Oshmiany District Research Group

The Oshmiany District Research Group (DRG) of LitvakSIG is chartered with obtaining records from all shtetls (towns) in the Oshmiany Uyezd (district) of Vilnius Gubernia (region) of Lithuania. This includes the town of Oshmiany itself as well as records that pertain to the entire Uyezd.

We primarily focus on obtaining 19th century Russian Empire period records from the Kaunas Regional Archives (KRA) and the Lithuanian Archives in Vilnius (LVIA) for Oshmiany District. Oshmiany was in Poland between the wars so JRI-Poland has non-LitvakSIG projects for obtaining some Oshmiany District records from the Polish Archives.

Effective January 1, 2013, the group is also translating vital records which are available.

We access records, translate and database them, and distribute the data to our contributors via a dedicated Contributor’s website http://donors.litvaksig.org/site/oshmiany. We distribute the data to our contributors in Excel format. As part of LitvakSIG’s overall mission, our group data is made publicly available in the LitvakSIG All Lithuania Database (ALD) about 18 months from when members first receive access but only via the web interface and not in Excel format.

Since the Oshmiany DRG was established, we have spent about $9,800 on acquiring and distributing data from records for Oshmiany Uyezd and the shtetls in Oshmiany Uyezd – that’s over 18,000 individual record lines of people! Our project is ongoing and progress is based on our available funds and the availability of records.

Our contributors are people who are researching ancestors from any shtetl in Oshmiany Uyezd who have joined together to make the most of our shared resources. Since many of our ancestors lived in one place but worked, were officially registered, owned property or assets, or had relatives in another place nearby, it is only by researching on the broader geographic scale of the uyezd that one can be sure where a family was really "from" and that one has searched thoroughly.

Shtetls in Oshmiany Uyezd are:

Derevno, Dieveniskes, Dvorets, Golshany, Ivye, Krevo, Lipnishki, Naliboki, Oshmiany, Smorgon, Solsk, Soly, Traby, Vishnevo, Volozhin, Zaskevichi, Zhuprany

We hope you will consider becoming a qualifying contributor at the $100 level or more to the Oshmiany District Research Group. Effective January 1, 2012, a $100 contribution provides early access for a 5 year cycle, based on calendar years. Instructions on how to contribute may be found here. If you have questions, you may contact the Group Coordinator Judy Baston.