with family information relating to those people who resided in independent Lithuania in the interwar period (1918-1939). All Internal Passport records have been translated and are available through the relevant Research Group with the sole exception being the city of Vilnius. Translating the city of Vilnius IP records continues to be a separate, special project due to the vast number of records included, approximately 45,000 individual files.