For centuries, Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe took shape in small market towns. Shtetale gathers what survives of those places into one record. The atlas holds the towns. The memorial books hold the names. And the descendants of the same towns, scattered across continents, can find one another here and add what their families hold.
Reading the atlas and the memorial books is free, with or without an account.
Dziatlava District, Belarus
pl. I · dzyatlava, sketched from memory (after the yizkor book)
Enter people by hand, build them out with the research assistant, or import a GEDCOM from Ancestry, MyHeritage, or Gramps. Link each person to the town they came from.
Search the atlas by a present name, a historical name, or any spelling a town was written under. Open a town to read its memorial books and meet the descendants gathered there.
Draft a footnoted narrative from your tree and the town records, with AI assistance and a choice of voice. Edit it, then export it as PDF or DOCX.
A shtetl was a market town, a street of trades, a synagogue, a cheder, a burial society, the houses of families who knew one another by name. Most of that life came to an end in the 1940s. What survives is held in archive drawers and in the memorial books the survivors set down afterward, and in the memory of the families who came from these places.
Shtetale brings several of these sources together, so that a name searched in one can be followed into the others. These were largely Ashkenazi communities; visiting the atlas is a way of keeping the names with the towns they belonged to.
cat. 014 · atlas
Each town in the atlas has a page. It gathers the descendants who have joined, the surnames they are tracing, and the notes and photographs that visitors have added. What you leave stays with the town, and the next person looking for the same streets finds it there.
cat. 027 · yizkor
After the destruction of these communities, the survivors set down what they remembered in yizkor books. They record the streets, the synagogues, the trades and societies, the families, and the names of those who were killed. Search them by surname. Where your name appears, the passage comes back translated, with the book and the page.
cat. 040 · open stacks
The atlas and the memorial books can be read without an account. To build a family tree, join a town, or set down a story, make a free account.