The Máramaros/Maramureş County Jewish Records Indexing Project

We're transcribing all surviving pre-1896 Jewish vital records from Máramaros county, Hungary

The Máramaros/Maramureş County Jewish Records Indexing Project is a volunteer-run genealogy and history project, working to create a free searchable online database of all known surviving 18th and 19th Century Jewish community records from the formerly Hungarian county of Máramaros. That county is today split between Maramureş county in northern Romania and the Zakarpattya (sub-Carpathian) region of southwestern Ukraine.

The 113 surviving birth, marriage, and death register books for the Jewish community of Máramaros are currently stored at a branch of the Romanian National Archives located in the city of Baia Mare, Romania. While many civil records also exist for these towns -- meaning that everyone in a given town was registered in the same book, regardless of their religion -- we've chosen to focus this project only on Jewish community vital records, which were only kept officially prior to 1896. Most of the towns in the county had records kept begininng in the 1850's.

With the help of a photographer in Romania who traveled to the Baia Mare regional archives for us, we have now obtained digital photographs of every one of the 113 surviving Jewish community record books. (Originally we believed that there were 115 books, but it turned out that one book was mislabeled and one birth records book unfortunately appears to have gone missing from the archives sometime between 1972 and 2009.) These register books have not been microfilmed by the Mormons (LDS Church) yet, nor by the Romanian government. Other than actually traveling to the archives in Baia Mare, or hiring a researcher to go there, the only way for genealogists and historians to research these records is to join our project.

This project has been funded through generous donations from genealogists around the world, and is managed through the Hungarian Special Interest Group (H-SIG), which is part of the fantastic non-profit genealogy website JewishGen.

Latest project news

As of February 27, 2012:

• 113 pre-1896 vital record books from the Jewish community are known to exist in the Baia Mare archives. As of early 2011, all of the books have now been digitally photographed and acquired by the project!
• 51 books, containing an estimated 32,400 records, are currently in the process of being transcribed by project volunteers. This is about 61.54% of the total number of records available.
• 39 books, containing 9,948 records, have already been completely transcribed by volunteers. This is about 18.90% of the total number of records available.
• Based on completed record counts and on uncompleted record estimates, we think that the total number of records in this project when it is eventually completed will be approximately 53,000 records! Assuming at least three to six names listed per record (parents, spouses, etc.), these 53,000 records may yield about 200,000 names!
• No records have been uploaded to any public databases yet. Soon, we hope. :-)