Archive for April, 2011
In May 2001 I visited Trakai in Lithuania. A mini-bus took me and a handful of Japanese tourists the 30 or so km from Vilnius bus station and dropped us off outside the major tourist attraction, the restored Trakai Castle situated romantically in lake Galvė. While the others headed across the footbridge to the castle with their cameras at the ready, I wandered by myself the length of the little town to see what I could find of the Karaim.
Karaism is a non-Talmudic Mosaic faith and the Karaim, or Karaites, are a dispersed people with what are generally regarded as Turkic but sometimes as Jewish roots, living in scattered communities across the former Soviet bloc.
Historically in what is today Ukraine, Karaim lived in the towns of Lutsk (inter-War Polish Łuck) and Halych (after which the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia is named). In addition, communities were to be found in the Crimea in towns such as Bakhchisaray (Bağçasaray), Feodosiya (Kefe) and Yevpatoria (Keslev). One of the best-known traditional centres of the Crimean Karaim was Chufut Kale (Çufut Qale) but this was abandoned during the 19th century. The Crimean Karaim often lived by trade and therefore sometimes had mercantile links and family outposts in Black Sea ports (e.g. Kherson and Odessa) and the Eastern Mediterranean (e.g. Egypt and Constantinople).
The Karaim in Lithuania arrived at some date before the end of the 14th Century, almost certainly as officially invited and privileged settlers involved in defence. It is not clear whether the original settlers came from the Crimea or from Lutsk. In any event, while military service may have been the prime mover behind their arrival in Lithuania, soon many Karaim were involved simply in agriculture or in trade.
The most well-known settlement in Lithuania is that at Trakai but smaller communities survive in Panevėžys and Vilnius. There is a Karaim cemetery in each of these three places. The one in Trakai is disappearing amid meadow and woodland on the other side of lake Totoriškiai facing the town – inscriptions are mostly in Hebrew but with some Latin script. Karaim places of worship – prayer houses known as a kenesa – survive at Trakai and Vilnius but that in Panevėžys was destroyed in 1970, a victim of the atheist communist state and probably also the declining local population and the ongoing process of assimilation. Other Lithuanian Karaim communities such as the one in Biržai have become extinct or, like Naujamiestis, all but died out with only individuals or solitary families surviving. The Lithuanian Karaim population is now very small and dwindling: officially 423 in 1959, 388 in 1970, 289 in 1989 and 257 in 1997. Assimilation and out-marriage are serious issues for the survival of the community, which traditionally was endogamous and sometimes had to resort to sourcing marriage partners from Lutsk or even Crimea.
Another distinctive feature of the Trakai Karaim settlement is its vernacular architecture. The typical Karaim wooden cottage, sometimes painted in pastel or brighter shades, sits with its gable end with three ground-floor windows facing on to the street; the entrance is on the facade round the side.
One reason why the Lithuania Karaim community survives at all today is the official recognition it gained in 1863. In that year, they successfully asserted themselves as a Turkic people in contra-distinction to the Jews, with whom they had previously been associated in Russian Empire. The unforeseen consequence of this was that they were largely spared the fate of the Lithuanian Jews during the Holocaust.
Bluebird Research undertakes professional family history research across Lithuania and can help you with your genealogical research, whether your ancestors were Karaim, Jewish, Lithuanian or Polish. Please contact us for a free assessment.
Records of interest to family historians can be found in unexpected places.
Researchers with experience of Central and Eastern European genealogy will know that records are often to be located outside the borders of a country, due to the complex history and shifting political map of the region. For instance, in Poland there are vital records for western Ukraine; in Germany there are records for some of the German communities of Romania; and in Austria there are army records for soldiers from the successor states of the Habsburg Empire.
For those with a family history rooted in the British Isles, the primary source of information for the British overseas is the General Register Office’s various series of indexes to armed forces, consular and maritime birth, marriage and death registers. They cover events relating not just to English and Welsh but also to Irish, Scottish and doubtless Manx and Channel Islander individuals. These are widely available online and have recently been fully name-indexed by Find My Past.
At New Register House in Edinburgh, the records of the births, marriages and deaths of Scots abroad are to be found among the statutory registers. These are also searchable online on the official Scotland’s People website, where they are called “minor records”. It is likely that there is some (possibly considerable?) overlap with the records held by the General Register Office of England & Wales described above.
Less well-known and rather surprising is the fact that the Catholic Registers on the Scotland’s People website include records from beyond Scotland. An overview document detailing the holdings can be downloaded. The document begins with the expected records of Catholic missions and parishes in Scotland itself. However, on page 3 it moves on to the Bishopric of the Forces. Among the Roman Catholic registers here there are of course records from within Scotland but a great many are from beyond its borders – and not just from England, Ireland and Wales. In fact, the collection covers Catholic registers of the British Forces across the world. For instance, there are volumes from Aden, Austria, Germany, Iraq, Lebanon, Malta and Singapore.
For those undertaking research within the region covered by Bluebird Research, the following may be of interest:
Cyprus
- Akrotiri RAF base 1956-1967
- RAF register 1957-1969
Egypt
- Alexandria chaplaincy of the English forces 1899-1910
- Cairo military vicariate 1896-1945
- Cairo 1904-1955
- Moascar camp 1925-1967
Although these Roman Catholic registers have been digitised by the Scottish authorities, the records contained within them do not just relate to Scots but, of course, to English, Irish, Welsh and all other Catholics in the British Armed Forces. At least one of the two parties will have been serving in the Forces at the time of the registration of the event. However, in the case of marriages, the other party to the marriage (usually but not invariably the bride) could be a civilian and, for that matter, a local from the vicinity of the Forces base. Likewise, of course, for births and baptisms of issue of such marriages.
All of Scotland’s People’s Roman Catholic registers before about 1908 can be viewed online (in contrast to the General Register Office’s records, for which only the indexes are publically available). For more recent records after 1908, there is a searchable index, upon the basis of which extracts from the registers (certificates) can be purchased.
The Armenians and the Greeks were not the only nationalities to be largely removed from Asia Minor as Turkey redefined itself as a single-nation state in the post-Ottoman era. The Yezidis (or Yazidis) – Kurds with their own distinctive non-Islamic religion – have also largely disappeared, either assimilating into the Kurdish population, crossing the border into the Republic of Armenia or emigrating to continental Europe (e.g. Germany).
Bluebird Research has created a Google Map showing the location of the former Yezidi villages of the Kars oblast, or province, of the Russian Empire circa 1910 before it was re-taken by the Turks after the end of WW1. During the Russian era, the distinctiveness of the Yezidi people was recognised and these villages constituted their own administrative district or okrug.
Click here to view the Google Map showing the Yezidi Villages of Kars Province.
Bluebird Research has no experience of Yezidi genealogical research but is always interested in expanding its knowledge and would be delighted to hear from anyone who is researching their Yezidi ancestry.
There were a number of villages named Karakala in the Russian oblast (province) of Kars circa 1900-1914. To help distinguish between them and particularly to assist family historians with ancestors from Armenian Karakala, Bluebird Research has created an online map identifying and displaying the location of the villages named Karakala in the then Kars oblast.
Please note that that there were additional villages of this name elsewhere in Russian Armenia (i.e. in Yerevan province) and, of course, in Ottoman Turkey. These are not displayed on the map.
This map should be used in conjunction with our other related recent (March 2011) posts on this subject.
Please click here to view the map showing Places Named Karakala in Kars Province in Google Maps.