The Botosani research team was established in 2008, by a small group of researchers with roots in the city and county of Botosani.
Sorin Goldenberg and Robert Zavos visited the Botosani branch of the Romanian National Archives. During the visit we took photos of the indexes to the civil state records (births and marriages only) of the city of Botosani, compiled by the local staff.
Teaming up with the late Rony Shaham, Bruno Segal, Edward Hardiman and Luc Radu we decided to digitize those indexes.
The next step was acquiring records based on our digital version of the indexes, which made search much easier. The results were not satisfying. Given that the original index was very lacking in information and incomplete, and the additional challenges in Jewish Romanian genealogical research (see here), we understood that much more is needed for a thorough research. We decided that we need to acquire all the records, index them by ourselves, so we will be sure that no relevant record will be missed.
We were able to acquire the records using the services of a local photographer and indexed the records, thus creating the first complete database of civil state records for the Jewish population of a city in Romania. But, we didn't stop there. Step by step, we continued to acquire records from other locations in Botosani county, and later, from additional cities and towns in the Moldova region that had a significant Jewish population.
More details can be found here.