The Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen East-Westphalia-Lippe Division, the Association for Computer Genealogy (CompGen) and the Westphalian Society for Genealogy and Family Research (WGGF) have created a platform on which those interested in family and local history can access the Jewish civil registers of the 19th century from the comfort of their own desk. The project was launched at the 7th Westphalian Genealogy Day in Altenberge near Münster in March 2017 (see http://juwel.genealogy.net).

Anyone interested can register and participate on the project page, either by navigating to a specific location or by simply having the system present the next unprocessed page. The only requirement is a certain amount of experience in reading old manuscripts, which is essential for family and local history researchers anyway. The participants are supported by the administrators Thomas Dickel and David Merschjohann.

The Jewish and dissident registers, in which the births, marriages and deaths of those inhabitants of Westphalia and Lippe who did not belong to the official churches were registered from 1815 until the introduction of the registry offices in 1874, are preserved almost completely and comprehensively at the Detmold site of the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen. These form the fonds

• P 2 Jewish and dissident registers of the administrative district of Detmold
• P 5 Register of Jews and dissidents of the administrative district of Arnsberg
• P 8 Register of Jews and dissidents of the administrative district of Münster.

The Westphalia Division has made the seal collection (fonds W 251) available online. Anyone can access all the seals as digital copies via the catalogue on Archive NRW. Two thirds of the seals have already been identified, while around 2,400 seals have not yet been indexed.

The Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen therefore asks the interested public for support: anyone who has information on the identification of the seals listed in Section 3 of the Findbuch (or corrections in Sections 1 and 2) is invited to send this to Siegel.Westfalen[at]lav.nrw.de, stating sources or supporting documents if possible.

The Landesarchiv will not be able to display the reports online in real time, but will collect them and update the online finding aid at suitable intervals. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all participants for their support!