1939 Shanghai Address+Business Directory of Jewish Refugees

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logan
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1939 Shanghai Address+Business Directory of Jewish Refugees

Post by logan »

With permission of Old China Hand Press, we are pleased to add this important reference for researchers of the Jewish community of Shanghai. As explained in its introduction, Tess Johnston located a photocopy of the original 1939 edition and, through her publisher Old China Hand Press, and with partner Deke Erh, organized this facsimile reprint in 1995. "Originally published in Shanghai in November 1939, this small replica contains the names, local addresses, cities of origin and previous occupations of thousands of German and Austrian Jews who fled to Shanghai before 1939." For questions about the availability of the reprint, which was sold out in August 2009, please contact Tess Johnston at tessinshanghai000@yahoo.com (remove the 000).

Thanks also to Georgia Haken, who provided us with her personal copy of the reprint and obtained the necessary permission. This is only available because of her willingness to share her copy, which will hopefully serve as inspiration for others who have rare and useful genealogical resources in their private possession.

Because this is a reprint of a photocopy of a 1939 book with small type, there are some deficiencies in the shapes of letters that do not affect human readability much but do reduce the accuracy of the OCR used to make the text searchable. For example, a too-heavily printed "e" might lose the hole at the top and be mistaken for a "c" by the OCR process, or a too-lightly printed "b" might have a gap in the bottom and be mistaken for an "h." Therefore, it is strongly suggested that you try the OCR-Adjusted search method, which will return both exact matches for your search term and matches that differ only by the most common OCR errors.

Also, Peter Nash has pointed out that some names might be misspelled in the book, such as his own Nachemstein appearing as Nachenstein. The OCR-Adjusted or D-M Soundex search methods might coincidentally find misspelled names, but there is no guarantee that they will.

To facilitate manual searches of surnames, for those who want to be certain that no matches have been missed because of OCR errors or are concerned about the possibility of misspellings, below are links to the first pages containing surnames beginning with each letter:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Z

-Logan
lindi_lmf
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Re: 1939 Shanghai Address+Business Directory of Jewish Refug

Post by lindi_lmf »

Thanks for posting this directory. I have just found my grandfather's name listed, which proves the story that my grandparents lived in Shanghai during WWII.
kellywaltersonu
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Re: 1939 Shanghai Address+Business Directory of Jewish Refug

Post by kellywaltersonu »

Thank you so much for posting this. I'm happy to have chanced upon this thread as the directory has the name listing of the family member I am researching. I already knew he was in Shanghai at the time but now I have an address as well.
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