JewishGen 2012 Review

Dear Friends,

1 million records. More than 41,000 new users. Nearly 8,000 donors.

These figures demonstrate tremendous accomplishment by JewishGen in 2012. As we wrote a few months ago, we are actively growing our databases to meet the demand of our constantly expanding user base. Second, our users continue to appreciate the free service provided by JewishGen, and are willing to financially support its mission.

There is still so much more to do.

We added more than 1 million records last year (surpassing 21 million records in total!), hundreds of Yizkor Book translations and many other important items of interest to Jewish genealogists – but there remain millions of records throughout the world that have yet to be digitized, indexed, and made searchable on JewishGen. Some for-profit companies seek to obtain these records, and then charge to access them. It is our belief that Jewish family research should be freely accessible, and we are doing everything we can to keep it that way.

With this in mind, we are proud to publish our “2012 Review,” highlighting JewishGen’s accomplishments over the course of the previous year. As you may have noticed, many of our most popular features (such as the Family Finder and Burial Registry) now have distinctively branded logos, making it easier to identify the information you are viewing. A project that has generated particular enthusiasm is our “Memorial Plaques” project, whereby volunteers throughout the world are indexing the names appearing on Memorial (Yizkor) plaques in their synagogues.

As always, major and significant improvements (with the rapid advance of technology, these improvements are always significant) have continued to be made “behind the scenes” to help ensure an easy, powerful, and secure web experience.

This past July, JewishGen's ViewMate project won the "Outstanding Program or Project Award" at the IAJGS conference in Paris.  We'd like to congratulate  the team of JewishGen volunteers who created  and maintain ViewMate:  Sam Eneman, Administrator; Gary Sandler, Programmer; and Bernard Kouchel, who envisioned the original concept.

                                      Bernard Israelite Kouchel

Finally, and most importantly, our loyal users continued to provide us with a strong base of financial support – we received nearly 8,000 donations last year – allowing us to operate within our budget for the third year in a row despite global economic uncertainty.

Running almost 50 pages, the 2012 Review covers these, and other topics as well. Last year’s report was viewed more than 20,000 times, and we are confident that this year’s report will reach an even wider audience.

The report can be viewed below, or by clicking here. 

Regardless of your level of financial support, we are glad that you are part of the global JewishGen community – the JewishGen family – and we hope you will enjoy reading about about our accomplishments in 2012, along with our plans for what we hope will be an even better 2013.

Sincerely,

Warren Blatt                                     Avraham Groll

Managing Director                              Director of Business Operations