Arline Sachs and Sallyann Amdur Sack have been running the Tracing your family roots series for a couple of years now. They started to put the show videos to the net, to Google Video. Show #172 features Paul Shapiro of USHMM. He explains how the unleashing Bad Arolsen ITS records can help in research. (One can find a good record of the opening process by browsing through mid-2007 - early 2008 issues of Avotaynu's Nu? What's New? newsletter.) Shapiro uses the records of Zakarpattya young man Nicholas Schwartz to demonstrate the depth of info available from the ITS collection. Scroll to about 23:30 to see the documents about Nicholas.

And a blog piece from Leland Meitzler's Genealogy Blog: Non-Jewish Neighbors Restore West Side Cleveland Jewish Cemetery. Cleveland's second oldest Jewish cemetery was founded by the Liberty Aid and Hungarian Aid Societies and has been the resting place for people with Hungarian ancestry.

A few days ago one of our genealogy fans on the Csaladtortenet mailing list posted the availability of the database of the public cemeteries in Gyõr. As Gyõr is Hungary's 6th largest city by population, this database contains several tens of thousands of records.

The search interface is in Hungarian, but it's easy to get around. Put your researched name or 3 characters at least into the "Név" (Name) field (stripping off special Hungarian accents is OK) and hit "Keresés" (Search). You'll get the name of the buried person, birth and death dates or years (if known), the cemetery name and a link to the map of the cemetery. Clicking on the link you can find either the section of the cemetery with the tomb of the deceased or simply the map of the cemetery.

I happened to crank up my browser and go down crossing the Drava River to see what was up in Croatia. I could find quite a few remarkable things down there.

Genealogy fans founded the Croatian Genealogy Society named after Pavao Vitezovic in June 2005. They seem to be an active group, consisting of both academic and hobby researchers. During their annual meeting in March 2007 their president announced their coming journal Rodoslovlje (Genealogy). They organized a presentation of the 2004 Slovenia made reference book Rodoslovje in April 2007. The society hosts a genealogy forum on their site, too.

I'm not quite sure following what links I found my way to Moja Bastian (My heritage). This is a Croatian firm run by young people offering printing services for family trees and heritage, biographical books. Besides their flagship products they also provide research services, done either by themselves or by their research associates.

Would they reach for international markets? Could they become competitors for Ancestry.com's coming AncestryPress?

The last part of my virtual Croatia trip took me to the Zagreb City Cemetery website. If the visitor clicks on the "English" (s)he will be presented with an English language brochure about the cemetery. It's better not to fear to enter the Croatian (hrvatski) page and to click on the "Trazilica" link on the right menu. This will bring up a search form. Well, one can search the database of not only the main cemetery, but all the Zagreb ones. My sample searches brought up burials back from the 1910s, so, the database might cover the records from the opening of the cemetery (1876). The English brochure mentions 300,000 burials. How to search? Put the surname into the "Prezime" field, and hit "Pretrazi!". One thing I notice is that it's not possible to jump further from the 1st page of hits. To truncate the search one can use the % sign to stand for several characters or the _ sign for one character. The system requires the use of proper Croatian accented letters. If you are to lazy to produce them, just use the % or _ characters.

This might be interesting for folks whose family roots lead to Szeged. The database of some 120,000 burials is now available on the burial services of Szeged company site: Testamentum.

I've just tried to access the site to give a short guide to its Hungarian interface, but my try failed and a database error was shown: Too many connections. Apparently the server is overloaded with requests.

OK, here is what I can remember from my visit there on Sunday.

On the left navigation menu one can possibly click on "Keresés". Then enter a surname into the "Vezetéknév" field (at least 3 characters anywhere in the name). You'll get a list names, the decade or year (sometimes date) when they were born and buried, and the cemetery plot number. You can even see the plot location on the map provided.

To find out the range of the time period in the database I entered a popular surname, Kovács into the search form. I got the impression that the first records start in the late 1800s and go up to the late 20th century.

Stephen S. of the Hungarian Special Interest Group (HSIG) @ Jewishgen posted a noteworthy site a few days ago. Öröklét? (eternal life or eternal existence, when translated into English) contains a database of names and information found on headstones in various, mostly (or exclusively?) Jewish cemeteries across modern Hungary. 100 cemeteries are listed. The number of persons is not easy to assess, it's a 6 figure number, for sure. The completeness of the records for each cemetery varies. The Kozma Str. Cemetery in Budapest has 200,000 records - probably a complete set, while some others have only 1-10.

A new set of data has been added to FamilyTracker.com's offers. This time their partner in Romania, Marcel Mindrescu added a collection of transcribed Jewish Cemetery records from Oradea, Romania (formerly Nagyvárad, Hungary). The press release also mentions that this is ment to be only the beginning, "the first of many planned from this part of the world".

I remember Gene Hall, FamilyTrackers, Inc. CEO sharing this news item with the members of Rootsweb's Hungary-L, too, and according to Google here and there it got posted on the Jewish Genealogy 2000 and Genealogy on the Internet lists, as well.

The former Google search brings up a new genealogy blog, the one by Gene Hall: FamilyTrackers blog. Interesting. One of the more recent blog items gives a basic overview of genie research in Romania: Genealogy in Romania - It's Tough but Possible.

I should sign up for the offered free account at FamilyTrackers to report what's inside. Does anybody have experiences with them? They made some nice peaks in May and August 2005 - according to Alexa. (But what are those unrelated domain names?)

Soroksár was one of the places around Budapest that was populated by settlers coming from various German-speaking areas in the mid-18th century. It was a small town when in 1950, together with many satellite settlements, the growing Budapest absorbed it. It's now Budapest's 23rd district.

The popular Hungarian website, Index.hu now reports that the old cemetery had to face demolition. The cemetery was closed in 1986 when the dead were disintered (with some remains apparently left on the spot) and bulldozers shaped the landscape. Tombs, tombstones and even human remains were pulled together then, and they were buried with soil.

About one month ago, the bulldozers showed up once again, and started to "finish the job". Bones and tombstones were turned out. Civil orgs now cast their opposition against the suspected plans (real estate development).

While at the cemeteries/burials subject, according to that page on Hungarian Radio's site, a new album with tombstones in the county was published in May 2004. The album covers tombs of notable people and/or of artistic, historical value. Page also has that this album is the 4th in a row sponsored by the "National Memorial Society".

Slovakia's online cemetery database is going to reach a milestone these coming days. The number of cemeteries they have records will reach 1000 soon, and the number of records is pretty close to 100,000, too. This site has an English language interface, too.

Let me start with a find of today.

Somogy County Cemetery Services, Ltd. has a really informative website (in Hungarian). Besides info about their services they have a database of notable tombstones in the county, and the long list of persons included is also available for browsing. Under the "Information" menu tab one can find a listing of the burials of the week. Unfortunately, there is no archives of the weekly lists.

The February issue of Szombat, the magazine of the Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association writes about the cleaning of the old Jewish cemetery in Topolya (now: Bačka Topola, Serbia and Montenegro). The article (in Hungarian).