Archive for March, 2010
The Estonian areas – Estland, northern Livland or Livonia – of the Russian Empire in the 19th century were dominated by the Baltic German elite until the russification programme of the late 1880s started to shift power away from them. Nobility, landowners, merchants and clergy were all German. Estonians constituted the peasantry and craftsmen in the countryside and the labouring poor in the towns. Those few upwardly mobile Estonians learnt the German language and usually took German names.
Serfdom was abolished in the period 1816 to 1819, initially in Estland and then in northern Livland. However, this was not the same as land reform: land was not redistributed to the peasantry and the peasants remained tied to the great estates with limited personal freedom and the obligation to labour for the landowner. Very few peasants moved to a different estate, let alone to the towns. The only Estonian peasants likely to move away from their places of birth in the first half of the 19th century were those conscripted into the Russian army for 25 years.
The taking of surnames among the peasantry followed the abolition of serfdom. Surnames are generally thought to have been given to the peasants, rather than taken by them. Usually they were given to a family by the landowners or by the clergy or parish clerks at the time of baptisms and marriages; the taking of surnames took place gradually and continued over the course of years into the 1830s. Where branches of families lived on different estates or farms, or were given names at different dates, they usually received different surnames. Names were derived from the usual sources – patronymics, occupations, places of residence (derived from the name of the manor or farm, or descriptive of the location), physical attributes, nature and so on – but also more talismanic and whimsical names. Often the names were Germanic rather than Estonian.
It is usually possible to research Estonian family history confidently back to the period of the assigning of surnames and, with luck and patience, beyond this date using family reconstruction techniques based upon the parish registers and revision lists. However, before the 1820s/30s personal records usually identify an individual through a combination of his own personal name, his father’s name and his paternal grandfather’s name (with women often described as being wife, widow or daughter of a particular man). The picture can be complicated further by the assigning of the name of the manor, the farm or the farmer to an individual.
If you require professional help with family history research in Estonia, please contact Bluebird Research for an assessment and estimate of costs.
Vital records of birth, marriage and death in Ukraine are decentralised: that is, they are held locally, at municipal level for the modern era and in regional state archives for earlier registers. What this means for a researcher in the widespread Ukrainian global diaspora is that it is essential to find out exactly where an ancestor came from in order to begin research in Ukraine.
There are various ways of doing this, if the place of origin is not confidently known from family records and lore. Passenger lists, immigration records, naturalisation records and, in some cases, births, marriages and death certificates in the immigrant land can all help. So too can a number of published sources, such as those for the prairie provinces of Canada mentioned in an earlier Bluebird blog. Another good source for the earliest immigrants is the cemetery headstone.
www.prairiesouls.com is a new website publishing photographs of gravestones for rural Alberta and, in a few cases, Saskatchewan. Many of the pioneer settlers, such as those in receipt of Western Land Grants searchable at Collections Canada, were Ukrainian or, as they were more likely to have been known at the time, Ruthenian (prior to the First World War, a self-proclaimed “Ukrainian” was most likely a nationally conscious Ruthenian). While it is not possible to see from the current arrangement of the website the exact coverage, it is possible to search by name, get a list of results and view individual images from the featured cemeteries.
The earlier the grave, the more likely it is to have a Ukrainian language inscription and to name-check the place of origin in the homeland. The original Ukrainian language spelling of the surname in the Cyrillic alphabet can be very important for research in Ukraine itself and is worth noting when found on a headstone, especially when the anglicised spelling of the name varies due to a simplification of the pronunciation and the lack of exactly corresponding characters in the Latin alphabet, as in the case in Prochinsky and Procinsky. One very helpful feature of the website is the translation into English of Ukrainian language information (name, date and place).
The place of origin is not always given and, when it is shown, it may be generic (Austria, Bukovina, Galicia etc) but sometimes the exact village is given, as in the case of the the Bryks family buried in the Old Wostok AB cemetery, said to have come from “Selo Dzurrin, Czortkiw, Austria” – the village of Dzuryn, west of Czortków in inter-War Poland, now Dzhuryn, Chortkiv, in the Ternopil’ oblast of Ukraine. Even if the grave of your ancestor does not name the place of origin, it is worth looking at others within the same cemetery to see if there is a pattern, as it was not unusual for members of settler communities to have come from the same area in the homeland.
Armenia is not, of course, in Eastern Europe. However, Armenians resided not only in the Caucasus and across Anatolia to the Aegean, but throughout the Black Sea region, forming a significant minority community in countries such as Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, Romania and Russia. Bluebird Research welcomes enquiries about Armenian family history research in these countries and will be happy to provide free assessments.
Armenian genealogical research is complicated not just by its diaspora in Eastern Europe and Asia Minor but, also, of course, by the state-sponsored persecution of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the genocide of 1915-17 and continuing into the early 1920s (for instance, the deliberate razing of the Armenian quarter of Smyrna by Turkish forces in 1922).
Bluebird Research is developing professional genealogical research services in Asia Minor, to include Armenian as well as Greek, Jewish and Levantine family histories. We would be delighted to hear from family historians in the Armenian diaspora and to supply an opinion as to the feasibility and likelihood of success of genealogical research in Turkey. In this regard, it is vital that you obtain as much information as you can from sources in your own country before contemplating research in Anatolia and the Caucasus.
Bluebird Research can offer research services in the Republic of Armenia itself. Contact us for further details.
The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (UNRRC) was created in 1943, largely to organise and administer the growing number of wartime refugees in Europe, those who became known as the Displaced Persons (DPs). By 1947, UNRRC was overseeing a total of 762 Displaced Person camps: 416 were in the zone of occupied Germany run by the Americans, 272 were in the British zone, 45 in the French zone, with an additional 21 in Austria and eight in Italy. Each camp could be expected to hold 3,000 or more DPs. Many more DPs lived not in these refugee centres but received out-relief in the community. In 1948, UNRRC was succeeded by the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), which continued to fulfil the same remit.
None of the DP camps were in the communist zone, for the simple reason that, now Nazi Germany was defeated, the DPs were effectively refugees from communism. The Soviets wanted all Central and Eastern Europeans of all nationalities to be repatriated to their place of origin. The Western Allies wavered between repatriation, inaction and resettlement (which, in this context, meant emigration). The sheer number of DPs, the logistics of resettlement abroad, fears about the unpopularity of immigration with electorates back home, and the reassurances of the Soviets (a wartime ally, after all, with which relations were still reasonably cordial), made repatriation an attractive and simple option. However, the Displaced Persons themselves categorically did not want to be repatriated and information regarding the fate of those who did return voluntarily, or for want of other options, and those who against their will were returned by the Allies to the Soviets gradually made the West firm up its policy to one of resettlement abroad.
In the end, in fact, economic self-interest, not humanitarian concerns, facilitated the resettlement of DPs. Even those economies not devastated by war needed to recover and build, and there was a growing demand for inexpensive manpower. Belgium wanted coal miners. Canada had a labour shortage and wanted workers for agriculture, forestry and the railways, as well as domestic service. When the availability of the pool of DP labour became widely known, governments rushed to take advantage and, as a result, DPs ended up on schemes which took them to countries such as Argentina and Brazil as well as the more expected Australia, France and USA.
The Poles in Britain are an especially interesting case. The Polish government and army in exile had been based in London and, for example, Polish airmen played a significant role in the Royal Air Force. At the end of the War, 115,000 Polish veterans (including those from Lt Gen Władysław Anders’s II Polish Corps, known as Anders’s Army) were formed into the Polish Resettlement Corps (or Polski Korpus Przysposobienia i Rozmieszczenia or PKRP in Polish) and granted the right to settle in Britain in recognition of their contribution to the war effort. Poles also featured prominently among the 86,000 Displaced Persons brought to Britain after the War as European Voluntary Workers (EVWs) under the so-called Operation Westward Ho.
Various records relating to Polish servicemen are held at different locations in Greater London and can give extremely useful genealogical information (including any kin back in Poland and, vitally for a jurisdiction with decentralised record-keeping, place of birth). Brief details of those who subsequently became naturalised can be found in the official London Gazette and often in The National Archives’ online catalogue. Records are closed (as all post-1922 naturalisation files are) but a Freedom of Information Act request will usually be successful in opening them to the individual or their near kin.
Bluebird Research offers professional family history research both in Poland and in Polish resources held in UK. Contact us for advice or an assessment.
By the time Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, there were no fewer than 45 Waffen-SS Divisions, although seven of recent formation were not up to strength. Each Division was numbered and named.
Central and Eastern Europeans featured in several of these Divisions (as of course did Belgians, Danes, Dutch, Norwegians and so on):
VII Prince Eugen – Volksdeutsche recruits from the Balkans
XIII Handschar – Bosnian Muslims
XIV Galizien – western Ukrainians
XV and XIX – Lettische, or Latvian Legions
XVIII Horst Wessel – Volksdeutsche recruits from Hungary
XX Estnische – Estonian Legion
XXI Skanderbeg – Albanian Muslims
XXII Maria Theresa – Volksdeutsche recruits from Hungary
XXIII Kama – Bosnian Muslims and Croatians
XXV, XXVI and XXXIII Hunyadi or Ungarische – Hungarians
XXIX and XXX Russische – Soviet PoWs
XXXI Böhmen-Mähren – Volksdeutsche recruits from Czechoslovakia
XXXII 30 Januar – Balts from Courland
For more details, see Norman Davies, Europe: A History, Oxford University Press, 1996.
It should be immediately apparent that the men in these units would have had very different reasons for joining the Waffen-SS. While the ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) and, say, the Hungarians may have shared many or all of the tenets of Nazi supremacist ideology, including anti-Semitism, it is much less clear that this would have been the case for some of the others. For instance, the soldiers in the Galizien Division (called the Halychyna Division in Ukrainian) almost certainly saw themselves primarily as fighting against Soviet communism and its expansionism, and for an independent Ukraine, not for the Nazis. The same could be said of the Latvians, for example, who were justifiably fearful of the Soviet Union destroying their short-lived pre-War independence (as, of course, was to happen): veterans, their families and supporters marched last week in Riga to commemorate the Latvian Legion, sparking the annual controversy as to whether they were nationalist freedom fighters or Nazi sympathisers. Among the men in the two Russische Divisions, joining may have been an alternative to languishing in prison camps, or a matter of compulsion.
In these circumstances, it is best not to rush to make value judgements if, during the course of your family history research, you discover that a grandfather, or an uncle, fought in one of these Divisions, as it is not possible to know with any confidence what his underlying motivations may have been at the time.
Across much of Central and Eastern Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries, the middle class was small. The landed and ruling elite was separated from the peasantry and the labouring classes in the towns by a great gulf, rather than there being a sizeable middle class in to which both upper and lower echelons gradually shaded by imperceptible degrees. Of course, during the course of the long 19th Century, this traditional feudal structure changed with industrialisation and increased social mobility, and a recognisable and increasingly influential bourgeoisie began to emerge. What is striking about the traditional Eastern European society, however, was that the middle class was composed disproportionately of people regarded by both the landowners and the peasantry as non-indigenous, even if their families had lived in the vicinity for generations.
Karl Marx described how these people in the middle – the lawyers, bankers, moneylenders, tax collectors, merchants, traders, innkeepers, shopkeepers and so on – occupying the Lücken-Positionen, the gap in between, were overwhelmingly “non-indigenous” (Ivan T Berend, Decades of Crisis, University of California Press, 2001). Depending upon region, these roles might be filled by Armenians, Germans, Greeks or Jews. They were vulnerable for many reasons. They were regarded with distaste by the landowners and with resentment by the peasantry, although or because they were needed by both alike. Their religion usually marked them out as different and foreign. In the countryside they might live in isolation and even in the towns their communities were often small and occupied distinct quarters. This vulnerability became more pronounced at a time of national awakening (or re-awakening, as the case might be) and whenever assertive nationalism required an adversary it was likely to be turned against the perceived alien in the midst. Similarly, class consciousness was also likely to be directed against the moneyed middleman to whom both the upper and lower class turned in times of need.
These communities are one of the fascinating features of Eastern Europe up to the First World War. This is why the family historian may find Greek ancestors in Romania or Ukraine, and German and Jewish ancestors across the entire eastern half of the European continent and European Russia. Many towns, or quarters of towns, became German or Jewish settlements apart, islands in a sea of native peasantry. In such places, German often became the lingua franca of the town (certainly so in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Baltic gubernia of Imperial Russian) and would be learnt and spoken by all other elements in civic society, such as the Poles or Latvians in their respective lands.
Some of the people in the middle, such as the Armenian community in Poland, assimilated and only relicts remain. Elsewhere, for the reasons indicated above, the German and Jewish middle classes were subject to distrust, victimisation, deportation and worse over the course of the 20th Century and this distinctive element of Eastern European society has all but disappeared.
Up to six million civilians are thought to have been displaced within the Russian Empire between 1914 and 1917. Up to 30% of the inhabitants of Russian cities in wartime were refugees: places like Ekaterinoslav, Kharkiv, Kiev, Nizhny Novgorod, Pskov, Rostov and Samara, received tens of thousands of displaced persons. Refugees flooded into central, black earth and Volga basin gubernia, while many others crossed the Urals into Siberia, or found themselves deposited in Tashkent or elsewhere in Central Asia.
There were three broad types of refugee.
Firstly, there were refugees who fled the advancing German army as it threatened and occupied the Russian territory on which they lived.
Secondly, the Russian military authorities evacuated the population in the path of advancing German forces and as the Russian army was forced to retreat, usually operating a scorched earth policy to prevent resources (manpower, settlements, farms, crops) falling into enemy hands and transporting livestock and machinery behind their own lines to assist the war effort. This pattern also applied to Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, which the Russian army occupied in 1914 but was then forced to withdraw from: Austrian subjects either fled or were evacuated to the Russian interior.
Given the rapid advance of the Germans through the lands of what are today Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine, these first two types of refugee merge one into the other: if the population did not flee the Prussian military machine, they were evacuated by the Russians. Neither type can be said to have migrated voluntarily; both were displaced in response to irresistible forces. Nearly all found themselves with limited or no means of support by the time they arrived at their destinations in Russia.
As men of fighting age had often been conscripted into the Russian army already, the refugees of these two types were overwhelmingly the women, children and elderly.
The third type of refugee formed a tiny minority. This was the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie who were able to escape to the Russian interior in a more pre-planned way, making their own private transport arrangements and reaching the relative safety and comfort of a major city such as Moscow or St Petersburg. Even those who started out with money might find themselves in reduced circumstances as the war wore on for years without resolution.
Given their origin, most of the refugees were non-Russian. they were, for example, Jews (never trusted by the Russian army command), Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and Ukrainians (not to mention German subjects of Russia, who were deported as soon as possible to the interior, often to Siberia or Central Asia, for reasons of national security). Where possible, the different peoples tended to form their own refugee communities in Russia and this was one of the various factors which crystallised national consciousness and precipitated demands for independence in their homelands in the wake of the War.
In all likelihood, any genealogist whose family history lies in the borderlands of the Russian Empire either occupied by the German army or regarded as a military zone by the Russian army during the years 1914 to 1917 is likely to find their family history research disrupted. Black holes in the documentary evidence are probable; family timelines will appear obscure. Births, marriages and deaths may not have taken place in the expected village or town of origin but somewhere along the long route that the refugees travelled into Russia, or at one or more of the places at which they were temporarily stationed or settled. In conditions of wartime poverty, hunger and disease, untold numbers of refugees died great distances from home and the family historian may never be able to identify when or where such deaths took place and were registered (if, indeed, they were registered at all). Instead, you will find no trace of a death which you know must have taken place, or of the birth or baptism of a child you know to have been born, in these years. The war was also a period of family rupture: even when a nuclear family unit did not become separated during the chaos, the more extended family is likely to have become dispersed to different locations and there cannot have been many families where one or men of fighting age were not conscripted and separated from the families for years.
So this is one of the frequent challenges of Eastern European family history research. You cannot apply without reservation what you know from your experience of undertaking genealogical research in Australia, or Canada, or New Zealand, or UK, or USA. You should expect discontinuities in the family timeline and gaps in the surviving documentary record. You may never know where key family members were at certain dates. But the challenges are one of the many reasons why family history research in Eastern Europe is so interesting and rewarding, as each breakthrough does not come with the relative ease and certainty with which you may be accustomed from undertaking your research in the English-speaking world.
The emancipation of the peasantry and the reform and re-distribution of land in Central and Eastern Europe during the course of the 19th and early 20th century had profound consequences for social mobility. Ironically, however, the peasantry seldom enjoyed great benefits. Freedom from serfdom meant freedom to be an underpaid and often under-employed agricultural labourer, or a subsistence smallholder of minimal land and assets, or a dislocated casual labourer in city factories.
Rather, the social revolution in the countryside created movement between the upper and middle classes. The topmost echelon of Hungarian society, the aristocratic and noble landowners such as the Bánffy, Esterházy, Jósika, Kemény, Somssich, Teleki and Wesselényi families, possessed vast estates and political power, which they retained well into the 20th century. However, beneath them was a broad layer of lesser nobility and gentry which did not fare so well once it lost its free peasant labour and exemption from taxation. They were not proficient in land or financial management. As they started to fail, their former estate managers and upwardly mobile bankers, industrialists and merchants purchased their great houses and lands. 19th century fiction abounds with scenarios in which the two previously distinct social classes inter-marry: the impoverished aristocrat marries into the new wealth of the family of a financier or manufacturer, while the latter marries into the name and prestige of the aristocrat. More frequently, of course, the dispossessed gentry simply became déclassé and found employment in the civil service, the military and the judiciary. In this way, the embourgeoisement of the former landed gentry still left them in positions of influence.
Through estate purchase and intermarriage, the most successful nouveau riche entrepreneurs and merchants assimilated into the upper strata of Hungarian society. Noble titles could also be bought. The industrialist Manfréd Weiss (1857-1922), became Baron Csepeli Weiss, Csepel being the island in the Danube on the south side of Budapest on which his iron and steel factory and munitions works were located. The sugar manufacturer Sándor Deutsch (1852-1913) became Baron Hatvany-Deutsch, the town of Hatvan 60 km east of Budapest being the site of his sugar factory.
Of course, as the 20th century wore on, further social upheaval, both in wartime and under Communism, brought vast change to both the upper and middle classes in Hungary. When undertaking family history research, it is important to remember that social mobility affects all classes and that movement can be up or down or both at different times in the history of any one family. It is also, of course, one of the destabilising factors which leads to migration within a country or emigration abroad.
When undertaking Serbian family history research, it is important to understand two facts: that the current and historical borders of Serbia do not coincide and that Serbs have always lived outside the country. Therefore, you should not assume that your Serbian ancestors always lived on the territory of modern Serbia.
During the period within which most Serbian genealogists can hope to make decent progress in their family history research – approximately 1800 to date – the northern boundary of Serbia was formed by the Dunav (or Danube) and the city of Belgrade was therefore a border town. On the other side of the Dunav was Vojvodina, which was part of Austro-Hungary until WW1. Many Serbs, along with peoples of other nationalities, lived in the Vojvodina; they were known as prečani (“across the river”), sometimes translated as the transriparian Serbs. Vojvodina itself was divided into three segments: the Srem, between the Sava and the Dunav rivers; the Bačka between the Dunav and the Tisa rivers; and the Banat, the largest and most populated region which today extends across Serbia and neighbouring Romania.
Serbs also lived along the military border, the Krajina, established by the Habsburgs as a bulwark against Ottoman expansion. The existence of the Krajina explains the historic arc of Serbian settlement across northern Bosnia, Slavonia and the western Croatian-Bosnian border. Serbs have always lived elsewhere across Bosnia and Hercegovina (where they constituted between a third and a half of the population at different times throughout the 19th century) and, of course, also in Kosovo (“Old Serbia”) and northern Macedonia.
Serbia achieved limited autonomy from the Ottomans in 1815 and effective independence in 1830. The new state immediately attracted Serbs from the surrounding and still Ottoman regions of Bosnia, Hercegovina and Macedonia. New waves of immigrants arrived in Serbia periodically, for example in 1875 following an uprising in Hercegovina and in 1910 following the suppression by the Ottomans of an Albanian revolt in Kosovo. Serbs living in Austro-Hungary, such as those in the Krajina, were also drawn abroad – up to 300,000 Serbs and Croats are thought to have emigrated to USA from Krajina in the decade leading up to WW1. On American passenger lists, immigration papers and census returns, they may be described as Austrians or Hungarians after their citizenship in Europe. Their Orthodox religion, if recorded, will help mark them out as Serbs.
The history of the Serbs, even in modern times, is complicated by the kinds of factors mentioned above. It should be noted that in some areas many records of value to family historians were destroyed, deliberately or inadvertently, during, for example, the Balkan Wars in 1912/13, in WW1 and WW2, or during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As a result, success cannot be guaranteed.
Bluebird Research offers professional family history research in Serbia and across Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia; research may also be possible in Kosovo and parts of Macedonia, depending upon the quality and detail of the background information available. We would be delighted to provide advice and guidance, as well as genealogical research services, and welcome all enquiries.
The writer Bruno Schulz is not much read in the English-speaking world nowadays, nor perhaps anywhere outside Poland and Israel. You can find pretty much his entire fictional output in a single volume English translation by Celina Wieniewska.
Schulz was the small-town Jewish boy who never really made good, a kind of obscure provincial Franz Kafka with a runaway mind veering towards the fantastic. He came from a modest and alternately successful and failing middle class background. His father Jakub Schulz was a clothier and later a bankrupt; his mother Henrietta or Hendel nee Kuhmärker took over the family business. The family appears in the JewishGen Ukraine Database, the commonplace nondescript name Schulz drawing no attention to itself, just one more lost Jewish name among many. But there is Bruno, born in Drohobycz in 1892 (actually 12th July 1892). It is not clear whether the civil authorities recognised the Jewish marriage of his parents, although the family is thought to have been an assimilated one, as some family entries seem to be registered under the mother’s maiden name Kuhmärker rather than Schulz. It was not at all unusual for Galician Jewish births to be recorded under the mother’s maiden name both in the days of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and during interwar Polish times; therefore, it is advisable to search under both names.
Most summaries of Bruno’s family life refer to a single sister Hania and brother Izydor. However, there appear to have been two more siblings at least, namely Isak, who died as a three-year old boy in 1879, and Hinda, who also died aged three years of age in 1890; quite possibly there were others who died in infancy or childhood. Hania appears to have been born circa 1873 and to have married Moses Hoffmann in 1900; at the time of her marriage, according to JewishGen, she was spelling her name Anna or Chane. They had a son Ludwik in 1903. Izydor seems to have been born as Baruch Israel in 1881. He was a successful engineer with oil mining interests in Galicia; a 1912 directory shows that he was then residing at ulica św Bartłomieja in Drohobycz. He died in 1935.
As for Bruno, he became an art teacher in the local school, wrote his fiction and received moderate acclaim for a while. Like Kafka he never married, although he had a string of female friends and correspondents and eventually was affianced to Józefina Szelińska, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who taught Polish and later worked in the bureau of statistics (perhaps the register office?). For her sake he renounced his religion, becoming officially “faithless”, but the intended resulting register office wedding never came to pass. Schulz survived the first Soviet occupation of Polish Galicia but was not to survive the subsequent Nazi occupation.
As a modern poet once sang, “Every moment leads toward its own sad end”. Bruno Schulz was shot by a Nazi named Karl Günther while carrying a loaf of bread back home to the ghetto in November 1942.
The family historian in the British Isles or North America or Australia is accustomed to high quality registration of birth, marriage and death and expects to be able to find most 19th and 20th century vital events in either civil or ecclesiastical registers. These expectations should not be carried over wholesale to research in Central and Eastern Europe. While births, marriages and deaths were registered in one form or another in much of the eastern half of continental Europe from the mid-19th century, if not earlier, registration would not have been comprehensive in most parts, survival of records is not guaranteed and access restrictions mean that 20th century records in particular can be difficult to obtain.
In Russia it seems likely that there was chronic under-registration, particularly of deaths, before the 1917 Revolution. Mortality rates were not just the highest in Europe but were in excess of those in the poorest sub-Saharan and Asian states today. The urban and rural poor died of malnutrition, alcohol poisoning, cholera and typhus, tuberculosis. In other senses, it is probably also true to say that they died from lack of education and certainly from state indifference. Famines in 1891/92 and in 1906 killed millions of often displaced people in southern Russia and in what is today Ukraine. The country was undergoing rapid urbanisation and labourers converged on Kiev, Moscow, Odessa, St Petersburg and other fast-growing cities. Economic migration, which was primarily male, might be seasonal – the taking of a job for six months – but equally it could last for several years, dividing families. According to the 1897 census, only an astonishing 3.8% of heads of household in the working class districts of Moscow were married males living with their wives (Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City, Cambridge, 1996). This also explains the frequency of illegitimate births back in the rural villages, where wives were often separated for years from husbands who were either labouring in the cities or serving in the army.
While during normal times parish priests in the countryside probably registered burials when they could, it is likely that at least infant deaths often passed unrecorded. However, in years of economic hardship or famine, when large sections of the population became itinerant in search of employment or food, the proportion of under-recorded deaths must have soared. More to the point, in a jurisdiction without centralised registration, even were the death of an internal migrant on the road to be recorded in a parish burial register, there is no way of identifying that place of death from the unlinked records of the originating village.
So where does this leave the family historian with Russian roots? Perhaps it is true to say that you will be at an advantage if your family was not mobile but, rather, firmly settled in either a village or in a city. It is also probably true to say that your task will be easier if your ancestor was from the emerging professional middle class or from the upper class strata of society than if they came from the urban proletariat or the peasantry. Finally, research will quite likely hold better prospects if the family were not Russian Orthodox but, say, Lutheran or Jewish, as it is not unlikely that the minority faiths kept better community records.
Last Friday and Sunday I attended the Who Do You Think You Are? Live exhibition at London’s Olympia, answering questions on resources for family history and giving research advice.
For a newcomer to family history – and the interest in family history has yet to reach a plateau and continues to mount – the scale and corporate gloss of the event may come as something of a shock. Family history is big business now. This year’s principal sponsor was the multinational corporation Ancestry. As well as the customary somewhat clinical Ancestry stand where visitors could search Ancestry databases, on offer also was the Ancestry scanning bay and the Ancestry members-only hospitality suite, a kind of hybrid between a gated community with its own private security and a business-class airport lounge laying on complimentary refreshments and a little ineffective back massage.
Who Do You Think You Are? Live grew out of the Society of Genealogists’ annual show, which used to take a more modest and less expensive exhibition space in Victoria. Three key events precipitated the explosion of interest in family history in England – the online release of the 1901 census in 2002, the publication of the birth, marriage and death indexes by the company now known as Find My Past, and the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? TV series. Wall To Wall, the makers of the Who Do You Think You Are? documentaries, saw an opportunity to piggyback the long-standing annual SoG event and co-opt the family history societies. This seemed like a partnership at first but it now looks increasingly like there is a cuckoo chick in the family history community’s nest, slowly pushing it out.
Which brings me back to Ancestry. A visitor entering Who Do You Think You Are? Live was funnelled through the Ancestry stand. He or she may not have been subjected to a body scan or relieved of all their cash, but the American corporate giant is unmissable. Meanwhile, over in a far corner of the exhibition centre, on the far side of the area reserved for family history societies, the visitor could see, if they had the stamina, stands which are in fact far more interesting and which reflect the range and diversity of family, local and social history organisations that have become marginalised. Passing the Anglo-German Family History Society stall, with its books on sugar bakers, pork butchers and WW1 alien internees on the Isle of Man, the visitor would have reached the British Deaf History Society and, in the very corner, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain, with its humble trestle table, small selection of fascinating volumes and enthusiastic volunteer staff. The JGSGB and its ilk cannot afford more floor space, or a prime position with guaranteed footfall, but I hope that they and all the local and subject societies had a worthwhile weekend and can continue to carve out a niche for themselves within what is now the family history marketplace.
A good seven or eight of the family history enquiries I took at Who Do You Think You Are? Live concerned Jewish family history research. Most enquirers knew or believed that their ancestors had roots in Poland, although one had Dutch and another German-Jewish ancestry. However, all Jewish researchers are likely to confront the same brick wall: how to establish a place of origin outside Britain, if this is not recorded in family papers or lore. And this is no easy question to answer.
The census returns, including the 1911 census released in 2009, seldom name a specific place. Too often the census return states merely Austria, or Poland, or Romania, or Russia, or Russian Poland. Even where a city or town such as Kovno or Warsaw or Wilna is given, it is not necessarily the case that this is the actual place of origin rather than a convenient shorthand for a district or region of the same name.
Naturalisation records may give the required information but, of course, many immigrants, and perhaps a majority of the poorer ones, settled without going to the trouble or expense of formal naturalisation (or wished to avoid the encounter with the authorities that it entailed). Naturalisations are indexed in The National Archives’ online catalogue and can also be found in the London Gazette. However, the researcher will need to access the underlying naturalisation file, or what survives of it, at The National Archives in Kew to find out full details. Naturalisation records before 1921 are on open access but those of later date require a Freedom of Information Act application.
Family historians with Jewish roots are welcome to contact Bluebird Research with any questions they have. Or, of course, they might wish to contact the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain…