Or browse the whole finding aid

About Shul Records America

Synagogue records are among the richest and least accessible sources in American Jewish genealogy. They sit in congregational safes, in university special collections, in historical society basements, and in the homes of retired rabbis. Shul Records America is the map. It does not hold the records themselves — it tells you what survives, what it covers, and who to ask.

Coverage spans birth and circumcision registers, marriage records and ketubot, burial records, yahrzeit lists, membership and donor lists, board minutes, bar and bat mitzvah lists, conversions, congregational bulletins, and photographs — across the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean.

The collections are found and recorded by volunteers of the USA Research Division, one repository at a time. It grows whenever somebody tells us about a collection we did not know existed.

What is a finding aid?

A finding aid is a catalog of collections rather than a database of people. Searching SRA tells you that a particular congregation's marriage register from 1897 to 1934 survives, that it is held at a named archive, and whether it has been digitized. The next step is always to contact that repository.

That is the difference between SRA and a database like JOWBR, where you search for a person and find their record. Here you are searching for the box the records are in. It is a slower path, but for most American synagogue records it is the only one. Only about a tenth have been digitized so far; for the rest, writing to the repository is the only way in.