This archive makes claims about real people: that a particular document belonged to a particular person, that a name typed in Kaunas in 1940 is the same name a family carries today. Those claims can be wrong, and a wrong one attaches a stranger's papers to somebody's grandfather. This page sets out the rules the archive works by, so that anyone can judge a record here — or argue with it.
Everything starts from Sugihara's own ledger: 2,140 lines, one for every visa issued, each line with a name, a nationality, a visa type, a date and a fee. That is all. There are no birth years and no birthplaces. Today 86 of those lines have a birth year attached, and only because a surviving document supplied it.
Why 2,140, when the ledger's numbers only run to 2,139? Because the numbering and the visas are not the same thing. George Bluman and Akira Kitade established the true count in their study of the list, and this archive has now verified the mechanics line by line against the Foreign Ministry scan: the clerk skipped number 1395 (the jump falls in the middle of the Frliczka family), and squeezed in two supplementary entries — 1160a, Berkowicz Chaim, and 1915a, Wojlang Sara — marked with an “a” in the ledger itself. 2,138 numbered lines plus two supplementary ones: 2,140 issued visas. The searchable register below holds all 2,140, including the two “a” lines, credited to that research. (The Bluman–Kitade file records the same 2,140 people; an earlier edition carried Kuszynski Bazyli, our No. 1669, as a second No. 99 — a clerical slip, as Prof. Bluman confirmed in August 2026; the scan shows him at 1669.) And beyond the ledger altogether, perhaps a thousand more visas — the hotel-issued, the final-days, the never-entered — were written and never recorded at all.
The clerk was also inconsistent about name order: most lines run surname first (“Trunk Chil”), but many run given-name first (“Ludwig Berliner”), and some — “Licht Abram” — could be read either way. The register preserves each line exactly as typed; the Bluman–Kitade reading, which resolves surname and given name for every entry, rides alongside as a searchable alias, so a search in either order finds the person.
The typescript itself is damaged in a specific way: on 934 lines the leading letter of a name is missing, so Swislocki reads as wislocki and Rozenbaum as ozenbaum. 1,150 lines carry a repaired reading. A repair is a judgement, and it is recorded as one — the original text is never overwritten, and every repair is listed in the corrections log.
In roughly this order of weight:
A name in 1940 Kaunas could be written in Polish, Lithuanian, German, Yiddish or Russian, by a clerk hearing it for the first time, and then changed again after the war. So the archive compares names allowing for the ordinary drift between them: sz / s / sch, cz / c, rz / z, w / v, dropped leading letters, given names in either order, and post-war anglicisation — Herszberg becoming Hershberg, Klejn becoming Klein.
A name that agrees is where a match starts, not where it ends. The question that decides it is whether anything else agrees: the visa number, the date of issue, the nationality, the family travelling on the same sheet, a birthplace, a photograph.
The large archives hold millions of records. Searching one of them for a common name returns a crowd: a single line of our register, searched against a European archive, returned ten men of that exact name born between 1866 and 1931. Any of them might be the right one. Nothing on our side can say which — and a coin-flip published as a fact is worse than an open question.
Where a name is genuinely rare, a match carries real weight. Where it is common, the archive records the record as a lead and says so on the page, rather than quietly turning a possibility into an identification.
Almost everyone on this list crossed the Pacific. They left Lithuania by rail through Siberia, sailed from Japan, and landed at Seattle, San Francisco or Vancouver — and the officials who met them wrote down what the consular clerk in Kaunas had not: a year of birth, a birthplace, a ship, a date.
That gives the archive something it badly needed. The register records an age and no birth date, so a name alone can never settle an identification. An arrival record made years later and an age written in Kaunas in 1940 are two independent hands; when they agree, they agree about a person. 108 lines of the register have been matched this way, across sailings of the Heian Maru, Hikawa Maru, Hie Maru, Asama Maru and the President Cleveland.
One family shows what the agreement is worth. The register gives entry No. 1410 a wife and three children with their ages and nothing else. All six of them appear on a single sailing into San Francisco in 1946, and every age the clerk wrote in August 1940 matches a birth year an American official recorded six years later. Travelling with them is a sixth child, born in 1946 — absent from the ledger not because it missed him but because he did not yet exist when it was written.
The same records show the reverse, too. Documents survive for people who took this route, on these ships, in these months, and who appear nowhere in the consular list under any spelling. The ledger is not the whole of who escaped this way.
The consular clerk recorded whoever held the visa. A wife or a child travelling on it was often written as an aside — “wife Bertha (29)” — with a name, an age, and no line of their own. They cannot be counted, cannot be searched for, and cannot be found by a descendant looking up a family name.
The archive now records them: 372 people so far, of whom 196 are children. Their median age is 10; 44 were under five.
They are recorded exactly as the ledger has them and no further. “Bertha, wife, aged 29” — no surname, because the note gives none, and guessing one from the entry produces errors: the register writes name order both ways round, and families share a surname across neighbouring lines. Where the note gives an age and no name at all, nobody is recorded. She travelled, and we cannot name her; saying so is honest, and inventing a name for her is not.
Almost everyone written into Sugihara’s register was born between about 1895 and 1925. If they were living they would be over a hundred, so the bare fact that someone has died is not a revelation and this archive does not treat it as one. What carries weight — and what a family will feel — is the manner and place: murdered at Ponary, deported from the Kovno ghetto, died in a camp on Flores.
So a death is stated here when a named source establishes it for this person: the family, a document, or a researcher who says how they know. The source and the date are published beside it, so that anyone who thinks it wrong can say so and can see what would have to be argued with. Manner and place meet the same standard as any other claim on this site, and are never inferred from a name matched in a database.
If a fate here is wrong, tell us. It will be corrected or removed, and no family is asked to justify the request.
Identifications here have been withdrawn after they were published, and will be again. When that happens the record says so rather than quietly reverting: a proposed match set aside is left visible as a question, unlinked from the register line it was claiming. Every change the archive has made — 15,133 recorded so far — is kept and published in the corrections log, with the reasoning.
The standard the archive tries to hold is simple: it is better to leave a document unattached than to attach it to the wrong person. An empty line can be filled later. A wrong name, once a family has read it, travels.
What the archive cannot yet answer has a page of its own: the visas and documents nobody has been able to place, the register lines with no record beyond the 1940 list, the questions standing on particular people, and the readings still unsettled with the compilers of the list. It used to sit here, at the foot of this page, and it outgrew that.
Think a record here is wrong — or know it is? Tell us. Corrections from families and researchers are the main way this archive improves, and they are credited in the log.