After World War I, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) established the War Orphans Bureau to aid thousands of European Jewish children who had lost one or both parents. Many of these children lived in devastated towns across former Galicia. A key function of the Bureau was creating detailed orphan lists to manage aid distribution and track each child's needs. These lists were compiled at the town level through local networks of rabbis, teachers, orphanages, and relief workers. Each entry included the child’s name, age, birthplace, parents’ status, guardian, physical condition, and educational background. Children were classified as full orphans, half-orphans, or displaced, helping prioritize the level of assistance. The lists enabled the Bureau to provide stipends, clothing, food, education, and medical care. They were updated regularly and submitted to the JDC’s headquarters for monitoring and planning. Orphan lists also supported efforts to reunite children with relatives, and when available, included addresses of relatives abroad. These records were vital for accountability and long-term care coordination. Today, the lists serve as valuable historical resources documenting Jewish communal rescue efforts and as important genealogical records on children and their parents. Given the disruption to vital record keeping during World War I, these lists can provide information of a deceased parent’s year and cause of death which may not be recorded elsewhere. With the support of Gesher Galicia, I coordinated a project to transcribe data from orphan lists associated with towns within the former territory of Galicia into a searchable format available on Gesher Galicia’s All Galicia Database.

Alexander Feller has been researching his family history since 1998 which started as preparation for a trip to visit Rohatyn, Ukraine, the town of his mother’s birth. In 2008, he attended his first IAJGS conference where he met in person with other genealogists researching their ancestry from the town of Rohatyn. In hopes of connecting with these and other Rohatyn researchers from around the globe, he subsequently created the Rohatyn Shtetl Research Group. After expanding the scope of the group and renaming it the Rohatyn District Research Group, membership has grown to over 300 members. In addition to administering the group’s website, www.RohatynDRG.org, and moderating the group’s discussion forum, he also serves on the board for the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois and on the board of Gesher Galicia. In his free time, he continues to practice ambulatory anesthesia in the Chicagoland area.