Volunteers needed: Cyrillic, Hebrew

Can you read and transliterate accurately from Hebrew or Cyrillic to English?

This is your chance to do a mitzvah (Hebrew, good deed) for thousands of researchers around the world who do not have your language skills. This project is for the JewishGen Romania Special Interest Group (RomSIG) , with data destined for the Romania Database.

And, if your roots are in the towns named below, you might even discover your own family's records while participating!

RomSIG coordinator Bob Wascou (Sacramento, California) desperately needs people who can read the difficult Hebrew. For Kishinev, nearly all the Cyrillic records have been done, but the Hebrew records need to be validated. For Balti, there are many records to be done from scratch in both languages.

I know readers are asking about validation, which is basically a term for quality control.

Volunteers will quality control those Kishinev vital records already translated from Cyrillic. This requires a person fluent in Hebrew to check what was entered on Excel spreadsheets and add anything different from the original Hebrew record.

For Balti, volunteers are needed to both translate the Cyrillic and Hebrew vital records and input data in Latin letters on Excel spreadsheets.

More than 123,000 records were created by the Jewish communities in the towns were the events took place, with text in both Russian (Cyrillic) and Hebrew script.

The original records are at the National Archives of the Republic of Moldova (NARM) in Chisnau, Moldova, were microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah, and were provided to JewishGen on CD-ROMs. The films are available through the LDS Family History Library and all LDS Family History Centers.

Requirements:

- Volunteers must have the ability to read Hebrew or Cyrillic
- To view JPG images as email attachments
- Knowledge of Excel
- Ability to input data into Excel template
- Have a high degree of accurate data entry.

All entries will be made in Latin letters, and transliterated as necessary from Hebrew or Russian according to standardized guidelines, which will be supplied to volunteers.

To volunteer, email Bob and tell him about your language skills.

For more information, check out this webpage.