Poor Jews' Temporary Shelter Database, 1896-1914

The database was developed in the first instance as a resource for undergraduate teaching and subsequently for historical and genealogical research. The teaching aspect was in the context of the pioneering Computing for Historians programme developed at Leicester between 1988 and 2002. This required all history students to undertake database work as a core element in their degree, involving an assigned quota of data input into one of a range of departmental databases and culminating in a finals project on their designated database. From a research point of view, work on the Shelter database received an important stimulus with the discovery that a substantial proportion of the migrants recorded in the database were bound for South Africa. This discovery attracted funding from the Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town, to help speed up the input by employing three postgraduates, and it led to the mounting of a partial online version of the database in Cape Town as part of a project there to research the development of South Africa’s early Jewish community at the beginning of the twentieth century. The database has subsequently been drawn on by two postgraduate theses and a number of publications.<br>