Finding Jewish Families at pilot.familysearch.org

A wonderful tool for those researching for their Jewish ancestors, is Record Search at pilot.familysearch.org. record search is the home of hundreds of databases holding hundreds of millions of individual records. To often it is overlooked because there are no Jewish specific databases, however, the records of our ancestors can be found there. A few easy steps can find those family members.

The image above is the starting page for searching Record Search. You have two options, either enter your names in the search boxes, to search all the records at once, or click on the Search or Browse our record collections. Should you choose the second option, you will be taken to the map below.

Once the map above appears, simply click on the region that you think you would most be able to find your family. For the record, according to this map, the British Isles are part of Europe. I know that is not the case, but for now we have to live with it. Once an area is chosen, the individual databases for that location will appear. If you click on Europe, you will see a list of all the countries. I then clicked on the Netherlands, which gave me the databases listed below. The red star signifies that the database is new. Record Search is constantly being added to and should be checked often.
From the list above I chose the first database, Netherlands Births and Baptisms, 1564-1910. I chose this because I know a family I am researching, the Gluckstein's were very prominent in Amsterdam before making their way to London. By entering the surname Gluckstein into the search box, I obtained the results listed below.

This is indeed the family I was looking for. The Gluckstein family moved from Holland to London and became leaders in business, military and government service. Even though it was not a Jewish database, the family was there. Record Search can be a great tool for Jewish researchers.


The records of the Glucksteins can be found in The Jews of the British Isles.