Archive for December, 2009
It has been suggested that the best way to understand the history of Bosnia is to read Ivo Andrić’s 1945 novel “The Bridge On The Drina”, to which is worth adding “The Slave Girl & Other Stories About Women” and “The Damned Yard”. His imagining of small town and rural Bosnia brings the region to life in a way that no number of political or social histories can. That is the mark of a great writer. As also is the fact that he is even-handed. He writes equally well and convincingly in the voice of the Turk, the Bosniak (often referred to as “Turks”, as per the Serbian vernacular), the Jew, the Gypsy and of course the Christian rayah, the Serbian Orthodox peasantry which constituted the largest population block (although not a majority) in the Bosnian countryside throughout the 19th century.
The eponymous bridge is that in Višegrad and Andrić’s chronicle spans the centuries from its construction in the 1570s to its destruction by retreating Austro-Hungarian forces in 1914. Andrić is particularly good at expressing the puzzlement of the native population, of all faiths, during the times of the Austrian occupation in 1878 and annexation of the province in 1908, at the Austrian compulsion to quantify and order everything, which is utterly alien to the Bosnian mindset and way of life. The strategic blowing-up of the bridge by the departing Austrians seems a senseless and wanton act to the townsfolk. Although this is the point at which the chronicle culminates, the bridge itself was restored and witnessed much else besides in the course of the 20th century.
Several times in his writings, Andrić touches upon the generational succession of families in Bosnia, in particular the dislocation which tends to follow prosperity or aspiration. This is one of the factors which led to emigration elsewhere within Bosnia (to the city of Sarajevo, for instance), or within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or further afield. The small town or village which had been the historical home of a family for decades or centuries could no longer contain it. In the short story “Zuja”, the narrator explains how the large and prosperous Aleksić extended family was scattered over the course of three generations:
“That little clan, which had become affluent, then rich, started, for that very reason, to disperse. The boys, then the girls, went off into the world and few of them returned… and fewer stayed behind to live, work and earn, as their elders had done… The population dwindled and moved away. And so it is today that there are Aleksićes in parts of Bosnia and Yugoslavia, and even far off around the world, but in town there is not a single one of them left.”
Before November 1918 you would not find Latvia in an atlas, for there was no such country. Pre-WW1 literature in English, following German usage, referred to Latvians as Letts or the Lettish (although strictly speaking this was a term for the native language). Latvia as a modern state was forged in the crucible of WW1, with the collapse of Empire, the October Revolution in Russia, and the victorious Allies’ partial and often expedient commitment to self-determination. The new nation state emerged from former Tsarist Russia, out of Courland, Livonia and part of the Vitebsk gubernia known as Latgale.
From July 1915 until the defeat of Germany, Latvia was under German occupation and, having fled or been evacuated with the retreating Russian army, up to one third of Latvians found themselves living in exile in Russia. Much of the momentum for independence built up among these Latvian refugees.
The right of return for former inhabitants was first extended under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in February 1918. Perhaps 400,000 refugees were repatriated from Russia in the months up to November 1918: note that this figure includes Baltic Germans as well as ethnic Latvians. A further 225,000 or so were repatriated between 1920 (following the Latvian-Russian Refugee Re-evacuation Agreement in June of that year, and the Latvian-Soviet Russian Peace Treaty in August) and 1924. This total includes, as well as Latvian wartime refugees, significant numbers of Latvian agricultural colonists, an estimated 200,000 of whom had settled in southern Russia and Ukraine from the 1880s onwards. Notwithstanding this movement of people, 186,000 Latvians remained in Soviet Russia, while an estimated 60,000 left newly independent Latvia for Russia (both ethnic Russians and Latvian communists disappointed with so-called White Latvia).
The wartime and post-War displacement of large numbers of Latvians, and the complexity of this background of upheaval, can complicate family history, which is seldom a simple linear narrative at the best of times. It may begin to explain why your grandmother seems to have been living as a young girl in Omsk in Siberia around 1918/19 (she was a refugee there); or why a great grandfather, who was a city boy born in Rīga and a Latvian Riflemen veteran, became a small farmer in Latgale in the mid-1920s (he was awarded land there by the new state); or why your great great grandparents, who were clearly ethnic Latvians, appear to have been living in the region of Kharkiv, Ukraine at the close of the C19th (they were pioneering colonists in the 1880s).
These events also mean that you may need to think laterally when researching your Latvian family history. For instance, if your ancestors came from Latgale (say, from Daugavpils, Ludza or Rēzekne), it is quite possible that at least some of the records you will need to use when reconstructing your family tree will be found, not in Latvia, but in Belarus, in which Vitebsk is now situated.
In April 1941, a new administration, Nezavisna Država Hrvatska or NDH, was established in Croatia as a client state of Nazi Germany and with it a reign of terror.
Although Istria and parts of Dalmatia including the port city of Split, usually considered Croatian, were annexed by Italy, the territory of the NDH extended across Bosnia Hercegovina and the Srem. This meant that the Ustaša, the Croatian fascist party, were responsible for lands that included, as well as the Bosniaks, an estimated 1.9 million Serbs and sizeable populations of Sephardic Jews and Roma.
Summary executions of Serbs began almost immediately, and mass deportations from 4th June 1941. 180,000 Serbs are believed to have fled Bosnia for Serbia by the end of July 1941 and tens of thousands who stayed were rechristened as Roman Catholics. By the end of 1942, perhaps 150,000 Serbs were detained in death camps on the territory of the NDH, 300,000 had been killed, and thousands more had been sent to Auschwitz.
The Jewish population of NDH in April 1941 was probably between 36,000 and 39,500. They were immediately subjected to plunder, victimisation, arrest and execution. 26,000 died in Ustaša death camps, the most notorious of which was Jasenovac. The camp’s population apparently never exceeded 3,000, as prisoners were usually murdered shortly after arrival. At least 80,000 people – Jews, Serbs, Roma, and communists including Croats and Bosniaks – died at Jasenovac.
There are two websites which contain specific information about individuals at Jasenovac.
The first is the Jasenovac Memorial Site, which has a searchable database of 75,159 names of those killed at the Jasenovac complex. This is a work in progress and the number is that of known victims as at November 2008. The final count will be higher.
The second, the Jasenovac Research Institute, has published a larger database of 597,323 names of Yugoslavs killed in WW2, compiled by Yugoslavia’s Federal Institute of Statistics in 1964.
You should search both these databases if you believe that a relative may have died in Yugoslavia during WW2, or are trying to determine the fate of a missing person.
Except for the two databases mentioned, all the numbers given above are estimates and different sources give different, sometimes wildly different, numbers. The majority cited here are from Yugoslavia As History: Twice There Was A Country, by the US academic John R Lampe, published by Cambridge University Press (2nd ed, 2000).
Belarus is not an easy place in which to conduct family history research. For a start, its geographical location meant that it was fought over in both World Wars and many places where vital records were held – churches and chapels, synagogues, town halls and archives – were accidentally or deliberately destroyed during the conflicts. For instance, an estimated 80% of the buildings in the capital Minsk were destroyed during WW2. This means that for some localities the surviving documentary record begins in 1945; all earlier records may be lost.
Secondly, its territory has been much disputed and its current borders do not much resemble those of its inter-War predecessor the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic: much of Belarus’s current western lands were part of Poland at that time. And before WW1, what is now Belarus was overlain with a number of the gubernias of Tsarist Russia. What this means is that surviving vital records for localities within modern Belarus may not be located within the country itself. Many records are to be found in Poland, especially Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic parish registers. Others are in Lithuania and, almost certainly, in Russia. As more archives are catalogued in detail, or existing catalogues published or translated, it is quite likely that new sources for Belarusian research will emerge over time.
The civil register offices in Belarus are known by the acronym ZAGS. This is where contemporary events of birth, marriage and death are registered and where post-WW1 registers are kept. These records are effectively closed to general research, although of course next of kin and attorneys will be granted copies of register entries upon application and submission of evidence of entitlement. In due course, the ZAGS registers are transferred to the National Historical Archives, where they are catalogued and made generally available on open access. However, a strict cut-off point does not appear to be operated. As some ZAGS offices possess records for the pre-WW1 period, sometimes even extending back into the late C19th, it is never entirely certain whether all surviving records within Belarus are already in the National Historical Archives or, alternatively, whether others remain at one or other of the ZAGs. The reverse is also true, in that birth, marriage and death registers from the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, which one would expect to be held in the ZAGS and to be closed, are in fact already in the National Historical Archives.
Catalogues provide good visibility of the holdings in the National Historical Archives, which are situated in Minsk and Grodno. Study of these catalogues reinforces the point made earlier about the loss of records: where there are surviving registers for individual localities, these are invariably piecemeal due to loss or destruction at different times. It is impossible to generalise. Records for one Russian Orthodox parish locality, for example, may extend seemingly unbroken for 80 or 90 years, while for another locality nearby only a handful of years may be extant.
Bluebird Research has contacts on the ground in Belarus and will happily provide you with an opinion on the feasibility of and prospects for research. Please supply as much background information as you have, including place of birth or residence, ethnicity and faith.
Australia’s population changed radically after WW2: not only was the rate of population increase unprecedented in Australian history, but there were new waves of continental European immigrants in the immediate post-War period 1947 to 1952 and continuing throughout the 1950s and ‘60s.
While the British Isles still contributed the greatest number by far, the 1961 federal census showed, for example, 228,296 enumerated individuals born in Italy, 109,315 born in Germany, 102,083 born in the Netherlands, 77,333 born in Greece and 60,049 in Poland, with smaller numbers from other countries across Europe.
Assisted passage schemes were agreed not just with UK government (the widely-known “ten-pound pom” scheme) but also with countries such as Greece and Malta, and proved very popular. These meant that immigrants over the age of 19 years paid a nominal sum (Aus $25) towards their passage, with the balance being picked up by the Australian state. For the two assisted passage schemes just mentioned, 91,927 Greeks and 71,660 Maltese entered Australia between 1947 and 1969. There was some return migration after two or three years, but the majority settled, naturalised and became Australian citizens.
Today, people of Greek birth or descent make up the 7th largest ethnic community in Australia: in the 2006 census, 365,147 claimed wholly or partly Greek ancestry, of whom 235,140 stated that both their parents were born outside Australia. These figures include significant numbers of Greeks from Cyprus, Egypt and Turkey.
The Greek community in Melbourne is reckoned to be the single biggest outside Greece, larger even that those in New York and Chicago. Melbourne districts such as Coburg, Doncaster, Oakleigh, Port Melbourne and Preston have particular concentrations.
Bluebird Research is able to assist with Greek genealogical research and will be pleased to provide a free assessment upon request.
Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire in the ten years either side of 1900 are generally thought of as having fled the persecution and poverty there for the safe shores of America. However, a lesser-known story is that of the Jews from Russia who travelled to South Africa.
These migrants came especially from the region around the city of Kovno, now known as Kaunas in Lithuania. As well as the city itself, many came from towns elsewhere in the Kovno gubernija (which corresponds to the greater part of central and northern Lithuania), such as Palanga, Panevėžys, Rietavas and Šiauliai.
They travelled via a port such as Libau (today’s Liepāja in Latvia) on ships bound, via the Baltic Sea and (after its opening in 1895) the Kiel Canal shortcut, for English east coast ports. From there, they travelled overland, usually via London, to Southampton to embark for the Cape.
This movement of people was not accidental: a whole business existed to cater for them, from the ticket agents in the Kovno area, to shipping lines such as the Wilson Line shuttling between Libau and Hull, to the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter in London which housed and orientated many of the trans-migrants, to the Castle Line and the Union Line which specialised in the route to the Cape.
And like any successful movement of people, it became self-perpetuating, as the new South Africans sent home letters, and money, encouraging others to follow suit. The first countrywide Union of South African census in 1911 indicates a population of 46,919 Jews, a majority of whom were Lithuanian Jews or Litvaks who had arrived since 1892 and were residing in the Cape. By 1921, the Jewish population had risen to 62,103, but with more of a shift in gravity towards the gold-mining and commercial centres of Witwatersrand in the Transvaal (which accounted for 33,515).
What this means is that a great many of those North Americans and British with Litvak ancestors are likely to have kin in South Africa. There are many good sources for Jewish family history research in Lithuania and prospects of success are often favourable, as long as the place of origin within the country is known or can be identified. Bluebird Research also has an excellent researcher in South Africa should genealogical research be required there.
In nearly all jurisdictions in Europe, vital records of value to genealogists are not held centrally in a single repository but are decentralised. Modern civil registers of birth, marriage and death tend to be held at municipality level; older registers and other public records are usually in regional or national state archives. In this context, the first step in any family history research in Europe is to identify the place of origin and ensure you have the correct starting point for your investigations.
Where two or more places of any size in the former Yugoslavia shared the same name, it was usual to distinguish between them by applying a regional adjective by way of prefix. For instance, there are places called Brod in Bosnia, Croatia and Macedonia which are known as Bosanski Brod, Slavonski Brod and Makedonski Brod respectively. Similarly, there are Bosanski Petrovac (in Bosnia) and Bački Petrovac (in the Bačka area of Vojvodina, Serbia). There are other ways of differentiating places, for instance there is also a Petrovac na Mlavi (on the river Mlava, in Serbia) and a Petrovac na Moru (on Sea, in Montenegro).
Of course, locally and in every day speech where there is little risk of confusion, Brod and Petrovac are likely to simply be referred to as Brod and Petrovac, and this also how they may be appear in many documents (such as passenger lists and immigration records) and family papers used in family history. Some care needs to be exercised, therefore, to ensure that the correct place of origin is identified.
Mitrovica is another town name which is not unique. There is a Sremska Mitrovica and a Mačvanska Mitrovica (also known as Srpska Mitrovica), which are located in the Srem and Mačva districts of Serbia respectively but are actually facing each other across the Sava river. There is also a Kosovska Mitrovica, a city in northern Kosovo which is effectively divided into an ethnic Albanian south and an ethnic Serbian north, the two sides of the city being separated by the river Ibar. The city has been deeply troubled since the 1999 Kosovo War and tensions still run high. On the southern side of town, the Orthodox church of St Sava was burnt down in March 2004 (one of 35 churches and monasteries in Kosovo to be destroyed and damaged by Kosovar Albanians in a single week of violence). The Serbian Orthodox cemetery has been desecrated and an estimated 70% to 80% of gravestones vandalised; it can only be visited safely under police escort. Whatever your politics and religion, if you feel any attachment to your own home town, or can imagine the destruction of its cemetery, and if you attach any importance to place, as all family historians do, you will understand the anguish of the Serbs of Kosovska Mitrovica.
Bluebird Research offers professional family history research services throughout Serbia and the former Yugoslavia. The feasibility of research in Kosovo can only be decided on a case-by-case basis: for an opinion, please e-mail us the details you have.
It is a cruel irony that wartime internment tends to catch more innocent victims than any real enemy within. In the C20th, definitions of enemy aliens have focused on the holding of passports only; if on the evidence of this document it appears that you are a citizen or subject of a nation with which we are at war, you shall be treated with suspicion at best, and quite possibly rounded up in camps.
The outbreak of WW2 is a striking case in point. Britain was one of the countries to which refugees from German Nazism and Italian Fascism were trying to escape. At the outbreak of war, there may have been 74,000 Germans and Austrian passport holders in Britain, plus 19,000 Italians and 8,000 Czechs. Inevitably the great majority of these people, the victims of right-wing authoritarian regimes, would hold foreign passports. Not all would be intending to remain in UK: some would be waiting for entry visas to USA or hoping to relocate to Palestine. When war was declared in September 1939, the authorities categorised aliens as class A, B or C. Class A were interned for reasons of national security, B remained at liberty but faced some restrictions, while C were recognised as friendly and, in many cases, refugees from Nazism. However, with a change of government in May 1940 and a perceived heightened risk of invasion, an emergency decision was taken initially to intern all male aliens between the ages of 16 and 70 located in a wide strip around the south and east coasts, followed by all class B German and Austrian male citizens. In June 1940, the class C men under 70 were also interned. Nazi sympathisers, members of the Italian Fascist Party, German communists and Jewish refugees were now treated the same.
One of the least explicable episodes which followed was the transfer of 2,542 mostly German and Austrian internees on the Dunera to Australia. The ship left Liverpool in July and arrived in Sydney in September 1940. At least 90% of those on board were Jewish, including perhaps 400 teenage boys aged 16 and over, although there were others who had also been oppressed by the Nazis, including Sudeten Communists and even some Austrian aristocrats. The story is well told in Cyril Pearl’s The Dunera Scandal (Angus & Robertson, 1983).
What is extraordinary, but indicative of the way in which post-War German and Austrian culture and society was utterly depleted and diminished by its persecution of the Jews, is the wealth of talent on the Dunera. Many were at, or later reached, the top of the tree in their professions. There were academics of every stripe, analytical chemists and engineers, art historians and professors of music, philosophers and writers, psychologists and sociologists, even chefs.
Of particular interest to a Man of Kent such as myself are two “locals” aboard the Dunera. The first was Walter Kaufmann, a Berlin native born in 1924 whose adoptive parents were murdered by the Nazis, who was attending Herrlingen School, which in 1933 had relocated from near Ulm in Germany to Bunce Court in the village of Otterden, SW of Faversham. The second was Fritz Heinz Georg Grün (later Fred Gruen), who had been born in Vienna in 1921 and was studying at Herne Bay College when war broke out.
By 1947, 1,451 of the Dunera internees had returned to UK, 913 had settled in Australia, 165 relocated to other countries and 13 died.
After 17 years in Australia, the left-wing Kaufmann moved to East Germany in 1957 and has been a prolific short story writer; he wrote a semi-autobiographical piece detailing his experiences of exile and internment. Gruen remained in Australia and became an academic and influential economist.
The village now known as Polonezköy, sometimes shown on maps simply as Polonez, lies within easy driving distance of İstanbul, on the Anatolian rather than the Thracian side of the Bosporus. It was founded as Adampol in 1842 by Polish political exiles. The village grew slowly over the years, augmented for instance after 1858 by Poles demobilised from the bands of Ottoman Cossacks who had fought under Michał Czajkowski (known as Sadyk Pasza) with the Turks against Tsarist Russia in the Crimean War, and again after the 1863 January Uprising against conscription into the Russian army was brutally suppressed in 1864.
The Polish population of Polonezköy was never large – there were 88 residents by 1866, and 165 in 1920, for example – and probably never exceeded 250. Just as many Poles left as arrived, some returning to Poland and others moving to Istanbul. The villagers took Turkish citizenship in 1938. Relations with Turkish Muslims were good and there was inter-marriage with local Turks and some conversion from Catholicism to Islam. No more than 20 or 25 Polish families still reside or own property in the village. Local surnames include Biskupski, Kępka, Minakowski, Nowicki, Ochocki, Ryży, Wilkoszewski and Ziółkowski.
The burial register of Our Lady of Częstochowa begins in 1848 and records the interment of over 330 individuals. There are more than 200 surviving graves with legible monumental inscriptions. Photographs of the cemetery on the village website http://www.polonezkoy.com/cemetery.html show that these appear to be mostly in very good condition.
These days, the community is mainly involved in tourism, the village being a popular daytrip from İstanbul as well as an attraction for Polish visitors to Turkey.
Data protection and personal privacy concerns dominate birth, marriage and death record access regimes throughout Europe. Records of the modern era – variously defined as, for example, the last 100 years, or 75 years – are generally closed other than to the persons concerned, their immediate family or their attorneys. These records are usually retained locally in municipal register offices. Records which pre-date the threshold are generally on more open access and tend to be held in national or regional archives.
This is true of Romania, too, a country which has a reputation for not being especially easy terrain for family history research. There is a 100-year closure rule for civil birth, marriage and death records. This is enforced in cities and towns; in villages and the countryside, the situation is sometimes more relaxed and registrars may be sympathetic to the plight of a family historian who needs records from the restricted era in order to be able to advance his or her research into the earlier open access era of records. If actual birth, marriage and death certificates are required for legal purposes by a person outside the country, these are best obtained via a Romanian notary, who is entitled to copies of closed records upon application.
There should be two copies of civil registers, the original with local district registry (at which actual life events are recorded) and a copy lodged periodically with the county town.
Some records under 100 years of age have been sent, for various reasons, to Romanian state archives, which are arranged at judeţ (county) level, and which is where records over 100 years old should be. Records held in these archives should be open and accessible. However, in a few areas there is a residual fear of higher authority dating to Communist times. Archivists may be afraid to grant access, fearing that in so doing they may open themselves up to later criticism from those higher up the hierarchy should the records be put to some purpose which is seen to reflect badly upon the archives, the state or the nation. In this regard, it is worth noting that genealogy does not have a high profile in Romania and is not a recognised recreational pursuit, and this goes part way to explaining the suspicion which family history researchers and their requests are sometimes regarded.
Ecclesiastical registers (baptism, marriage and burial) were created as working originals and annual copies (bishops’ transcripts). Therefore there is a double chance of finding a surviving copy and accessing it: one copy may be with the parish church, the other may be with an archive. Additionally, registers under 100 years of age may still be with the church, so if the incumbent of the parish is co-operative, it may be possible to use church registers to circumvent the 100-year rule. The older the records, the more favourably a priest is likely to regard a request to view and copy them. It may of course be necessary to make a donation to the church in exchange for this privilege.
In Hungary, names were and still are formatted differently to those in all other European cultures. This can create problems for the unwary beginning their research into their Hungarian ancestry.
Firstly, name order is, to an English speaker, reversed. In other words, in normal usage the family name precedes the personal name (and the terms “forename” and “surname” cease to be entirely apt). For example, Csillag Márton might be the son of a man named Csillag István and have a brother named Csillag Jenő.
If István had a son of the same name, the father and son might be named id Csillag István and ifj Csillag István respectively to distinguish between them. These abbreviations for idősebb and ifjú are equivalent to senior and junior in English and precede the family name.
István’s wife would usually be known as Csillag Istvánné – that is to say, as Mrs István Csillag (or, fully translated into English, as “Mrs Stephen Star”). In traditional usage, therefore, married women take the family and personal name of their husband with the suffix –né added to the latter.
A woman who is widowed gains a prefix to her married name, becoming özv Csillag Istvánné. The prefix is an abbreviation of özvegy.
If you see the phrase özv Csillag Istvánné szűl Deák Mária, you are being told that the widow’s maiden name (abbreviated to szűl or sz) was Maria Deák and that she married, and is now widowed from, István Csillag.
In other contexts, you may find, for example, Anna férj Kálmán Jánosné. This denotes that Anna is the wife of János Kálmán.
Or you may come across a couple’s identity expressed as Kálmán János és neje szűl Nagy Anna: that is to say, János Kálmán and his wife born as Anna Nagy.
11 communities of Russian Old Believers (starovery) remain within the borders of modern Estonia. Nine of these are situated around the lake known in Estonian as Peipsi järv and to the Russians as Chudskoe: Kallaste, Kasepää, Kolkja (two parishes), Kükita, Mustvee, Piirissaar, Raja and Varnja. These are the Prichudie (“by Chudskoe”) parishes. The other two are in the capital Tallinn and in the university town of Tartu.
Like the Amish in America, the Old Believers are a throwback to an earlier age, maintaining a life of simplicity and religious observance. Those in Estonia arrived in the late C17th, from cities such as Moscow and Novgorod, following persecution in the Russian heartland. An early monastery was established at Räpina but was destroyed in 1719. Persecution sought out the Old Believers again during the reign of the reactionary autocrat Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855) and there was pressure to conform to the Russian Orthodox Church: Old Believers were forbidden to baptise, marry or bury according to their own rites. They were not officially recognised and tolerated until a religious freedom act of 1905.
The Prichudie communities were largely self-contained but had connections with co-religionists in, for example, Pskov and Moscow, and in Rīga and Vilnius. The inter-War independence of Estonia, and the drawing of an international border north to south bisecting Peipsi, made communication with communities in Soviet Russia difficult. The annexation of Estonia into the militantly atheist USSR created greater problems – for example, many Old Believers were deported to Siberia in March 1949, although some were able to return after the Thaw following the death of Stalin in 1953. Yet the Old Believers and their customs survived the turmoil of C20th and remain largely intact today in their fishing and onion-growing villages on the edge of Lake Peipsi in re-independent Estonia.
There is of course, as well as a population in Russia, an Old Believer diaspora abroad, in Canada, USA and Australia, established in the C19th and C20th. However, because of the various doctrinaire schisms within the starovery themselves, it is not clear how these often discrete communities are inter-related in family history terms and how many, if any, of these have direct kinship with the Estonian population. Records in state archives in Tartu and Tallinn appear to be extensive and there would seem to be good prospects for family history research for anyone knowing or believing themselves to have roots in this small but fascinating community.
In 1947/48, up to 6,000 White Russian émigrés returned voluntarily from Shanghai to the Soviet Union.
These were the families of Tsarist army officers and other loyalists who had left Russia after the Revolution in 1917 and headed due east to Vladivostok, Harbin and Mukden (now Shenyang). Some had taken a more southerly route, via Tihwa (where some settled temporarily in the aftermath of the Revolution), Lanchow and Chungking. While many remained in the largely Russian city of Harbin, and some refugees settled in Peking, Sinkiang and Tientsin, many headed by road or rail to the autonomous city of Shanghai where, by the mid-1920s, the Russian community may have numbered as many as 35,000. Numbers are uncertain – the official 1926 census of the foreign population of Shanghai estimated only 5,000 White Russians (whereas figures for other nationalities are quite precise – e.g. 6,910 British, 3,418 American etc). The true number may have been at some point mid-way. The reason for the uncertainty is partly that the White Russians did not settle solely in the International District and the French Concession but lived across the city and, more especially, that as a stateless people they had no diplomatic representation and no single community organisation.
More White Russians arrived in Shanghai in 1932, following the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Many initially took jobs as manual labourers, working in warehouses and kitchens, to survive. However, Shanghai was a cosmopolitan city and White Russian culture re-asserted itself and began to thrive. As well as exile and reduced circumstances, the White Russians also suffered from being stateless; while some took Chinese citizenship or, in the case of women, married Europeans or Americans and acquired their citizenship, many remained in a state of diplomatic limbo.
In 1941 Soviet Russia joined the Allies fighting Nazi Germany in WW2, its Great Patriotic War, and this, and the defeat of Japan, made a return to their homeland begin to look more attractive to homesick and stateless White Russian exiles in Shanghai. The tipping point came when, in the summer of 1947, in a seeming gesture of reconciliation, Stalin offered Soviet citizenship to all Russian émigrés in the Far East. Repatriation began in August 1947, with sailings to Nakhodka and Vladivostok, from whence the returnees boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway. The homecoming was not as the more optimistic repatriates had expected and there were no freedoms to enjoy. In exchanging statelessness for Soviet citizenship, they found that they were settled against their will in industrial cities such as Kazan, Kemerovo, Molotov (today re-named Perm) and Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg again).
But it was a case of a rock and a hard place. In May 1949 the Chinese Communists took Shanghai and the inter-War “Paris of the East”, with its clubs and cabarets, its lively amd prosperous international community, which had briefly revitalised by the period of American occupation from September 1945, was doomed. Under the aegis of the International Refugee Organisation, between 5,000 and 6,500 White Russians – those who had refused to be repatriated to the Soviet Union, including some 1,500 especially vulnerable who had taken up and then quickly renounced Soviet citizenship – were temporarily resettled at an abandoned US naval base at Guiuan on Tubabao Island in the Philippines, from whence in early 1951 they made their way to San Francisco, USA.
White Russian family history is therefore vastly complicated. Successfully tracing back family lines from home in the diaspora, often via a temporary residence in Western Europe or the Far East, to Russia is a difficult business. Records for Shanghai and Harbin, for example, are piecemeal but do exist. For example, in the case of Shanghai, there survive more than 30,000 registration cards for Russians resident in Shanghai circa 1938-45 and more than 50,000 personnel files are now held in the Russian regional state archive in Khabarovsk.
Alternatively, if you know the exact place of origin within Russia (or Ukraine or Belarus), it may be possible to leap over the difficult years of the C20th and begin research at archives or register offices in Russia but this is not always straightforward either, due to access restrictions.
We are always interested in White Russian family history research stories, especially those with a Harbin or Shanghai connection, and would be pleased to hear from you if you are willing to share information. Our professional research services cover Russian family history in Harbin and Shanghai and we welcome enquiries and provide free assessments.
Earlier this year, Yale University Press published The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread by Maria Balinska, about everyone’s favourite breakfast roll. The book has been positively reviewed in the press.
This put me in mind of an earlier publication called The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World by Mimi Sheraton (Broadway Books, 2000). The bialy differs from the bagel in not being boiled before baking and in having in the centre a depression, filled with onion or poppy seeds, rather than a hole. It originated in Białystok and acquired its short name after being brought to New York by immigrant Yiddish-speaking bakers some time after WW1. It appears to have died out in its native Białystok with the disappearance of the Jewish community.
Białystok was a large and densely populated city by the mid-C19th, when it was situated in the Grodno gubernia of the Russian Empire. The majority of the city’s population was Jewish: by 1895, 47,783 Jews out of a total population of 62,993 (76%). As well as merchants, shopkeepers and tradesmen, many worked in the textile industry or were otherwise part of a growing urban proletariat which was later to become radicalised and active in the Bundist movement. From 1920, the Białystok area was incorporated into newly re-independent Poland.
Ancestors from Białystok found, for example, on the English or American census returns, or in other sources of use to family historians, may give their country of origin as Russia, or Poland, or Russian Poland. Beware that, as well as being the name of the city, Białystok was also a uezd (district) within the Grodno gubernia in Tsarist times, and a larger eponymous województwo (province) in Poland during the inter-War years: therefore, it is possible that ancestors claiming to have come from Białystok may have come from the surrounding area and used the name for convenience.
Researching family history becomes much more satisfying when, instead of concentrating narrowly on direct ancestors, the collateral branches of the same family are also investigated and the search turns round and heads towards the present day. Notwithstanding the shoah, the Jewish diaspora from Białystok is global, and a genealogist is just as likely to discover that he or she has surviving kin today in Argentina or Australia as in Israel or USA.
The February 1940 Estonian telephone directory is a fascinating volume, as it was issued four months before the June 1940 Soviet occupation which ended the nation’s first period of independence. It is a piece of ephemera which inadvertently acquired historical significance. Estonia’s experience of WW2 was grim. First, it was savaged by the Soviets, enduring executions and mass deportations to labour camps. Then, in July 1941, the Wehrmacht invaded. Einsatzgruppe A murdered those Estonian Jews who had not already been deported by the Soviets or fled to Russia, and the Nazis declared Estonia Judenfrei in January 1942. The Soviets returned in the autumn of 1944 and many Estonians fled in advance, withdrawing with the defeated Wehrmacht towards Germany, or fleeing across the Baltic to Finland and Sweden.
The 1940 phone directory is therefore the last to show the broad cross-section of Estonian society prior to World War Two. As well as Estonians, there are many Baltic German, Jewish, Russian and Swedish names.
My copy was once in public use, possibly hanging in a post office by the public telephones. Pages 5 to 32 are carefully excised with a sharp knife, as apparently is usually the case with surviving copies of this volume. These were the pages which included, among other things, details of foreign embassies in Tallinn: the Soviet authorities did not wish those numbers to be publicly available.
The directory is in three sections: i) the capital Tallinn, ii) the major towns, such as Pärnu and Tartu, and iii) the smaller communities (many of which have only a tiny number of subscribers).
We are happy to provide free look-ups to family historians upon receipt of a surname and place of residence.