Archive for February, 2010
Russia is as vast as a continent, and this prodigious extent makes it both difficult and foolhardy to generalise about its population. However, if attention is restricted to European Russia – the regions west of the Urals – and to the ethnic Russian peasantry, it is possible to make a few tentative comments which may assist those trying to undertake family history research. It should be borne in mind that although most émigrés at the time of the 1917 Revolution and the subsequent Civil War were from the ruling classes, those who were not nobility or landed gentry often had peasant roots two or three generations back in their family trees.
This is easy to appreciate in light of the 1857 Russian census figures. In that year, Russia was lightly populated and had a population about the size of the UK today – 61 million. Approximately 81% of the Russian population at mid-century were peasants. The privately-owned serfs (as opposed to state-owned serfs, who were already technically free) were finally emancipated in 1861.
The Russian peasant or muzhik married young. All marriages were of course celebrated in the Russian Orthodox parish church. In the 1850s and 1860s, the minimum legal age for marriage was 18 years for boys and 16 for girls, although the parish priest could give his blessing to marriages where the bride and/or groom were up to six months younger. Most boys married before the age of 20 and girls before the age of 19, and often the bride was one or two years older than the groom. By the turn of the century, rapid social change had raised the average age at marriage: the groom often married only after completing his military service, while the bride might typically be aged from 17 to 22.
Mortality rates were high and therefore re-marriage of widowers and widows was common. When a widower married a widow, this was popularly known as a cuckoo’s wedding. However, it was not unusual for a widower to marry a young woman, often a spinster in her mid- or late twenties who was regarded as an old maid but might be experienced at household management and accustomed to hard work. It was the custom for the bride to enter the household of the groom, whether he was in his late teens or a widower in his fifties.
Fertility rates were also high and family size was large, although generally restricted by an equally high infant mortality rate (in the mid-19th Century, up to half of all Russian peasant children died before the age of five years). The first two or three children of a very young couple were especially vulnerable to premature death: the parents were inexperienced, hygiene and diet were poor, and babies and toddlers might be left in the care of children or neglected while the parents worked in the fields (the mother returning to work within one week of giving birth). Infant mortality appears to have been accepted fatalistically. Lying-over – where a mother accidentally lies on top of her baby at night and smothers it – was so commonplace that it has been suggested that it was used as a means of controlling family size. The parish priest imposed a penance for overlying a child.
Baptism at the parish church took place within a day or two of birth, perhaps partly in recognition of infant mortality rates. Usually, the child was named by the priest, but sometimes by the godparents and only rarely by the parents. This can lead to a pattern of names within a parish reflecting the preferences of the priest.
Over the course of the late 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire gradually shrank out of Europe and the Middle East into the region of Asia Minor currently occupied by modern Turkey, leaving in its wake territories which were contested and claimed by the emerging nation states.
For a family historian with roots in the parts of South-East Europe which were formerly Ottoman, the three main administrative divisions to understand for the period from 1864 up to the First World War are, in diminishing order of size, the vilayet, the sanjak (also sandjak) and the kaza.
The vilayet was the largest of these divisions and is approximately equivalent to a province. With some exceptions, these tend to be smaller than, and do not correspond in location with, the successor nation states which have replaced Turkey-in-Europe. For instance, the vilayets of Shkoder, Janina, Monastir, Salonica and Edirne cover the territory which extends today from Albania, Macedonia and Greece to the Black Sea.
Each vilayet was subdivided into a number of sanjaks, which in turn were divided up into the kazas. For instance, before the Great War, one of the western, Aegean coast vilayets in Anatolia was called Aidin and comprised the five sanjaks of Smyrna, Magnisia, Aidin itself, Denisli and Mentese. Smyrna contained 12 kazas (Smyrna & Nymphaeon, Krini, Pergamos, Vourla, Odemission etc), Magnisia 11 kazas, Aidin five, and Denisli and Mentese six each.
Across Anatolia or Asia Minor, the majority population was usually Turkish (or Kurdish in the east) but many towns and villages were mixed, with the different communities (e.g. Turkish, Greek, Armenian and Jewish) residing in their own relatively self-contained quarters. However, in some places the Turks did not form a majority: for instance, Greeks dominated Smyrna sanjak.
The 20th century erased the ethnic diversity of the former Ottoman Empire. Turkey itself became an overwhelmingly homogeneous nation state, an historical process which is still a matter of serious dispute for Greece and Armenia. The traces of Armenian and Greek civilization remain throughout Asia Minor and often feature as Turkish tourist attractions – see for example the website of the Turkish Culture & Tourism Office in UK here.
What remains unclear is the extent to which the Ottoman era Asia Minor records of interest to family historians, such as those in the Armenian and Greek diasporas, survive. Are Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic church registers of baptism, marriage and burial to be found in Turkish state archives? Are there any congregation list or even individual-level census returns? With a few exceptions (such as Armenian research in Constantinople), there is a sense at present that Greek and Armenian genealogical research within Turkey is, if not impossible, then doomed to disappointment. However, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the next decade will see an opening up of Turkish archives: Turkey remains an applicant to join the European Union, is promoting tourism, and has a potentially large international constituency of family historians who would be extremely interested in the contents of state archives. It will be interesting to see what happens.
In common with most countries in Europe, Greek birth, marriage and death records are not just created locally, but also held locally rather than being centralised and made available in a single nationwide record centre.
Civil registration – the recording of vital events of birth, marriage and death by the state rather than the church – did not commence in Greece until 1925, in which year the Lixiarheion registration system was established and began to be rolled out nationally. Cities and towns have their own dedicated register offices (likewise called Lixiarheion), while in smaller settlements civil registration is carried out at the dimos (the mayor’s office) or koinotis (the community office).
Between 1912 and 1925, registration of birth/baptism, marriage and death/burial by the Church was mandatory. However, even prior to 1912, parish registers were maintained by most Greek Orthodox parish churches, with copies (usually known in English as “bishop’s transcripts”) sent to the diocese office.
Traditionally in Greek society, a child was not named at birth. Rather, the child was referred to simply as “bebá” or similar until baptism. Churching took place at 40 days after the birth, with the naming of the child taking place at the baptism (it is useful to know this when searching baptism registers for populous locations, as you can skip ahead 40 days from the date of birth, if known, with some confidence).
Forenames were not selected randomly but followed either a pattern of naming within the family (i.e. first son named after its paternal grandfather, the second after the maternal grandfather etc) or after saints in the Orthodox calendar – and, obviously, these could be one and the same, as the earlier generations were quite likely named after saints. Children were not named after their parents unless the parent of the same sex died between conception and baptism. The naming convention may also mean that some core family forenames recur in alternate generations, but that within a generation they may occur two, three or more times. For example, if grandfather was named Konstantinos and had three sons named Athanasios, Nikolaos and Spyridon, each of the three sons may well have named their first-born son Konstantinos (with the accompanying patronymic distinguishing them).
The godparents of the baptised child are named in the baptism register and they play an important role in Greek culture. The godparents and the parents form a new and mutual kinship called koumbároi, which does not have an exact equivalent in the Catholic or Protestant churches in Western Europe. The godparents are often siblings of the parents (i.e. uncles or aunts of the child), or they may be influential members of the community (who will then be able to mentor and sponsor the child in later life), or they may be close neighbours or friends.
Towards the end of the 19th century, Cook County, Illinois, centred on the city of Chicago, had one of the fastest growing populations in USA, due to both transatlantic immigration and migration from other parts of the USA. Today, a significant segment of Cook County’s population has roots in Central and Eastern Europe, including a great many people of Polish descent and smaller but still sizeable groups of other Slavic origin.
A database of the Declarations of Intention completed by immigrants applying for naturalisation is available online here. This covers applications made locally between 1906 and 1929. The database has not yet been completed: somewhere between 150,000 and the total estimated number of 400,000 have been entered online so far. It is therefore worth bookmarking the website and returning to it later if a search is negative.
Importantly, the Declarations give the exact date of birth and the town and country of birth, which are essential when beginning research in the European country of origin.
Note that the place names as shown are subject to variation from the accepted norms: they may differ according to the ethnicity of the applicant, are rendered without diacritic marks and may have been transliterated in different ways from Cyrillic alphabet originals into the Latin script used in English.
Place names are also subject to mis-transcription, which is all but unavoidable when transcribing old handwritten originals. Here are two examples from modern Romania. The Banat city of Timişoara appears as Lemesveer, Temesvar (this is a correct German language spelling), Temisvar, Ternesvar, Timisoana etc; while the Moldavian university town of Iaşi shows up as Gassi, Iassy, Jasse, Jassy (a correct German and Yiddish form of its name), Tassi, Yassy, Yoss etc. The best advice is simply to proceed with care and not to use too many search terms to start with – you can always narrow down results by redefining your search later.
If searching by place, you should also consider the political geography of the period 1906 to 1929, which saw great change either side of the Great War. For example, a Croatian ancestor is most likely to have been residing in the Hungarian sphere of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the years before the War, and could therefore appear with Austria or Hungary against his or her name. After the War, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was created, later to become known as Yugoslavia. Of course, a Croat nationalist might simply state that he or she was born in Croatia irrespective of the actual political borders at the time of their birth, emigration or application for naturalisation. Finally, do not forget that a Croat ancestor might not have been living within the modern borders of Croatia at all, but in Bosnia or Hungary proper or Serbia.
Analysis of the Croats who applied for naturalisation in Cook County offers a fascinating picture of their position in society at that date. Of the 820 entries returned by the search engine with Croatia as the recorded country of origin, 367 simply described themselves as labourers. Likewise, there are 67 machinists and many whose jobs – blacksmith, boilermaker, crane operator etc – are likely to have meant that they were either industrial factory hands or working in construction. However, there are good numbers of bakers, craftsmen in wood (cabinet makers, wood turners etc) and so on, and a number of less expected occupations – five chauffeurs, 16 firemen, nine saloon keepers, as well as a solitary iceman, pastor, reporter and undertaker.
As one would expect, most of the applicants came from Zagreb, which tends to appear in the database under its former name Agram. Other places with multiple entries include Čanak, Hreljin, Jaska, Luka, Petrinja, Plešivica, Ramljane, Samobor and Veliko Trgovište. Some of these places are small and the number of immigrants suggests chain migration: that is, one villager emigrating to Chicago, writing back home, and friends and family then following suit. This certainly seems to be true of Čanak, for example, where four of the eight named applicants are called Golić and two Prša (their names anglicised to Golich and Prsha in the absence of diacritical marks). Very few applicants for naturalisation appear to have come from the Dalmatian coast.
Finally, looking at the dates of birth of the 820 Croatian immigrants in Cook County, 33 were born in the 1860s, 109 in the 1870s, 389 in the 1880s, 271 in the 1890s and 16 in the 20th century. Partly this reflects the coverage period (application made from 1906 to 1929) but it also shows a clear upward trend of immigration towards the end of the 19th century.
In the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar in Poland, the first two days in November carry a popular resonance equalled only by Christmas and Easter. All Saints’ Day, the 1st November, is followed by All Souls’ Day. Strictly speaking, the former remembers those who have already attained heaven, the latter the faithful who have not and who will be helped by the prayers of the living. The holiday is not the preserve of the observant, however, and many atheist and agnostic Poles visit the graves of deceased relatives to light candles and remember, a custom known as Zaduszki. For, as Andrzej Stasiuk writes in one of his essays collected in Fado (Dalkey Archive, 2009), “what would humankind be without ancestors?”
“Once a year we mark with fire the places where we’ve buried our dead, so that they might abide forever, so that they can be visited, so that they can be found. No one testifies to our own existence better than them…. So then, once a year we mark those places with light so that the dark, empty, uninhabited and boundless reaches of space should know we’re engaged in a battle with them, a battle with their nothingness, their indifference.”
Poland is not the country it once was. The Second World War shifted it 100 km to the west. It lost many of its eastern marches, the kresy, to the Soviet Republics of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. In return it received the so-called recovered territories in the west vacated by Germans. Displaced Poles from the kresy were repatriated to within the revised borders, often to the recovered territories. Other Poles from within the new borders also moved to the recovered territories – these were known as resettlers rather than repatriants. During the Communist era, still more Poles moved for education, for employment, for careers, for relationships, and so on. As a result, All Soul’s Day is not a local affair. People cross the country in all directions to visit the cemeteries in which lie the graves of their ancestors.
“At dusk everyone leaves, climbs into their cars and buses and goes back home. The cemeteries are left deserted and illuminated… On All Souls’ Day, a journey across Poland resembles a fairy tale or a dream. Fires burn in the darkness. On hills, outside the town limits, in black wildernesses, suspended in the depths of night like twinkling magic carpets, like fiery mirages, like apparitions woven from tiny red and gold and green flames, cemeteries come to life.”
Of course, some ancestral homes now lie well outside the borders of modern Poland and are unlikely to be visited by many, if at all, from year to year.
Stasiuk visits as many of the local cemeteries as he can, remembering the dead, even though his own ancestors are not from the corner of SE Poland where he now resides. He visits Austro-Hungarian military cemeteries from the First World War. He visits the Lemko cemeteries, often all that remain of Lemko villages razed and depopulated during or immediately after the Second World War. “Some of them lie in remote places, in abandoned valleys”; even here, though, in the wild borders down by the Slovak border, others have come before him and a handful of candles flicker into the night.
Beyond the borders of modern Greece, throughout Eastern and South-eastern Europe, and especially in Romania, there are families with Greek ancestry. They may no longer bear distinctively Greek names, or be able to speak or read Greek, although some communities are still very much identifiably and consciously Greek. There are two related sources of these family histories, both dating back to the centuries of Ottoman rule.
Firstly, there are the Black Sea or Pontic Greeks, who spread from Constantinople around the Anatolian seaboard and to all ports around the coast of what are today Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Abkhazia, Georgia and, of course, Turkey. These Greeks were bankers, merchants, ship owners and the like, and often formed (along with Armenians and Jews) the core of the middle class in the towns in which they settled. Naturally, there was also a Greek working class, often making a living as sailors and fishermen. In Romania, there are still coherent albeit dwindling Greek communities in the capital Bucharest and in the ports and towns of the Danube delta such as Constanţa, Galaţi and Sulina.
Secondly, there are the so-called Phanariotes, Greeks from the historic Phanar district of Constantinople (today Fener in Istanbul) who rose to influential positions in the administration of the Ottoman Empire and especially in its Danubian Principalities, the precursor of modern Romania. Here, the Greeks were not only financiers, traders and innkeepers but also often the local rulers and landowners. They married into and purchased estates from the native Romanian ruling class (the boyars). Many assimilated over time, so that the Phanariotes became more of a caste than an ethnic group, including families with clearly Albanian, Italian and Romanian as well as Greek roots. While some family surnames such as Mavrocordatos and Ypsilantis still bespeak Greek origins, others do not and, of course, this is doubly true of female lines of descent.
Bluebird Research is pleased to offer family history research services in all parts of Romania and would welcome the opportunity to assist you in investigating your family tree.
“I was talking to a wealthy peasant who came in from a neighbouring village to Monastir market. He spoke Greek well, but hardly like a native. “Is your village Greek”, I asked him, “or Bulgarian?” “Well”, he replied, “it is Bulgarian now, but four years ago it was Greek”. The answer seemed to him entirely natural and commonplace. “How”, I asked in some bewilderment, “did that miracle come about?” Why”, said he, “we are all poor men, but we want to have our own school and a priest who will look after us properly. We used to have a Greek teacher… but we had no priest of our own. We shared a priest with several other villages, but he was very unpunctual and remiss. We went to the Greek Bishop to complain, but he refused to do anything for us. The Bulgarians heard of this and they came and made us an offer. They said they would give us a priest who would live in the village and a teacher to whom we need pay nothing. Well, sir, ours is a poor village, and so of course we became Bulgarian”.”
from HN Brailsford, Macedonia: Its Races and their Future, Methuen & Co, 1906
Monastir, or Manastir, is today known as Bitola and is the second city of the Republic of Macedonia. It is situated in the far south of the country; Albania is not far off and Greece closer still.
When Brailsford was writing, in 1905, Macedonia was not a state but an ill-defined region of ailing Turkey-in-Europe increasingly contested by different national movements. It is true that some of its peoples, such as the Albanians in the west and the Greeks in parts of the south, possessed clear national affiliations but for many others personal identity was properly a matter of religion, to which all else was secondary. The people had been accustomed to being defined by faith community (millet) by the Ottomans for as long as the collective memory could recall. Since the Bulgarians, the Greeks and the Serbs, all of whom had an eye on at least part of Macedonia, were all Orthodox, this meant that the majority population of Macedonia found itself on a kind of three-way spectrum along which they could slide, or be slid, as the case may be, as illustrated by Brailsford’s anecdote. The longer-term result of this was that the emerging separate Macedonian identity developed in contradistinction to those surrounding nation states.
For the family historian with antecedents from Macedonia, the advice is to tread with great care and to be prepared for a difficult way ahead. It is vital to know the exact place of origin of the family in order to conduct any meaningful genealogical research. Knowing the family religion is important, too, nationality or ethnicity perhaps less so. Many villages would have just the one church, and/or just the one mosque, and in that respect it might matter little whether the villagers thought of themselves as Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Serb or Vlach (Aromanian or Wallachian) on the one hand, or as Albanian, Bosnian, Pomack or Turkish on the other. Note also that some Albanians in Macedonia were Roman Catholic and, indeed, Orthodox; and that the Gypsies, who tended to live in discrete communities on the outskirts of towns and villages, were usually Muslim but occasionally Orthodox.
Macedonia was contested politically and militarily for too long, with significant and bloody revolts at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, long before the two Balkan Wars of 1912/13 and the destruction of the Great War. Brailsford worked in the vilâyet of Manastir on behalf of an NGO called the British Relief Fund during the winter of 1903/04, following the 1903 uprising and its savage Turkish suppression and reprisals. In that vilâyet alone, he calculated that 119 villages were wholly or partly burned and over 8,400 homes destroyed, displacing at least 60,000 civilian non-combatants. Some families went back to re-build their villages once peace returned but others re-settled elsewhere or went abroad; the subsequent upheavals and conflicts after 1903 created a pattern of repeated displacement and migration and the impact of this, too, must not be under-estimated when attempting family history research in Macedonia.
In 1989, the writer Gregor von Rezzori returned to the place of his birth for the first time since 1936.
He had been born into the elite caste of the pre-WW1 Austro-Hungarian civil service, in which his father served as a supervisor and administrator of the Romanian Orthodox Church estates and monasteries in Bukovina. In the remodelled post-War world, Romania acquired Bukovina and the former Austrian governing class there became déclassé. The von Rezzori family was among the minority which stayed on, residing in Czernowitz (now officially Cernăuţi), the capital of Bukovina, where Gregor himself had been born in 1914 and lived as a boy. Although he attended a boarding school in Braşov (Kronstadt) in Transylvania, and dwelt subsequently in Vienna, Bucharest, Berlin and Firenze, he continued to think of himself as a Czernowitzer.
Of course, much had happened in the intervening 50 years before von Rezzori returned to his birthplace, now called Chernivtsi. Bukovina had been bisected in 1940. Its top half, including Cernăuţi, was ceded by Romania to the Soviet Union and the transfer of territory was confirmed after the War. From that date, Chernivtsi ceased to be a provincial capital and became a town of little moment on the periphery of Ukraine.
To his surprise, upon his return von Rezzori finds the city largely intact – of major landmarks, only the synagogue had been destroyed, inevitably razed by the Nazis during their occupation in 1941 – and in good repair. There was the inevitable and ubiquitous urban sprawl of high-rise apartment blocks where once the city had almost imperceptibly merged into the surrounding countryside. What appeared to von Rezzori to have changed was the character of the city:
“My hometown gained world fame as the melting pot for dozens of ethnic groups, languages, creeds, temperaments and customs… Nothing could be detected now of the restlessly vivacious, cynically bold and melancholically sceptical spirit that had distinguished the children of this town and made them known and famous throughout the world as Czernowitzers… the spirit of Czernowitz was due to the unique propinquity and juxtaposition of the Bukovina’s multiplicity of populations” (The Snows of Yesteryear, trans HF Broch de Rothermann, New York Review Books, 2009).
Czernowitz has been “cleansed of its hodgepodge of Swabian Germans, Romanians, Poles, Jews, Prussians, Slovaks and Armenians… The motley ethnic variegation had been replaced by a homogeneous breed of people…. These were Ukrainians. In the old days we called them Ruthenians, one of the many minorities in a place where there was no majority”.
Of course, von Rezzori views Chernivtsi through eyes that might not distinguish between a local Ukrainian with deep Bukovina roots and a modern Hutsul, or between western Ukrainians and the Soviet era immigrants from central and eastern Ukraine foreign to Bukovina. However, the great diversity of the city, the outcome of centuries of organic growth and the occasional jolts of conflict, has gone. Like L’viv, like Vilnius, like other cities of the borders and contact zones of Eastern Europe, Chernivtsi lost something irreplaceable during the history of the 20th century.
Burgenland is an invention. All administrative regions other than island nations are, to a greater or lesser extent, inevitably inventions: why, for example, are the borders of any continental European state where they are and not a little bit further west or east, or north or south? But Burgenland is quite literally an invention and a recent one.
Before the Great War, what is today Burgenland was simply a strip of territory on the westernmost border of Hungary abutting Austria. It did not really have a name. It was ethnically mixed, with a population of Austrians, Croatians, Gypsies, Hungarians and Jews. The Austrians made up the majority but not in all towns or areas, some of which were predominantly Hungarian or Croatian. This multi-national flavour was true, of course, of not a few regions in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.
After the War, however, the Great Powers decided that defeated Hungary had to be dismembered, partly to punish and weaken it and partly to enable the self-determination of the peoples of what became “the Little Entente” of the newly founded states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and an enlarged Romania. However, for no apparent good reason, defeated Austria was awarded the westernmost strip of defeated Hungary. The other option had been the creation of a “Czech corridor” linking the Slavic states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, but this was dismissed in favour of unification with Austria. A plebiscite allowed Hungary to retain the largely Hungarian town of Sopron, which had been mooted as the likely capital of the new Austrian province.
The territory ceded to Austria in 1921 needed a name and Burgenland – “castle land” – was chosen.
What followed illustrates the effect of moving international borders. The 20th century nation states boxed in peoples as homogeneously as possible and effectively discouraged minorities. Burgenland was now Austrian. Austrians moved in. Hungarians moved out. Slavs emigrated to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The Austrian majority increased with the 1930s and creeping institutional germanisation. When the Austrians welcomed the Anschluss with Nazi Germany, the fate of the Burgenland’s Jews was sealed. It is true that today there are still Croatian and Hungarian minorities in Burgenland but the historical multi-ethnic mix of the region has been greatly diminished.
For family historians in the English-speaking world with roots in Burgenland, it is worth knowing that emigration from the region built up slowly during the closing years of the 19th century but gained momentum in 1921 to 1924, when Hungarians in particular emigrated to North America. Although Burgenland is Austrian, it should not necessarily be assumed that surviving vital records will be in Austria rather than over the border in Sopron or elsewhere in Hungary. Remember also that the majority of settlements in Burgenland have a Hungarian language name which may not be shown on modern Austrian maps and atlases, while others have Croat names. If you have Hungarian roots and are interested in the Burgenland, it is worth looking for a map published in Hungary, as this will almost certainly show the old Hungarian names. Concordances have also been published which match the Austrian, Hungarian and Croat names of individual settlements.
In the Church of England, at least as practised in England, individual parish churches tend to be dedicated to a single saint or to the saints as a whole (All Saints). Many settlement names are also taken from the dedication of the church – St Albans, St Helens, St Ives etc – or use the dedication as a qualifier – think of Bury St Edmunds. Apostrophes have mostly disappeared over the years.
The practice of naming parish churches after individual saints is also common in Belarus, although some saints revered in the Orthodox Church are not familiar in the West, for example, Paraskevskaia (St Paraskeva) and Dmitrievskaia (St Demetrius).
However, many Orthodox churches in Belarus are dedicated to the feasts of the liturgical calendar, which is unusual in the Anglican Church. Here are some Orthodox Church dedications which are particularly common in Belarus, transliterated, together with their translations:
- Rozhdestvo-Bogoroditskaia / Nativity of the Virgin
- Krestovozdvizhenskaia / Exaltation of the Holy Cross
- Bogoiavlenskaia / Epiphany
- Blagoveshchenskaia / Annunciation
- Voskresenskaia / Resurrection
- Voznesenskaia / Ascension
- Preobrazhenskaia / Transfiguration
- Uspenskaia / Dormition
- Vvedenskaia / Presentation
The territory of Belarus has been ravaged by world war and civil war, and subjected to the militant atheism of the Soviet Union. Churches, town halls and archives have been among the victims. Notwithstanding this, baptism, marriage and burial registers do survive for many places in Belarus, although seldom do these surviving records form unbroken sequences. Many have gaps of years (sometimes many years), while others might have good stretches of marriage registers, for example, for a given period but no extant baptism registers of the same dates. Still, unless you search you will not find, so do not be needlessly discouraged from attempting family history research in Belarus. Bluebird Research has researchers on the ground who can assist and we welcome enquiries regarding genealogical research in Belarus.
Like any other small immigrant community whose population is not being frequently replenished with new stock, the Lithuanian community in Scotland is in danger of completely assimilating – effectively disappearing – within the next 10 or 20 years.
The original migrants arrived in the early 1880s, coinciding with the introduction of a more repressive regime in Tsarist Russia following the 1881 assassination of Alexander II. Various reasons are cited for the influx of Lithuanians into Scotland, among the most common of which are political, religious and/or national persecution, or escaping conscription, and poverty. Suppression of the growing Lithuanian national movement may have played a role but I suspect that it was minor. One has to ask the fundamental question: why would a Lithuanian emigrate to Scotland during the era when, for example, USA operated a completely open door policy without even the annual quotas which were introduced in the wake of WW1? And, if they came to Scotland, why on earth would they emigrate to, for example, Bellshill and Mossend, Coatbridge and Uddingston, in North Lanarkshire as they did rather than, say, Edinburgh or Dundee?
Of course, chance and chain migration may have been involved – one or two Lithuanians, fresh off the boat in Leith, happened to find jobs and land up in Bellshill and others followed. But I believe the real reason must have been that they were purposely recruited, in Lithuania itself, to work in the mines. Whether the agents of the Scottish mine owners and ironworks were seeking skilled labour or cheap labour is a moot point.
One thing is for sure: Scotland may not have been experienced as a universally welcoming new home. The Lithuanians were, for starters, not just foreigners but moreover they were Catholic rather than Protestant and they were competing, or were perceived to be competing, for local jobs. This antagonism recurred whenever there was an economic downturn and rising unemployment, for instance during the severe depression of the 1930s.
In this environment, and without a steady flow of new immigrants to reinforce the population, the process of assimilation gathered pace. Lithuanians changed their names, for convenience and to stand out less. They married out. They quickly became bilingual and then started to use English more than Lithuanian. Some will have moved on to USA and several hundreds returned to Lithuania following its independence in 1918 after the Great War. Despite some newcomers after WW2, when UK accepted Displaced Persons from the zones it occupied in defeated Germany and Austria, the Lithuanian community appears to be dwindling and recognised as such.
The growth of recreational family history will lead to an increased awareness of the Lithuanians in Lanarkshire but unfortunately it will not revitalise the community. Scotland enjoys an excellent civil registration system and records can be searched online at the official ScotlandsPeople website. One beauty of the Scottish registration system, as opposed to the English & Welsh, and certainly those in Ireland, is that it captures aliases very diligently. Partly this is a function of Scottish women legally retaining their maiden surname after marriage; they therefore appear in the birth, marriage and death registers as, for example, Mary Millar or Scott or Wilson (in that case meaning that Mary was born a Millar, married firstly a Mr Scott and secondly a Mr Wilson). This keenness to record all names means that Lithuanians’ changes of name can be traced back through the records to shortly after their arrival. The one problem is that their names are not always spelt correctly in the registers (and of course never faithfully using the diacritics of the Lithuanian alphabet).
If you wish to take your research into your Scottish Lithuanian ancestry back to Lithuania itself, it is vital to know, or to be able to discover through research in UK, the exact place of origin in Lithuania. The reason for this is simply that all records of use to family historians are decentralised. Without a place of origin, therefore, it may not be possible to advance your enquiries. Try, as well as the birth, marriage and death records, Scottish census returns and British naturalisation records; elders within the family or the Lithuanian community generally may be able to point to a home town in Lithuania. And if you would like a hand in Lithuania, Bluebird Research offers reliable family history research with good rates of success across Lithuania and would be happy to undertake an investigation upon your behalf: contact us for a free assessment.