AL BELL'S TRANSLITERATION SCHEME

A – A
Á – B
 – V
à – G
Ä – D
Å – E (actually pronounced Ye)
¨ – Yo (never saw this letter)
Æ – ZH
Ç – Z
È – I (pronounced ee, as in feet)
I – I (this is an obsolete letter in modern Russian)
É – J (pronounced like the Y in yellow)
Ê – K
Ë – L
Ì – M
Í – N
Î – O
Ï – P
Ð – R
Ñ – S
Ò – T
Ó – U
Ô – F
Õ – KH
Ö – TZ (sometimes I may forget and write TS)
× – CH
Ø – SH
Ù – SHCH
Ü – hard sign (grammatical; doesn't change the sound of the letter)
Ú – soft sign (does something inexplicably Russian to the preceding consonant)
Û - Y
Ý – E
Þ – YU
ß – YA
"Crossed O" – TH (obsolete letter)
"Crossed b" – E, as in “eh” (obsolete letter)

Help! The Russian here looks like garbage.

To read Russian characters through your Web browser, you need to install Russian fonts (characters) on your computer and adjust the "Character Set" or "Encoding" option on your Web browser so that it will use the Russian characters when necessary. To install Russian fonts, roll up your sleeves or find a smart 12-year-old and visit this site:

The Jewish Records Indexing-Poland Inc. fonts instruction site

Once you've installed Russian fonts on your computer, you should be able to see the Russian forms on this page with your browser's Cyrillic Windows-1251 encoding.

To adjust your encoding in NETSCAPE, click on the View menu at the top of your screen, pick the Character Set sub-menu, then pick Cyrillic Windows-1251 from the options available through the sub-menu. This should not mess up the display of normal English text.

To adjust your encoding in INTERNET EXPLORER, click on the View menu, choose the Encoding sub-menu, then pick Cyrillic Windows-1251. This should not mess up the display of normal English text.