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Finding your family in the Yad Vashem and JewishGen records
A respectful, practical walkthrough of two of the most important Jewish record collections — what each holds, how to search them, and how to read a result with the care it deserves.
Two collections do an enormous share of the work in Jewish family research: the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, and the databases of JewishGen. They serve different purposes and ask to be read in different ways. This guide covers both — practically, and with the dignity the first one in particular requires.
JewishGen: the living archive of the towns
JewishGen hosts millions of records drawn from across the Jewish diaspora — vital records (births, marriages, deaths), revision lists, cemetery transcriptions, and the JewishGen Communities Database that maps the towns themselves. Its Unified Search lets you query many of these at once.[1]
How to search it well
- Search by town, not just surname. Ashkenazi surnames were often fixed late and spelled many ways; the town (shtetl) is frequently the more stable anchor. Use the Communities Database to resolve a town’s historical and modern names.
- Turn on phonetic (Daitch-Mokotoff) matching so spelling variants — Rivka / Rifka / Regina, or Yankel / Jacob — collapse together instead of hiding results.[2]
- Read the original image when one is linked. The index is a transcription; the scanned register is the source you should cite.
Yad Vashem: a memorial you search with care
Yad Vashem maintains the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, an ongoing effort to recover and record the name of every Jew murdered in the Holocaust. Much of it is built from Pages of Testimony — forms submitted by surviving relatives and friends, each one a deliberate act of remembrance for a specific person.[3]
In memory
A Page of Testimony is not a database row to be mined. It is a name reclaimed from erasure, often submitted by someone who loved that person. When a search returns one, read it as testimony: the victim’s name, where they lived, and the witness who refused to let them be forgotten.
Source: Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names (Page of Testimony)
Searching Yad Vashem follows the same craft as JewishGen — phonetic name matching, town-based searching, attention to Hebrew and civil names — but the result is held differently. Where JewishGen tells you a family lived, Yad Vashem may tell you how a branch ended. That deserves a moment, not a spreadsheet cell.
Reading the two together
The strongest research uses both. JewishGen can establish that a family lived in a particular town and name the generations before the war. Yad Vashem can, painfully, account for those who did not survive it — and a Page of Testimony often names the very relatives who would otherwise be lost from the record entirely. Read with care and cited honestly, together they let a family’s full story be told.
Sources
Your family, researched
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