The Israeli genealogy website MyHeritage announced on Tuesday that several millions of Lithuanian Jewish historical records have been added to the website’s database as part of its partnership with a U.S. nonprofit organization.
LitvakSIG is the primary online genealogy resource site for Lithuanian Jews, also known as Litvaks. The records in the collection now published by MyHeritage were originally translated and indexed by LitvakSIG and represent almost all of LitvakSIG’s body of work over more than 20 years.
The Lithuanian Jewish records are currently searchable for free on the MyHeritage platform; however, a subscription is required to view the full records and access record matches.
MyHeritage, the world’s leading platform for discovering family history, has billions of historical records and family-tree profiles. It also has one of the largest consumer DNA databases with 4.8 million customers.
“Adding this collection from LitvakSIG provides a valuable resource for anyone of Lithuanian-Jewish origin,” said MyHeritage CEO and co-founder Gilad Japhet.
“On a personal level,” he said, “some of my own ancestors appear in this collection, including my paternal grandmother and her siblings from the small Lithuanian town of Valkininkai [Olkieniki], making this addition especially meaningful for me and my family.”
Jill Anderson, president of LitvakSIG, said that through its collaboration with MyHeritage, “LitvakSIG is fulfilling its mission to promote widely Lithuanian Jewish genealogical research. This arrangement will enable LitvakSIG to accelerate the pace of publishing new records, which will be added to the collection on MyHeritage in the future.”
