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April 24. 2006
Genealogical Breakthroughs at your Fingertips: Expanding the Jewish Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR)
by - Steven Brock

It was on a sunny spring day in 1998, that I walked among the rows and rows of headstones of the Baron de Hirsch Cemetery in Montreal, in search of one particular marker. Up and down the huge Russian section, looking for the last memory of a great-grandfather I never knew... never even heard of until a few weeks before. Suddenly there it was. A respectable-sized, white, weather-worn stone, engraved R' MICHEL YUROFSKY b"n SIMCHA. Died May 2, 1925, aged 68. In Memory of our Beloved Husband and Father. I stared in awe at the Hebrew and English letters on the stone for several minutes, before I took my camera and snapped a few frames of the stone. Finding that stone was the first real breakthrough I had discovered in the months since I began unraveling the puzzle that is my family's genealogy.

Passing away two years before my father was born, there was nobody alive who could recall my late grandmother's father. Who was he? Did he come to Canada, or did he die back in the old country? There was nobody left to remember. Could he have ever imagined that 73 years after his passing, around what would have been his 141st birthday, a great-grandson would search and find him in a quest to rekindle his name in memory, and preserve it going forward "Dor V'dor" from generation to generation?

On that day, what did I learn? From that simple stone, I now knew that Michel was born in about 1857. He eventually packed up his family and along with millions of other Jewish emigrants came to North America, for what he hoped would be a better life than they ever knew in Russia. However, most significantly, I now knew the name of HIS father. I had opened the gate to another generation up the ladder into my past, to what would logically bring that branch of the tree back into the 1820s.

How different this search may have been today a mere eight years later, thanks to the explosion of data made available over the Internet over the past several years. The amount of research and reference material now available, at your fingertips, has grown to enormous proportions. Information and data sources of genealogical importance which only a few years ago would have been accessible only by traveling to foreign libraries, archives and, as in my case, cemeteries, are now available to the general public (often without extra cost) with the click of a mouse.

One project currently being coordinated by JewishGen.org is an online searchable database of Jewish burial information from around the world. The Jewish Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR) already contains hundreds of thousands of entries pulling data from Jewish gravestones from every corner of the earth.

Today, I may have been able to find Michel Yurofsky without ever leaving my computer.

Just next door in the GTA, the Toronto JGS has already indexed over 20,000 gravestones in the three largest Jewish Cemeteries in the Toronto area (Pardes Shalom, Roselawn, and Dawes Road). Currently in the works is the Jones Avenue Cemetery. Finally, Oakville's only Jewish Cemetery (Shaarei-Beth El at Trafalgar Lawn) was indexed and submitted to JewishGen last autumn. Regrettably, as of the posting of this article, the Oakville entries had not yet been processed and published onto JOWBR's searchable database.

There are still three more Jewish cemeteries in the Halton region (Burlington's East Flamborough area), and four in Hamilton. It would be quite an accomplishment for our budding society, to be able to say that all Jewish graves in our vicinity have been indexed and made available to the world via the JOWBR. Once available, this formidable registry will provide amateur and professional genealogists alike with one more tool in discovering their Jewish relatives and ancestors who found their final resting places in Southern Ontario.