The Center For Jewish History Genealogy Institute

The Center For Jewish History Genealogy Institute helps new and experienced family history researchers learn about the world of their ancestors. It helps you learn about your ancestors by providing reference and educational services, and creating programming on family history and its connections to the broader sweep of Jewish history.

The Institute also leads researchers to the primary sources at the Center: Yizkor books and landsmanshaft records at YIVO, family and community histories at the Leo Baeck Institute, and military records at the American Jewish Historical Society are just a few of the rich primary sources open to researchers.

This has been added to Genealogy Resources Subject Tracer Information Blog.

What does the Center have about my family?
The Center for Jewish History is home to over 100 million archival documents and a half million books, distributed among the archives and libraries of the partner organizations. These include family histories, memoirs, correspondence, personal papers of prominent and less well-known individuals, and records of communal, cultural, political and professional organizations. Among these sources are many documents with information about individuals and families.

Many of the documents and books at the Center are in languages other than English, such as Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, German, Russian, Spanish, French, Hungarian, and others. Most of the document groups are not indexed or catalogued by family name, but it is possible to identify records about individuals and families. Please see our FAQ on finding genealogical resources at the Center (FAQ #4, below) to learn how to identify sources for your family history research. You may also download and print our fact sheets, which describe the genealogical resources at the Center.

The Center does not have ship passenger manifests, U.S. census records, most U.S. naturalization records, U.S. vital records, or most European vital records. To learn how to find those records, see our fact sheets on the topics.