The Krzemieniec Research Area

Ellen Garshick, Area Coordinator

Isn’t Krzemieniec (Kremenets) in Ukraine, not Poland? Yes, but from 1921 to 1939, following World War I,  Krzemieniec (along with other parts of the Russian Pale) was governed by Poland. In fact, in September 1939 the Polish government temporarily relocated to the city of Krzemieniec. Because of that brief stay in Poland, in the early 2000s JRI-Poland’s founding executive director, Stanley Diamond (z’’l), welcomed Ron Doctor and Sheree Roth in setting up the Kremenets Shtetl Co-Op within JRI-Poland.

Ron and Sheree soon obtained some Krzemieniec vital records from the Family History Library, had them translated, and posted them in JRI-Poland’s Legacy Database. They quickly established a community of supporters with origins in the towns of the Krzemieniec district. In 2009, Ron and Sheree established the Kremenets District Research Group (KDRG) as a nonprofit. And as of 2025, the Co-Op is JRI-Poland’s Krzemieniec Research Area. (See https://www.jri-poland.org/town/krzemieniec/)

We’ve grown quite a bit since Ron and Sheree’s pioneering work. Our community of email subscribers and supporters has reached 500 people. The research area includes 24 towns, the largest being Krzemieniec.

Other major towns include:

• Berezce (Berezhtsy) ,
• Bialozorka (Belozirka),
• Jampol (Yampol),
• Katrynburg (Katerburg),
• Kozin,
• Krupets,
• Lanowce (Lanovtsy),
• Oleksiniec (Oleksinets),
• Poczajow (Pochayev),
• Rachmanow (Rokhmanov),
• Radziwiłlow (Radzivilov),
• Szumsk (Shumsk),
• Wiśniowiec (Vishnevets), and
• Wyzgrodek (Vyshgorodok).

Records and documents we have translated include more than 37,000 vital records (births, marriages, divorces, and deaths); Revizskiy Skazki and Posemeynyy Spisoki (Revision List and Family List, or census) entries for nearly 133,500 individuals; resident lists; voter lists; guild lists; school feepayer lists; conscription lists; yizkor books; and many more. You can access some of these records via JRI-Poland’s Legacy Database. Names and towns from all of these records are indexed in the Kremenets Concordance Database Index.

Our current focus is making all of our records publicly available via JRI-Poland’s NextGen Database, so we are currently converting our data to the new format. And we continue to look for additional records for the towns of the Krzemieniec district. For more information, please send an email to Research Area Coordinator Ellen Garshick.