What is "The Knowles Collection"?

The Knowles Collection is a collection of records pertaining to the Jews of the British Isles. It is built upon the work of the late Isobel Mordy, of Middlesex, England. Her collection, which was put together for the most part before 1980 contained the records of about 7500 people in 160 family pedigrees. Considering that her work was done before the "computer age" and before the availability of many modern records, it was a wonderful source.

The Knowles Collection took that foundation and began using other records to fill in the gaps and link all the families into a fully search able electronic database. As of this post the collection covers the records of over 60000 individuals. While it is a collection of the Jews of the British Isles, there are Jews from over 30 different countries included. Mostly this has happened because at some point those people either moved to the British Isles or were visiting long enough to be included in the records.

The Knowles Collection is available free of charge to anyone searching for their Jewish ancestors. It can be found on the Jewish resources page at http://www.familysearch.org/. If you would like to have the records of your own family added simply email this blog for information.