Archive for January, 2010
At the time of Rebecca West’s visit to Macedonia in 1936/37, recounted in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, she reckoned that “not one in a million Englishmen has been to Ochrid” and it is not likely that that ratio has changed since. It was surprising to see, therefore, in the 30th January 2010 Travel section of the Guardian newspaper, a two-page spread devoted to Ohrid: the consciousness of British travel journalists, or perhaps their commissioning editors’, seldom alights on Macedonia or, for that matter, its neighbours Albania and Serbia. However, I then saw the name Kapka Kassabova in the by-line. Kapka is a Bulgarian writer who writes in English and now resides in Scotland; her Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria is highly recommended for anyone interested in everyday life in communist era Bulgaria.
Kapka’s grandmother was from Ohrid and identified herself as Bulgarian. However, follow history one or two or three generations further back and the matter might not have been so clear for her. Macedonia needs to be understood primarily as a large and never well-defined region; today, it is divided between the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria and Greece. Its population has always been mixed; hence the Italians’ use of macedonia for a colourful fruit salad. Until the mid 19th century, many inhabitants of Macedonia were more likely to think of themselves in terms of their religion (say, as a Muslim, as a Catholic, or as an Eastern Orthodox Christian) or simply as Macedonians without this connoting race or ethnicity. However, by the late 19th century, Macedonia was the site of emerging and competing nationalisms laying claim to different and often identical sections of the population. Regional identification became less tenable and the growth of national movements encouraged and sometimes compelled individuals and communities to affiliate with one national group or another. Certainly, this seems to have been true of the Albanians, the Greeks and the Slavs, whether Serb, Bulgarian or indeed Macedonian. Outside these contested peoples remained others such as the Gypsies and the Aromanians.
The Guardian piece is illustrated with a half-page photograph of the view across the lake from above the Orthodox Church of Sveti Jovan Kaneo. Rebecca West wrote of the “old town of Ochrid on its hill [that it] is stuck as thickly with churches as a pomander with cloves, and there are several churches in the new town that lies flat on the lake shore”. In fact, the town had so many churches and chapels – allegedly an improbable 365, one for each day of the year – that it was known as the Slavic Jerusalem.
Of its population, West comments that “nothing is… more unsettling than… its numbers of immensely aged people. They must be old, though probably not as old as they say, but still very old, because one finds them living in the same house with five generations of their descendants”. She also remarks that the people – by that date living in Yugoslavia – “preferred harmony to disharmony, and were capable of sacrificing their immediate impulses to this preference”. Such people were less likely to be drawn into the schisms hewn in communities by nationalist politics, more likely to focus on the pleasures and necessities of day-to-day life and getting on with their neighbours whatever their ethnicity or faith. Claudio Magris’s Danube relates the story of a certain Mr Omerić which, he suggests, sums up “the Macedonian question”:
“Omerić, who was so called under the Jugoslav monarchy, became Omerov during the Bulgarian occupation in the Second World War and then Omerski for the Republic of Macedonia, which is part of the Jugoslav federation. His original name, Omer, was Turkish”.
The German state brought calamity upon the German people, as it did on all peoples of Europe, and elsewhere, during World War Two. While it may be difficult to muster sympathy for the great mass of Nazis and their sympathisers in Germany proper and Austria, millions of ethnic Germans – the Auslandsdeutsche, or Volksdeutsche – resided in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.
Nazi Germany over-ran Poland in September 1939 and large regions were annexed as Reichsgaue, becoming Danzig-Westpreußen (which comprised Polish Pomorskie) and Wartheland (Poznań and the eastern half of Górny Śląsk). The Nazi policy here was twofold and implemented immediately: to deport all Jews and Poles, and to import Volksdeutsche to settle the farms and properties of the dispossessed. Agreements were reached quickly with the governments of the three Baltic countries, Italy and Soviet Russia to arrange the patriation (it cannot really be called repatriation) of the Volksdeutsche. An estimated 75,000 Baltendeutsche came from Estonia and Latvia alone. In 1940, tens of thousands followed from the so-called Generalgouvernement (hitherto central, southern and eastern Poland), Bessarabia, Bukovina and elsewhere.
Of course, an unknown proportion of these ethnic Germans must have been Nazis or sympathisers, particularly perhaps those who had been landowners amid otherwise non-German populations, and the petit-bourgeois burghers of larger, predominantly ethnic German towns. Plenty joined the Waffen SS later on in countries such as Hungary. However, many of the Volksdeutsche in rural areas, the long-established agricultural colonists in regions such as the Banat, Bessarabia, Galicia and Volhynia, probably felt no affinity with the Reich and no inclination to be disturbed from the soil which their families had cultivated for generations. They too were swept up and sent packing by the frontline activists of the resettlement or Umsiedlung organisations: entire villages of German smallholders and artisans were unceremoniously evicted and forced to plod west by horse and cart.
Just as the Nazis over-reached themselves militarily in the depths of Russia, so they over-stretched themselves and over-estimated their competence at resettling their Volksdeutsche. Up to half a million may have been settled on hitherto Polish farmland in the Reichsgaue, where they faced the understandable animosity of as yet unevicted Poles, but for at least that number the reality of Lebensraum was languishing in ever more crowded camps for the duration of the War. The number of the displaced kept rising too. As the defeated German army retreated from the Eastern Front towards Berlin, many of the Volksdeutsche in their path felt that they had no alternative but to accompany them or risk vengeance at the hands of the Red Army and the inhabitants of the resurgent nation states which Nazi Germany had conquered.
Significant records relating to the Baltic and Eastern European Germans were removed to Germany during WW2 but others remain in archives in the lands where they were created. Bluebird Research can help and advise in German family history research across Eastern Europe: contact us for an opinion.
Novorossiya, New Russia, was the name given to the southern steppe region of the Russian Empire which comprised the gubernia of Kherson, Taurida and Ekaterinoslav and, where colonists were invited to settle and develop the land in the 18th and 19th centuries. Settlers came from across Russia and Ukraine, of course, but there were also significant numbers of Germans, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Moldavians and Swiss, among others.
The Greeks of New Russia were concentrated on the western side of the Sea of Azov, in a cluster of 24 large villages in the Mariupol district, and were granted citizenship in 1779. Here they grew tobacco and cabbages, raised livestock, kept taverns and ran shops. As traders in a multi-ethnic environment, many Greeks spoke one or more of Russian, Turkish and Tatar as well as Greek. Marriages were contracted young (grooms were typically 17 or 18, brides often 14 or even younger) and families large.
In other towns on the northern Black Sea coast such as Anapa, and around the Crimea, they were also successful merchants, builders and ship-owners. The numbers of Greeks in the Russian Empire increased steadily throughout the 19th century, partly because of the creeping territorial expansion of the Empire and especially due to the conflicts between Russia and Turkey in 1828/29, 1853-56 and 1877/78: many Pontic Greeks living in the Ottoman Empire withdrew with the Russian forces to avoid reprisals at the hands of Turkish forces.
However, under the Soviet Union, the multi-national character of New Russia, which now fell largely within the Ukrainian SSR, was systematically destroyed by Stalin. The Greeks came to be regarded as counter-revolutionary: they were capitalists, they were too attached to their own culture, and many were suspect as they held Greek identity papers which the Greek government had made available to Greeks living in the diaspora after WW1. From 1936, and again after WW2, deportations led to virtually the entire Greek community of the former New Russia region, up to 240,000, eventually being forcibly removed to Siberia and Central Asia.
There was some movement back after the death of Stalin in 1953 but the process did not gather momentum until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when many of the Greek villages formed by the deportees were abandoned. There are still sizeable Greek communities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and in towns such as Anapa in Russia and the now Ukrainian Mariupol (which recorded 21,923 in 2002), but most of those able to leave the former USSR headed to mainland Greece.
Pontic Greek family history research in Russia and Ukraine is inevitably complicated by this history, as it is also by the often parlous state of some regional state archives and the difficulty of accessing such records as survive. However, if you would like an opinion on the prospects of success, please write to Bluebird Research with an outline of the information you have and we will respond as soon as we can.
By 1921 Hungary was less than one third of its pre-War size. The Treaty of Trianon had sheared off great swathes of its former territory and awarded them to an enlarged Romania and to the newly formed Czechoslovakia and Kingdom of Serbs, Croats & Slovenes.
The Hungarians of the lost territories were faced with a choice: did they remain in the successor state in which they found themselves, with all its uncertainty, or did they move to within the redefined international borders of Hungary? Many were tied to the land on which their families had lived for generations and to the churches and cemeteries where they and their ancestors had been baptised, married and buried.
Of course, for many, however, this dilemma did not present itself as a choice. As early as 1919, the Hungarian authorities had created a national administration for refugees. Official figures for 1921 show 233,503 refugees in Hungary: the greatest number, 139,390, had come from Romania, while 56,657 had arrived from Czechoslovakia and 37,456 from the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats & Slovenes. The experience of these refugees was like that of other refugees throughout Central and Eastern Europe. They camped uncertainly at frontier towns and slept rough in railway stations. In the absence of any other options, such as those arising from pre-War family or business connections elsewhere in the country, they headed to Budapest. In the capital they again lived in makeshift camps or in centres set up by the authorities prior to permanent resettlement.
When conducting family history research in Central or Eastern Europe, it is imperative to orientate your investigation carefully at the outset. If a passenger list, or an immigration or naturalisation paper, or a census return or an identity card, speak of a person being Hungarian or coming from Hungary, it is necessary to place that statement in the context of both the date of the document and the subject’s likely perception and understanding of their situation. The fact that grandmother or great grandfather “came from Hungary” does not mean that they were born within the borders of today’s Hungary. If they were born before 1921, it is quite possible that their place of birth is within a successor state, with all the implications that has for your research: you might need to consider records in Croatia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia or even Ukraine.
There were scarcely 19 years of peace in interwar Lwów, between September 1920 and September 1939. Ironically, the city which had been at the forefront of Polish national and cultural activism during the long years of partitioned Poland became somewhat peripheral now that the country was united and independent. Its prestige declined. From having been Lemberg, the capital of the self-governing Austro-Hungarian crownland of Galicia and the fifth largest city of the Empire (behind Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Trieste), it became Lwów, one of many satellite cities within the orbit of the Polish capital Warsaw. And of course the ambitious and the unemployed, students and professional elites, now gravitated towards Warsaw.
There were three national communities in the city. During the Austrian era, from 1772 to the Great War, the authorities counted the population by religion rather than nationality, as, to a greater or lesser extent, an empire exists by denial of nationality or at least of national expression.
Between 51% and 53% of the city’s inhabitants were Roman Catholic. These were overwhelmingly Poles, with a very small minority of Austrians and assimilated Germans and Armenians (although a separate Armenian Catholic Church still functioned in Lwów).
18% or 19% were Greek Catholics, who were rusyny or Ruthenians, and increasingly identified themselves as Ukrainians as the 19th century advanced and the community’s national consciousness awakened.
27% or 28% were Jewish. The Jews of Lwów had traditionally resided in two designated areas and continued to do so even after regulations were relaxed in 1867. The first area comprised a largely affluent and assimilated community in the neighbourhood of three streets in the old town: ul Żdowska, Ruska and Zarwańska. The second area was a more working class and religiously Orthodox Jewish community in the Krakowskie and Żółkiewskie suburbs.
These three large national communities interacted and shared certain common aspirations during the era of Austrian rule, despite the irreconcilable incompatibility of Polish and Ukrainian national claims to the city and despite a wide range of internal differences. For instance, the Jewish community included assimilationists and Polish nationalists; Zionists; Bundists and communists; and largely apolitical Orthodox Jews. The Jews appear to have least frequently intermarried with the other two communities: it seems probable that intermarriage was restricted to those who not only assimilated but also converted to Catholicism. However, marriage between the Polish Roman Catholics and Ukrainian Greek Catholics was not unusual.
It has been calculated that 16% of pre-WW1 marriages were mixed*. This needs to be placed in context of the respective sizes of the two communities. For instance, in 1900 there were 82,590 Roman Catholics and 29,327 Greek Catholics in Lwów. When this numerical imbalance is factored in, it means that one in three Poles may have been marrying a Ukrainian. Mixed marriages declined after Galicia became part of independent Poland and tensions between Poles and Ukrainians increased, but even in the 1920s mixed marriages are estimated at 8%.
These figures are salutary. History is necessarily written in generalisations with only occasional references to individuals by way of exemplification. The reality for individuals is granular and subject to infinite degrees and gradations of experience. In pre-Soviet era Lwów, there may well have been some “pure” Polish and Ukrainian families but it would not be surprising for family history research to demonstrate or suggest otherwise.
*Estimates of intermarriage are by Lidia Zyblikiewicz, cited in Philipp Ther’s “War Versus Peace” (Harvard Ukrainian Studies XXIV (1/4) 2000).
Records for the different communities in Lemberg / Lwów / L’viv are today found in L’viv and Warsaw. Bluebird Research offers professional family history research services in L’viv, across Ukraine and Poland, and would be delighted to undertake genealogical research on behalf of anyone with Jewish, Polish or Ukrainian – or mixed! – ancestry from the region.
In the 1930s, Estonia underwent an estonianisation campaign, one aspect of which was the encouraged changing of names for those whose surnames were not already authentically Estonian. The campaign needs to be placed in context. Firstly, this was a nation state newly independent after centuries of rule by Imperial Russia and, more locally, by Baltic German landowners. Secondly, many of the surnames which had been given to or acquired by the native Estonians were Germanic and dated from the 1820s and 1830s. The estonianisation policy should therefore be viewed primarily as an assertion of national identity. This is not to say that Estonian politics was not moving to the right in the 1930s, or to deny that there were unintended victims such as the Finns and Swedes who also lived within the borders of inter-War Estonia.
Between 1920 and 1934, only 820 names were spontaneously estonianised. Estonianisation of names effectively began in 1935, in which year there were approximately 34,000 name changes; by 1940, there had been about 200,000. Some of the new surnames were translations or equivalents of the old names, but others were simply chosen for their attractive sound, meaning or association.
One example is the common Estonian surname Rebane. In English, this surname means “fox”. Records show that Estonians with, for example, the surnames Fuchs, Fuks and Tokmann took the new family name Rebane in 1938, 1938 and 1936 respectively. Of course, others of those names took different new names: for example, other people named Tokmann became Laiamäe, Rahula and Toim. Therefore, whole blood siblings could suddenly possess different surnames, and conversely Estonians bearing a rare name might be completely unrelated. (This was true also at the time Estonians took family names in the 1820 and ’30s).
Following the Soviet occupation, maybe 45,000 or more russianised ethnic Estonians moved to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. These Estonians were sometimes called Yeestlased (in English, “Yestonians”) reflecting their characteristically Russian pronunciation. Some of these were immigrants (having been born outside Estonia) and others returnees (having left Estonia at an earlier date). Some went native and estonianised their names to better assimilate in post-War society although, given the Soviet domination of the country, there was little or no pressure upon them to do so – rather the reverse, Estonia was to be sovietised.
Stability is not a common trait in Jewish names and those researching their family tree should not expect too much consistency from generation to generation or even over the course of a single individual’s life. Leaving to one side the traditional naming patterns before the era of (supposedly) fixed surnames, Jewish names change, or different names are used, for a host of reasons.
A Jewish person or family resident in a country using the Cyrillic alphabet will spell his or her name, or have it spelt for them in official papers, in one way but transliterate it differently into the Latin alphabet. There is not a simple 1:1 correspondence between the characters of the two alphabets and there are different transliteration systems which, in turn, have changed over time and differ by place (for example, French and German transliterations from Russian often differ from the English and American).
Of course, many Jews and virtually all educated Jews in Eastern Europe were fluent in at least two languages, depending on their place of residence: in the former Russian empire, including the Congress Kingdom of Poland, they might well have spoken Russian, and/or German, and/or Polish. The Jewish lingua franca of the empire was Yiddish, although an increasing number were at least conversant with Hebrew. Yiddish also had its dialects, such as Litvish spoken by the Litvaks, which affected the pronunciation and therefore also the spelling or rendering of proper names.
When Jews emigrated westwards, to Germany, for instance, or France or the Netherlands, and especially when they came into contact with the English-speaking world, their eastern names caused difficulties of orthography and pronunciation, and were subject to change in spelling and usage. Here is Joseph Roth writing in The Wandering Jews (translated by Michael Hofmann, Granta Books, 2001) about the experience of Galician Jews arriving in Vienna:
“Christian papers are in order. All Christians have sensible, European names. Jewish names are mad and Jewish. Nor is that all: they have two or three surnames, qualified by false or recte. You never know what to call them. Their parents were married by a rabbi. The marriage has no legal standing. If the father’s name is Weinstock, and the mother’s Abramovsky, then the children of their union will be called Weinstock recte Abramovsky, or perhaps Abramovsky false Weinstock. The boy, for example, is given the Jewish first name of Leib Nachman. Because the name is difficult and might sound provocative to others’ ears, the son styles himself Leo. So his name is Leib Nachman styled Leo Abramovsky false Weinstock. As far as the police are concerned, names like that are nothing but trouble.”
So the Jew will simplify or change his name to satisfy the civil servant who wants sensible order to prevail. Not that that will invariably give satisfaction, as the Jew will have papers, if he has papers at all, which do not support the claimed new identity, and which will cast further suspicion upon him.
Roth’s remarks in a later chapter of his book should also be borne in mind when undertaking research:
“Don’t be surprised at the Jews’ lack of attachment to their names. They will change their names with alacrity, and the names of their fathers, even though those particular sounds, to the European sensibility, are charged with emotional weight. For Jews their names have no value because they are not their names. Jews, Eastern Jews, have no names. They have compulsory aliases. Their true name is the one by which they are summoned to the Torah on the Sabbath and on holy days: their Jewish first name and the Jewish first name of their father. Their family names, however, from Goldenberg to Hescheles, are pseudonyms foisted upon them.”
Roth is writing primarily about Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews of the former Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empire but his cautionary words are salutary for anyone undertaking Jewish family history research.
1922 was a year of great change in the land.
For the largely Polish landowners of Lithuania, it was a time of loss and sorrow. Land reform led to confiscation of their estates, leaving each with just a small plot around the manor or farmhouse in which they dwelt.
For the Lithuanian peasantry, it was a time of plenty. The same reforms redistributed former estate lands among the peasants, who therefore were now working their own land for the first time. Harvests were good and the peasants enjoyed a newfound prosperity.
1922 was also the high-water mark for Lithuanian Jewry between the Wars. The sudden spending power of the peasantry created a new demand for the goods produced by Jewish craftsmen and sold by Jewish traders. More importantly in the long term, however, a honeymoon period for the Jews of Lithuania was coming to an end.
From 1919 to 1922, Jewish and Lithuanian activists had worked side by side in the cause of the newly independent Lithuania. The country was governed from the left by social democrats and the progressive Populists (liaudininkai). Jews worked in the foreign ministry, for example, where their language skills and overseas connections helped in negotiations with the Germans, Russians, English and French. Jewish life flourished in Lithuania and attracted non-Lithuanian Jews from Russia and Ukraine, both those fleeing civil war and its aftermath, and those recognising the progressive state of Lithuania and the opportunities it might bring.
It was the liaudininkai who had pushed through the radical land reforms in favour of the peasantry. Ironically, once land reform had happened, the peasantry switched allegiance from left to right, from the liaudininkai to the conservative and largely Roman Catholic Christian Democrats. Government edged to the right and the civil service was gradually Lithuanianised. Jews started to be viewed with suspicion, especially those who had joined the communists en masse from the Bundists in 1921, or pushed for greater Jewish national autonomy. Jewish support had also been welcomed when Lithuania was campaigning to recover Wilno (with its large Jewish population) from Poland but, as this possibility receded and the situation on the ground was accepted, Jewish involvement in government no longer seemed as essential. Ultimately, a military coup in December 1926 produced a further lurch to the right and the Lithuanian National Union party took power for the next 14 years.
The years 1921 to 1923 are therefore key in modern Lithuanian history and may represent a point of great change in many individual family histories, whether Polish, Lithuanian or Jewish. Poles, adrift in the new state, would look ever more longingly towards Poland. Lithuanians asserted their new independence and for many the land reform was a great life-changing event, redefining their relationship to the land. And the disappointments after the early promise for Jews meant that many would channel their energies inwardly into their religion and communities, or outwardly into more radical politics such as communism or Zionism, or else look beyond the seas.
Bluebird Research has many years’ experience of successful genealogical research in Lithuania and is at your disposal should you require professional research. Please contact us for an assessment and estimate of possible costs.
Civil registration has been conducted, and mandatory, in Hungary since October 1895. Of course, after this date religious communities continued to register locally events of birth or baptism, marriage, and death or burial, but these ceased to carry legal recognition.
In common with most other European countries, registration of birth, marriage and death in Hungary is not centralised; rather it is conducted, and all records are held, locally at municipal level.
This can cause serious problems for the genealogist, especially when undertaking 20th century research. Self-evidently, it is necessary to know exactly where a child was born, a couple married or a person died in order to request a certified copy of an entry from the register. If you do not know this, you need to make enquiries, often unavoidably speculative, to find out.
The problem is magnified when a family being researched comes from the capital. Budapest is today sub-divided into 23 separate districts. The districts are customarily identified by Roman numerals. For example, the northern district (kerület) of Újpest, on the east bank of the Duna (Danube), is Budapest IV, while the inner city Pest district of Erzsébetváros is Budapest VII.
Many of these districts are of modern origin, encompassing large suburbs and outlying villages which have been swallowed up by the capital during its growth in the 20th century. The original, historic districts are the 10 numbered from I to X and it is in these that you should concentrate enquiries if you do not know where a family lived after 1895.
As is also common in Europe, the more recent civil registers are closed, other than to the individual, their close family or attorney, for a prescribed number of years, on account of personal privacy and data protection concerns. In Hungary, births are restricted for 90 years, marriages for 60 and deaths for 30. It is usually possible for private family historians to obtain certificates from within these closed periods upon application to the relevant register office, subject to proof of identity and relationship. A letter of authority can be used to delegate the application for certificates to a third party such as Bluebird Research and we would be happy to advise further upon request.
In eastern Europe, the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution was chaos and population displacement on a previously unknown scale. Imperial Russia unravelled around the edges and new states struggled to assert their independence and pull away. In the former Russian gubernia of Kovno, Vilna and Grodno, moves were afoot to recreate Lithuania.
However, the issue here, as elsewhere in Europe, was that there were competing and mutually incompatible claims to land. It was impossible to satisfy all claims, as the population was not neatly parcelled up into ethnically or nationally homogeneous units. Most regions had diverse populations. In the city today called Vilnius, for example, Poles and Jews formed the majority and in its hinterland many of the pre-War landowners were minor Polish nobility or szlachta; yet the peasantry was Lithuanian. Force decided the issue and treaties ratified it. It was the new Polish state which emerged victorious, securing a Polish Wilno, just as it successfully secured Lwów as a Polish island in a largely Ukrainian sea.
At the start of 1918, as many as one in six Lithuanians were refugees within Russia. An estimated 550,000 were scattered across European Russia, from Minsk and St Petersburg to distant Voronezh and Yekaterinoslav. It took until 1924 to bring home all those who wanted to return and who Moscow and Kaunas would between them allow. Maybe as many as one third of Lithuanian refugees remained abroad and settled, willingly or otherwise, in Soviet Russia or Poland.
From 1921, the return of refugees was closely supervised by the authorities. Refugees were registered and issued with travel permits in Moscow. From Moscow they travelled by train to Rēzekne, Daugavpils and Kalkūni in Latvia, and thence across the Lithuanian border to Obeliai. At Obeliai – the only recognised point of entry into the country, although not the only one in practice – refugees were vetted, re-registered and issued with passes, usually to their place of birth or pre-War residence.
Those who were regarded as suspect were sent back to Moscow. And those refugees who wished to return to their pre-War homes in what had become Polish territory were often stuck in limbo for months on end in the Obeliai transfer camp, with an ever-present risk of humanitarian crisis – typhus, cholera and hunger.
Not all those coming to Lithuania were refugees. Optants – Lithuanian colonists long settled in Russia – paid their own way to reach the newly independent country. And from 1918 to 1921, the nascent Lithuanian state, in need of qualified administrative and technical experts, welcomed back not just its Lithuanian but also its Jewish middle classes. In fact, the immigration policy was so liberal before the change of government in 1922 that Jewish doctors, engineers and so on from elsewhere in Russia headed to Lithuania for the opportunities it presented.
For many researching their family history in Lithuania, the period 1915 to 1924 looms like something of a black hole. For a start, the family may not appear in the expected parish registers (assuming, that is, that such records were created and have survived). Over half a million spent several years effectively in exile in Russia and, of course, of these, some married, some had children and some died there. At Obeliai, too, refugees gave birth or died and, doubtless, in some cases married. The Lithuanian state did not recognise Soviet civil registry marriages so, in order to return with spouse and children, natives of Lithuania would have to remarry in a Roman Catholic or Orthodox ceremony: this can result in what appear to be illegitimate children born between the respective dates of the secular and the religious marriage.
Bluebird Research would be delighted to help and advise you as you investigate your roots in Lithuania.
The first and largest wave of Ukrainian emigrants to North America took place between 1891 and the outbreak of War in 1914. These were almost exclusively economic migrants and, of course, chain migrants: both pioneers and those friends and family who followed them learning of their success. To generalise, these Ukrainians emigrated to rural regions of Canada (an estimated 171,000 to the lands of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan) and urban centres of USA (maybe 250,000 in number).
It is important to understand that these early Ukrainian Canadians came from the most distant provinces of Austro-Hungary – from Galicia and Bukovina. On contemporary records – pre-War passenger lists, immigration records, land settlement records and censuses – they are therefore likely to be described as Ruthenians from Austria. Galicia is now split west-east between Poland and Ukraine, while Bukovina is now divided north-south between Ukraine and Romania. Almost without exception, therefore, these Canadian immigrants hailed from what is today western Ukraine, not from the central Kyiv area or eastern (so-called Left-Bank) Ukraine. They were unRussian.
Ruthenians from Galicia were invariably Greek Catholics and, where literate, wrote using the Latin rather than the Cyrillic alphabet found in eastern Ukraine and Russia. There was no tradition of the use of patronymics now common throughout Ukraine. Their names may have been recorded in parish registers in Latin or Polish spellings: you can safely assume that Latin Joannes and Polish Jan was known to his nearest and dearest as Ivan. Of course, he may also show up as Iwan, reflecting Polish orthography, and once arrived in North America is likely to have become John.
For Canadian descendants of this first wave of immigrants (which had started as early as the 1870s but gained real momentum in the closing decade of the century), there are some tremendous ready-made resources available. Among these are the compendiums of Vladimir Kaye known as Dictionary of Ukrainian Canadian Biography. Mr Kaye produced three of these: Alberta and Manitoba were published, while (as far as I am aware) the volume for Saskatchewan remains in manuscript only. There are 941 entries in the Manitoba book. Here is an abbreviated extract from one:
YASKIW, Maksym, born 1853 in Rostayna, district Yaslo, Galicia, Austria, died 7 September 1911 in Rossburn. Wife Eudokia (Dora) born 1856 died 6 February 1942 at Rossburn. Children on landing: Vladimir 10, Yurko 16, Petro 8, Hanka 14. Arrived in Canada on SS Phoenicia, landing at Halifax 21 May 1899.
Rostayna and Yaslo are respectively Rostajne and Jasło in Polish and are situated in the far SE of the country. In 1900, the year after Makysm sailed to Canada, Rostajne comprised 63 houses and an almost exclusively Greek Catholic population of 366, according to the official Austrian gazetteer for Galizien.
Another excellent resource for Canadians beginning their Ukrainian family history is Ukrainians In Alberta, published in 1975 by the Ukrainian Pioneers’ Association of Alberta, which gives fuller biographies, often one or two pages’ long and with accompanying family photographs.
Bluebird Research is happy to offer assistance with family history research in both Poland and Ukraine and would be delighted to help and advise you investigate your family’s Galicia roots.
The Greek Catholic, or Uniate, Church was one of many Christian faiths thriving in pre-Communist Romania, along side the Lutheran (followed by the Saxons of Transylvania), the Calvinist (with its mostly Hungarian adherents), the Roman Catholic (practised by the Swabians, for instance) and, of course, the majority Romanian Orthodox Church.
Following the 1698 Habsburg conquest, most Romanians in Transylvania had converted to Greek Catholicism by 1700. From 1737, the Metropolitan was located at Blaj, which developed into a centre of learning and Romanian nationalism and, accordingly, was nicknamed Little Rome (just as, for other reasons, Timişoara was Little Vienna and Bucureşti was Little Paris).
According to the December 1930 Romanian census, 31% of the population of Transylvania was Greek Catholic (second only to the 65% in Maramureş, where the Ukrainians, or Ruthenians, were also Uniate). In all, upwards of 1.5 million citizens of Romania were Greek Catholics in the 1930s.
However, the Communist state abolished the Greek Catholic Church in Romania on its 250th anniversary in October 1948 and its congregations were compulsorily converted to the Orthodox Church by decree. Those bishops and priests who declined conversion were imprisoned (as were, of course, many of the inter-War intelligentsia, politicians, army officers and the chiaburi – the peasantry who opposed enforced collectivisation and were Romania’s equivalent of Soviet Russia’s kulaks – and others who were regarded as counter-revolutionary).
The Communist state was officially and in some ways militantly atheist but, in the words of Lucian Boia, “Communism and Orthodoxy… arrived at a modus vivendi” (Romania, Reaktion Books, 2001). As long as the Orthodox Church did not interfere in politics, it was tolerated and its churches and seminaries stayed open. In fact, baptism and burial by Orthodox rite continued throughout the years of Communism, even among the families of Party members, who could discreetly practise their religion as long it was a matter of private conscience and they remained outwardly atheist.
The Orthodox Church’s accommodation with the state also meant that it had to effectively countenance the destruction of historic church and monastery buildings where this was deemed necessary, especially during the periods of “systematisation”: from 1974-80 and again from 1984-86, this policy of ruthless urbanisation of towns and villages demolished old quarters and removed their inhabitants to jerry-built high-rises and blocks of flats.
With the collapse of Communism, the Greek Catholic Church was re-established in 1989 and some of its places of worship have been reclaimed by their congregations. However, numbers of Greek Catholics remain much diminished compared to their pre-WW2 peak: 191,000, or 0.9%, nationwide, according to the 2002 census, with a visible presence mainly in the north-western judeţe or counties of Cluj, Maramureş and Satu Mare.
For family history research in Romania, this means that Greek Catholic kin may have converted to Orthodoxy for the 40 or so years from 1948 to 1989, and indeed might not have returned to their original faith; others, of course, will have ceased to believe altogether. Vital records of the post-War era are officially closed, although it is quite possible that some which remain at individual churches, especially in rural areas, will be opened by a sympathetic priest to enquirers if he is satisfied that the request is harmless.
Siberia inhabits the popular imagination as a vast penal colony stretching from taiga to tundra, horizon to godforsaken horizon; a journey’s end of deportation and exile; a kind of limbo in which the politically unacceptable were quarantined for indefinite but invariably soul-destroying periods and permafrozen into powerlessness by the Russian state, whether imperial or Stalinist.
And all this is true. But there is another and paradoxically contrary Siberia which coexists with the first and which is a surprising land of opportunity and optimism. From the early 19th century, migrants from across European Russia began to see and seek out the potential of colonising the sparsely populated but resource-rich lands east of the Urals, where Asian Russia begins. In Siberia, the long controlling arms of the Russian Orthodox Church and the centrist state did not always reach, and land was available for the taking rather than inevitably belonging to a prince or count or some other absentee landlord. So pioneers, from freed serfs and landless peasants to dissenting Old Believers, continued to push eastwards in their horse-drawn carts, beyond Yekaterinburg and Omsk, towards the Far East. The opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1891 suddenly accelerated this flow. By 1899 the Railway stretched as far as Chita, subject to a Lake Baikal ferry crossing from Irkutsk.
In 1896, following a concession from China, work began on a spur of the Trans-Siberian Railway called the Far East Railway or Chinese Eastern Railway. This left Russian territory after Chita, cut across Manchuria and through the city of Harbin, re-entering Russian territory just outside the port of Vladivostok. The railway was completed in 1903 and prominent amongst its engineers and workers were an estimated 7,000 Poles.
Poles were no strangers to Siberia and the Far East. Thousands had been deported there following uprisings against Russian rule in 1831 and 1861-63. Poor peasants from the Kingdom of Poland emigrated to Siberia in search of land. By the start of WW1, there were perhaps 70,000 Poles living in Siberia and Manchuria, with a notable community, thriving and organised, in Harbin.
The First World War increased this number, with the arrival both of prisoners of war and of evacuated peasants from the Russian Polish gubernia of Lublin, Łomża and Siedlce. The subsequent Revolution and Civil War brought further refugees including the so-called Trans-Amurians, Polish gentry who had settled beyond the Amur River in 1910 and fled the Bolsheviks for Harbin in 1917; and the remnants of the 5th Siberian Division of Fusiliers which escaped the Bolshevik forces and were evacuated from Harbin, via Vladivostok, in the summer of 1920.
Most of the Poles in eastern Siberia and the Far East removed to newly independent Poland between 1921 and 1925, although a small community remained in Harbin, Manchuria in the 1930s. In Poland, those who returned from Siberia were known as Sybiraki irrespective of their own, or their family’s, origins as colonists, exiled political prisoners, PoWs or wartime refugees. While some went on to enjoy successful careers in the young Poland, other veterans could not assimilate into the new post-War society and remained nostalgic for Siberia.
Family history research in Siberia is, needless to say, not straightforward. Bluebird Research has a professional researcher able to make searches but the prospects of success very much depend on the quality and precision of the background information available to us at the start of the investigation. We are happy to provide a free opinion. Additionally, we are always interested in increasing our own knowledge and understanding and would be delighted to hear from family historians who have undertaken successful searches in Siberia or Manchuria.
Gyula Krúdy, or Krúdy Gyula in Hungarian style, is a writer like no other I know. Although his Sunflower of 1918 is a great if sometimes perplexing novel, much of his literary output consists of what you might call feuilleton, or reportage, short observational and often reflective pieces which were published in newspapers and journals. The first and I believe only volume of these pieces in English translation, edited by John Bátki, was published by the Central European University Press in 2000 and is entitled Krúdy’s Chronicles: Turn-of-the-Century Hungary in Gyula Krúdy’s Journalism.
In a short piece called “A Hungarian Village After Sundown”, Krúdy reflects on the impact of the War. It is 11th August 1915. He stops briefly in the largely Calvinist village of Kiliti, en route to the town of Siófok which lies on the southern shore of Lake Balaton in Somogy megye or county. It is “a good-sized prosperous village with a broad main street”. There has been a great harvest already, the cattle are plump and even the lime blossom has been gathered in and despatched to Budapest for a tidy profit. However, the innkeeper is not contented: “No one comes to the tavern. All the men are at the front.” Every able-bodied man of fighting years has attested and joined the 44th Regiment.
The innkeeper goes on to say that, if the war continues, it will put an end to the practice of egyke in Somogy county. An egyke is an only child and, by extension, the practice of having one child per family. In this county, egyke was the tradition that ensured prosperity: the family’s estate was not subdivided upon death between many children but passed down intact from one generation to the next. “No one’s had a second child around here as far back as anyone can remember”, muses the innkeeper, exaggerating.
However, the wisdom and logic of egyke did not foresee the horror of the First World War and the Eastern Front in Galicia. There were no exemptions for only sons; all must serve the country. So “those precious only sons are now falling on the battlefield… Now the women realise how foolish they’ve been with this practice – the ones with grown sons are the most woebegone for it’s too late for them to hope for a second child to replace the older one who’s died”.
Of course, soldiers come back on furlough. Some were on home leave in the village recently. Wives have retrieved cradles from attics. “So in eight or nine months’ time the registries of birth will again be opened by the priests in Somogy county… a second child will be born to families that already have their one son… In this neighbourhood the women are all expecting babies to replace the fallen sons.”
This is the kind of insight that you are unlikely to find elsewhere in histories; it flourishes in the writings of Krúdy and, for example, his approximate contemporary Joseph Roth, whose non-fiction is also highly recommended. It is in such writings, perhaps generally regarded at the time as ephemera, that the times were captured, week by week. And of course, they shine a light on family history research: where else might one ever learn of egyke and how it explains to us that surprisingly beanpole-shaped family tree we have been researching in Somogye county?
Croatia is a European tourist destination which isn’t yet blessed with a great many British visitors. The general British public prefers to holiday in places where it may enjoy all the delights of home – fish and chips, pubs, fine English conversation – with extra sun. Hence the enduring popularity of the well-worn British package tourist destinations in, for example, Spain and Greece. This is not to single out the British: think of the wonderful concept of the Accidental Tourist range of books envisaged by novelist Anne Tyler in The Accidental Tourist, in which the male protagonist Macon creates travel books which guide American travellers to those places, hotels and restaurants abroad which approximate closest to the comforts of home, and expose them least to the disconcertingly alien.
Over the last few years, however, Croatia has been fast emerging as a destination of choice for British who read broadsheet newspapers and who, for example, enjoy the idea of island-hopping, and have the means to do it; or are fascinated with the historical palimpsest which is Split, or the breathtaking beauty of Dubrovnik, or the notion of slowly touring the long Adriatic coast. Of course, tourists focus primarily on Dalmatia and Istria, and few spend much time in the Croatian heartlands around Zagreb, let alone venture into Slavonia.
The British, as often, are latecomers to Croatia. Our northern and central European cousins wised up earlier. And, of course, the history of holidaying in what is today Croatia has a far longer history than that which has largely developed post-WW2 and especially post-1991 Independence.
One of the first places to attract visitors was Opatija, which like the remainder of Croatia, enjoyed, to varying degrees, being part of the big, baggy Habsburg or Austro-Hungarian multi-ethnic empire. In the late 19th century, Opatija was usually known by its Italian name Abbazia. The two names are translations of one another: both mean simply Abbey (just as Croat Rijeka and Italian Fiume further round the bay both mean River). Opatija came alive during an earlier period of enhanced freedom of and possibilities for travel for those with sufficient resources. Just as today tourists take advantage of cheap flights and discounted package holidays, so in the 19th century a more limited demographic began to travel for leisure, as well as for business or looking for employment, with the advent and spread of the railways. The development of regional railways, and the promotion in tandem of the Adriatic coast as a tourist destination within Austro-Hungary, was what made Opatija possible as a resort. In its pre-WW1 heyday it was not just a resort, but the resort of choice for the fashionable and wealthy of the empire.
Of course, for every Austrian prince or Hungarian noble in Opatija before the Great War, there were many locals who lived and worked rather than played in the town. Opatija is situated on the edge of the Istrian peninsula, which has always had a mixed population of Croats, Italians, Slovenes and others. In this part of Istria, Croats predominated, although, as well as established native Italians, new Italian settlers arrived following Italy’s 1918 annexation and subsequent occupation of Istria until WW2.
Political and military events had their usual impact on the lives of the common people. Before WW1, locals had emigrated from Istria mostly for the usual push and pull reasons: lack of opportunities, or poverty, or pressure on land in the home country, and the draw of a new life and economic possibility in a remote destination such as USA. Of course, even during the 19th century some Croats and Slovenes left their homelands for political reasons, preferring exile to living under Hungarian domination. However, the political dimension to emigration intensified in the 20th century. Under Italian rule and especially Fascist Italian repression, many Croats emigrated; then, following the welcome defeat of Italy in WW2, many Italians, of both long-established and recently settled families, left rather than live within Yugoslavia and under its nascent Communist government.
Undertaking family history in Istria can be complicated for these reasons. In addition, the population, as well as their places of habitation, often had two or more names to suit the occasion and the individual or institution with which they were communicating. Many people were bilingual or even trilingual, able to converse and conduct business in Croat, Italian and/or Slovenian; often, if not entirely fluently, in all three languages. Naturally, the more educated classes during the long years of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy may well have been fluent in Hungarian and/or German as well.
Bluebird Research has tried and tested local research partners in Croatia and would be delighted to assist you with research in Istria or elsewhere in the country. For an assessment, please e-mail or snail-mail us using the contact details on the contact bluebird page.
Metohija is a place name little heard in Western Europe nowadays. As a region, Metohija is now subsumed into what is understood by Kosovo. Until 1968, Kosovo-Metohija (sometimes abbreviated to Kos-Met) was an autonomous region of Serbia. By that date, its population was already at least 70% Kosovar Albanian. Traditional Muslim Kosovar society was patriarchal and standards of education were still low in the late 1960s. There was 20% unemployment and real and relative poverty compared to elsewhere within Yugoslavia.
Unrest in the summer and autumn of 1968 focused, not on independence, but on raising the region to the status of a separate republic within Yugoslavia and culminated in violence in November. The riots were put down and order restored by the Yugoslav state. However, various concessions were made to Kosovar Albanian demands and aspirations. Among these, the autonomous region became a province of its parent republic Serbia, giving it equivalent constitutional status to Vojvodina in the north of Serbia, and “Metohija” was officially dropped from the name in 1974.
Metohija is the western half of Kosovo, containing three of its seven districts. Running from north to south, these districts are centred on the cities of Peć, Đakovica and Prizren. Like Kosovo proper, Metohija is of great cultural significance to Serbs, having formed an integral part of the medieval Kingdom of the Serbs (1217-1459) and being the historical site of extensive Serbian Orthodox monastic lands. However, over the course of the centuries of Ottoman rule, Albanian immigration (and Serbian emigration) meant that by, if not before, the 19th century, Kosovar Albanians formed a majority in the land. Although the demographics of Kosovo are a highly politically sensitive subject, it seems likely that the Serb population is now as low as 6% and declining.
The success of Serbian family history research in Metohija depends, as elsewhere in Kosovo, on two factors: i) the extent and reliability of background information already to hand at the outset (it needs to be as precise as possible regarding place of origin) and ii) the survival and availability of relevant records for the location. We would be delighted to provide an opinion on the prospects of genealogical success, upon request and without any obligation.
Today, in the era of identity politics, it is expected of everyone that they possess a clear and unequivocal identity and in particular that they identify with a particular nation state, commonly the one in which they were born and/or live.
In some regions of Europe (and of course elsewhere), this is very much a modern phenomenon and a consequence of the nation-building projects of the 19th and 20th centuries. Particularly in the large and sprawling multi-ethnic empires that crumbled during WW1, less focused identities formerly existed.
For instance, in the Ottoman Empire and not just in its Anatolian heartland but also in so-called “Turkey in Europe”, religion rather than nationality or ethnicity was the defining feature. The Empire recognised its component regions, of course, but thought of the constituent populations as Muslim, Christian and Jewish, with Christian perhaps subdivided into Greek Orthodox, Armenian and so on. These religious communities were known as millets. As late as the 1920s, both the Greek and the Turkish states found that they had to impose national identities upon particular populations where they were lacking. For instance, Cappadocia was home to up to 100,000 Orthodox Christians. They were known as Karamanlides, but this did not denote ethnicity or race: it simply meant that they were Turkish-speaking and wrote in Turkish but using the Greek alphabet. Although loyal to Turkey, enjoying good relations with their Muslim neighbours, and not thinking of themselves as Greek, they were caught up in the great Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923/24 following the Treaty of Lausanne. Removed from their centuries-old heartland in Anatolia, they became unwilling refugees in Greece, where they had to forge a new, national rather than religious, identity and learn a new language.
In what is today Belarus, too, national identities were far from fully formed even between the World Wars. In the years 1918-1924, when a massive repatriation programme was under way to return refugees and other displaced persons from Soviet Russia to their former places of origin in newly independent Eastern European successor states, many effectively Belarusian refugees entered their religion (Orthodox) in the box marked “nationality” on the registration forms: even Belarusian nationalists recognised that the people had little or no national consciousness.
Poland acquired extensive eastern marches following the collapse of Tsarist Russia and a war with the Bolsheviks. One of these new provinces, województwo Poleskie, was ethnically very mixed and had a particularly small Polish Roman Catholic minority population (14.5% according to the 1931 Polish census). As well as approximately 6.7% in Polesie who declared themselves explicitly to be Belarusian, no less than 62.4% (about 800,000 people) identified themselves as “locals” (tutejszy or tutejsi) and their language as “local”. This was a peasant people, speaking a mix of Belarusian and Russian with some Polish and Lithuanian elements; many were illiterate. Some became polonised before WW2 and the end of the Second Polish Republic, but most came to be regarded as Belarusians and found themselves living in the Belarusian SSR from the 1940s.
During the 1920s and ‘30s, the Romanian countryside drew romantic adventurers, writers, ethnographers and musicologists from Western and Central Europe, fascinated by “the last peasants”. This fascination with a way of life tied to the land and largely lost elsewhere in Europe continues today – for instance, an excellent and non-patronising three-part documentary entitled The Last Peasants was made in 2003 about the villagers of Budeşti in the Maramureş region.
Not all portraits of the Romanian peasant avoid condescension and romanticisation. If you are interested in the subject and especially if you have Romanian ancestors, one writer worth reading about Romania in the inter-War period is Donald Hall, whose Romanian Furrow (republished by Bene Factum, 2007) was written in 1933 and provides an accessible and credible snapshot in time. Hall spent almost a year in the country, initially living among peasants in the village of Morăşti between Curtea de Argeş and Călimăneşti in the region of Muntenia. There he learnt the language and spent the summer working along side the family with which he was lodging.
After the harvest, Hall moved on to the Sibiu area of Ardeal (known as Erdély in Hungary and as Transylvania elsewhere outside Romania). There, first when visiting Poiana Sibiului and then in other places, he encountered villagers who spoke American. About 100,000 Transylvanian Romanians had emigrated to cities such as Cleveland OH and Chicago IL in USA during the late 19th century and early 20th century during the years of Hungarian rule in Ardeal. After the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, Ardeal was ceded to Romania and thus reunited with the “Old Kingdom” centred upon the core provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia. As a result, thousands of Romanians returned from USA. Men typically came back first, to test the waters, and, once satisfied that return migration was the right thing, their wives and children followed, just as the men folk had often emigrated to the States in advance of their families.
Of course, many more remained in USA. Reading Hall or one of the other inter-War writers on Romania, it is hard to imagine the peasants of Wallachia or Maramureş, whose lives had been inseparable from their land and the cycle of the seasons, finding themselves working and adjusting to life in the factories of Detroit or New York.