Hoffnungstal-Odessa Parish (HOP) RIG Chapter

We are currently planning some additions to the HOP webpages.

We continue to bring back the annual St. Pete reports (1899-1917) for the parish of Hoffnungstal. As usual, our first issue of the newsletter this year will carry at least one year's worth of reports.

This past year we saw a re-publishing of the Leibbrandt Hoffnungstal book by the Hoffnungstal people in Germany. We did a group order and brought several copies to many of the HOP RIG members.

Many of the BDO reports for the villages that were founded in later years were founded by families from the GDO. So we have many ties in the BDO reports that readily tie back to the GDO families. Once both the BDO and GDO projects are done, we can combine the files and see the various families and how this data ties together.

BPC (Berlin Document Center) Indexing Projects

Great headway with the BDC efforts was accomplished this past year. The National Archives doubled their prices for each film, so a major effort was made to buy as many as we could before the price increase took effect. As a result, we should end up with almost every one of the EWZ 50 collection, and many of the EWZ 51 collection, and a few other films of other collections. Indexing is in process.

There is a project for the T-81 series of DAI films available from our National Archives. Significant indexing has already been completed on several of the films and is already posted on the various webpages. These materials include much "historically significant" information, mostly Bessarabian, that needs to be translated and shared.

These past four years, we have seen a significant increase in the EWZ indexing efforts. In excess of 935 of these films have now been indexed and placed on the Odessa Digital Library. Anyone holding EWZs who are willing to have them indexed should contact the Clearing House representatives for this EWZ indexing project. We have a representative in Canada and two in the USA.

Village - Family Databases

The BDO, GDO and HOP RIGs are busy building Family Databases for sharing on the RIG webpages.

This is a very ambitious set of projects and accommodates small teams well. If you go to the BDO and GDO webpages and look at the databases that have so far been assembled, you will readily see the value in making these types of "notes" available to the membership to aid in their research.