David-Horodok - LDS Vital records

(the source for the data in this section of the site)

As a part of the LDS faith, its followers (also known as Mormons) seek to convert individuals as well as their ancestors. To fulfill this requirement they engaged in a worldwide project to photograph all vital records (birth, marriage, divorce and death) into microfilms and/or microfiche. The microfilms are then available at the LDS Family Centers for copying.

The official vital records of David-Horodok's Jewish population for the years 1886 to 1910 are in Minsk, Belarus. They were photographed by the Mormons and recorded onto three microfilms. One of them, reel number 1794310 was photocopied by Ms. Kathryn Winston and is the basis of the data here. This microfilm contains the following records:

• Births, marriages, deaths 1886
• Births, marriages, divorces, deaths 1887-1889, 1891
• Births 1892

• Russian handwritten Cyrillic letters
• Hebrew handwritten letters

Mr. Boris Gankin, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, originally from Minsk, Belarus translated / transliterated the Russian part and Mr. Mosheh Shavit from Israel did the same from the Hebrew part. You are also advised to read the "Transliterator's Notes" in the Necrology section of this site. Ms. Kathryn Winston compiled these into databases in MS (TM) Excel format which, after finalized, will be available in our discussion-group's file depository. In these files each specific event received an UID (=Unique IDentifier), which contains the page number in the Mormon records and the line position in the page. As the Russian and Hebrew entries are on different pages, they have different UIDs, for the same event. For completeness we bring here both the Russian and the Hebrew records, each in its own webpage, with a link to the other language's record.

The entire database is managed with the Family-Name as the key and your search should start with the Family-Name in question. However, family-names change in pronunciation and writing especially when transliterated to another character-set. To group similarly sounding names together the Soundex indexing system was invented. Each name (actually any word) is assigned a Soundex value consisting the first letter of the name and three digits which depend on its consonants. Names with identical Soundex values sound similar. We added to each name its Soundex value so you can search according to it. To find a Soundex value you can use the form below, then hit your browser's "back" button to come back here.

The database contains all the names transliterated both from the Russian and the Hebrew records. To search this database you have two options:

1. Select the first letter of the name and search for all names starting with this letter by hitting the button at the end of the list;
   OR
2. Enter a name or a soundex-value to the text-box below and search the database for it.