We have indexed 2394 miloth for the year range 1812 – 1950. Please use the multiple generations of fathers’ names to construct robust family trees. The vast majority of these took place in Calcutta but also in other cities. The most traveled and prolific mohel was Aaron Shalom Yahya Gubbay who circumcised 633 boys in Calcutta as well as other cities including Gorakhpur, Ghazipur, Lucknow, Akyab (Burma), Madras, Kanpur, Darjeeling, Purnia and Hong Kong but they are unlikely to be the only miloth that took place in those cities. This volume covers the period 1859 to 1908 with a significant gap from Sept 1862 until December 1863. However, there are other registers that cover the same period with that of Aaron b. Hacham Abigedor Azriel (1859 – 1873, 116 miloth) and Saul b. Moses Aaron Lanyado (1874 – 1920, 494 miloth). There is also a small register of 59 miloth from Bension Saul Lanyado covering the period 1905 – 1911. We have now indexed those as well in addition to 343 of the earliest circumcisions from the period 1812 – 1860 in the register of Moses Dwek Cohen. Finally, the register of Sassoon Jacob Cohen has been added. It contains 749 miloth covering the period 1920 – 1950.
An enormous thank you is due to my friend, Barry Mizrahi (of New York), who was both the impetus to have the project started and the mechanism to achieve it, by physically doing a lot of the indexing himself. Another big thank you also goes to my mother, Judith Perl, for her work in indexing both Lanyado registers, aided as well by Donna and Mauri Delbaere. We are very grateful for the help of Joseph Mosseri (New York) for interpreting some difficult Judeo-Arabic notes and names.
In the spelling of names, we have tried to stay consistent with the marriage and cemetery records. Some records contain question marks as we were unable to decipher some of the names. To help with research, the search engine will return searches with varied spellings e.g. Hyam will return Hyeem and Haim as well. Important: while the date of milah is always shown, the exact date of birth may be given or in other instances, we just write the number of days after birth. The majority of these say “8 days”. It is important to point out, that the day of birth is counted as day one, so for example, if the milah took place on 28 Tammuz, the date of birth would be the 21st Tammuz and not the 20th. In some instances, if the boy is older, we use shorthand – y for year, m for month and d for day. By example: 2 years, 3 months and 3 days would be written as “2y 3m 3d”.
Finally, we know that these records do not reflect all of the circumcisions that took place in the community. We hope to be able to secure a copy of the register of Samuel Shalom Moses Dwek Cohen from one individual that contains another 254 from the period 1905 – 1923. We are also certainly missing some from the 1920s to 1950s which I suspect will never come to light.