Announcing our new sister site SynagogueScribes!

The Cemeteryscribes website, www.Cemeteryscribes.com (previously www.Genpals.com Cemetery Project) has now been running for three years and, from the number of hits and the regular flow of comments and contributions we continue to receive, we believe you have found it useful.

We now have over 10,000 individuals on the site and some 3,330 headstone photographs, with many more still to be processed and several new burial grounds still to be catalogued: enough to keep us busy for a few more years! But, to keep us on our toes, and to make better use of some hitherto unpublished, Burial records, we decided to launch a new sister site SynagogueScribes

This one-stop gateway to Anglo-Jewish community records will offer a unique and fully searchable database of London Ashkenazi Synagogue records, with the emphasis on pre UK civil registration, which began on 1st July 1837.

The database already contains the names of over 11,500 marriage partners, drawn from the major London communities, The Great, The New, The Hambro and the Western Synagogues: more than 1,500 Birth Records from the registers of the Great and the New Synagogues: and over 1800 Circumcision Records from two Mohel Registers.  And, finally, approx. 600, never previously published, Burial Records dating from 1774 to 1810.  These exciting new records, taken from one of two registers held by the University of Southampton Library Archives & MS dept., [Ref MS 116/107 AJ] are still being transcribed and many more will be added over the coming months.

We have already made several links to burials in Brady Street Cemetery. Many of these record the deaths of children and stillborn or miscarried births and, whilst they may not add materially to your research, they may help to explain apparent age gaps between children. The Jewish schoolmaster, Hyman HURWITZ of Highgate, suffered several such losses.

We have sometimes been able to connect a "missing" spouse to their partner. CemeteryScribes I7647 Samuel b. Zachariah was buried in Brady Street 1799-1800. We have not located a grave for his widow but, from the Burial Register, we now know she died some 9 years later [DPL 0563 Burial 1809 [2 Jul] Widow ZACHARIAH) of Samuel ZACHARIAH Samuel (Samuel b. Zachariah) Gun Street Spitalfields.

Our most positive "find" to date is the listing of the 1801 death of R. Feivel b. Abraham Goldsticker. This record not only fixes the date of death for one of the Great Synagogues earliest members (# 247 in Roth's list published in Vol VI of the Miscellanies of the Jewish Historical Society) but it also adds two further generations to the family of CemeteryScribes ID I2603 Avigdor ABRAHAMS, and perpetuates their highly specialised business as Gold Embroiderers. This record is not yet on SynagogueScribes but will be added when we next update the website.

We ought to point out that Synagogue Scribes is a database of transcribed records which are not open to amendment or expansion. And we regret that we do not offer a Message Board facility, nor can we act as a recipient or publisher of Personal Genealogies, Family Trees, etc. We would, however, be delighted to hear from you if you are able to link any of the new burial records to any of the tombstones recorded in Cemeteryscribes.com