Archive for July, 2011
Among the aristocracy of Imperial Russia, as of course among the landed gentry in other places, some men of title fathered children by mistresses, of high and low birth, and by female serfs in their households and on their estates in accordance with the droit du seigneur. Those of the illegitimate children recognised by the father, and perhaps supported by him, would sometimes take a truncated version of his surname (as well as his patronymic) so as to acknowledge paternity but at the same time prevent confusion with the legitimate bloodline.
It seems that recourse to the dropping of the leading syllable of the surname was the practice most often adopted. For example, the surname Pnin, today most associated with Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, was borne by the poet Ivan Petrovich Pnin and was an abbreviated version of the surname of his father the statesman Nikolai Vasilyevich Repnin.
Similarly, the 18th century educationalist Ivan Ivanovich Betskoy was the illegitimate son of Ivan Yurievich Trubetskoy. Other examples include Golitsyn shortened to Litsyn, and Putivlev to Ivlev.
The Jews of Belgrade were largely exterminated by the Nazis and their local accomplices between October 1941 and May 1942. The Nazis declared the city Judenfrei by August of 1942. Of course, as elsewhere in Serbia and throughout Europe, this was seldom entirely true – individual Jews managed to go in to hiding, or were concealed and protected by kind neighbours, or left Belgrade for the relative safety of an obscure village in the countryside, or fled while there was still time with view to returning later. Nevertheless, the great majority of the pre-War Jewish population of Belgrade was destroyed.
The Jews of Belgrade were both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, with the latter in the majority (as tended to be the case throughout the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans), forming approximately 80% of the overall community. Before the Shoah there were four functioning Sephardic synagogues and prayer houses in Belgrade. However, families were not necessarily religious – the Jews of Serbia were usually assimilated and often upwardly mobile and, as well as merchants and craftsmen, there were many shop salesmen and clerks, professionals and intellectuals.
Although the community was destroyed in 1942, there are excellent surviving records covering the period from the turn of the century up to the Holocaust. These are not online but in some cases have been digitised and can be interrogated locally. Other and frequently more informative paper files have to be called up in the traditional way in the municipal archives. If an individual or a family was established in the city, especially in the Stari Grad (“old town”) neighbourhoods such as Dorćol, we can usually find a very good paper trail for the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s up to 1941/42, detailing dates of vital events, occupations, residential addresses and so on. Such records often indicate connections elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia or abroad – a sojourn in Croatia perhaps, a wife born in another city with a thriving Sephardic community, or a parent from Sofia in Bulgaria.
If you are interested in Jewish family history research in Belgrade, Bluebird Research would be delighted to assist – please email us for an assessment and estimate of costs.
How a society disposes of its dead is one of the most interesting and often distinctive outward signs of its culture and values. When travelling abroad it is invariably an illuminating experience to pop into some cemeteries and take a look around.
Earlier this month I was in Russia. It is foolhardy to even consider generalising about a country the size of a continent so I should stress that I saw only small pockets of the Leningradskaya oblast in the NW.
The oldest graves I saw were not in graveyards at all but were kurgans, or barrows. You could be forgiven for overlooking these burial mounds, as they could be mistaken for natural features until you notice their placement and disposition – in this case (near the village of Staraya Ladoga in the Volkhovsky raion), commanding a sweeping panoramic view over one of those broad slow-flowing rivers that wind their way through and are so evocative of many parts of European Russia. Of course these are no ordinary graves but the final resting places of prominent chiefs of what in Russian are called Varyagi, or Varangians, the Vikings who traded with the early princely states of northern Russia. These particular kurgans probably date to between the 9th and 11th centuries. Today they are over-run with meadow flowers and grasses and their original purpose has been obscured, but they remain an outstanding feature of the local landscape.
On Vasilyevsky Island, one of the various islands which compose St Petersburg, I visited the Smolensky Cemetery or, to be more precise, the Russian Orthodox section of it (as opposed to the Lutheran and Armenian portions). Although not dating back to the founding of the city, this is at least 270 years old and still going strong, although a passerby might be forgiven for believing they were passing by a walled forest – the graves, along with bush and shrub, form the dense undergrowth of a mature woodland. The graves are packed in with a rich exuberance and a modicum of natural chaos, the antithesis of, say, the neat and orderly, regularly spaced stark white headstones of a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in Flanders. Mid-18th century graves sit alongside those of the casualties of an early 21st century air crash. There are Orthodox crosses of iron and wood and stone; stone tub type graves from the 1920s; headstones featuring a photograph of the deceased in ceramic or in carved relief; and grandiose mausoleums. And all types of beautiful Cyrillic script, in pre- and post- spelling reform alphabets, with the otchestvo or patronymic helpfully (for the genealogist) identifying the father of the deceased. Unidentified passerines sing high in the canopy and flit in the shadows; speckled woods spiral in the sunlight; a red squirrel peers round the side of a tree trunk; and believers in head scarves follow a path through the forest to the chapel of Saint Blessed Xenia of St Petersburg, where they kiss the icons and press their foreheads to the cool outer walls.
By the Aleksander Nevsky Lavra monastery on the SE side of the city, there are three separate cemeteries. Two are closed for burial and managed by the State Museum of Urban Sculpture; one is under the aegis of the monastery. The state ones are the Tikhvin (or Necropolis of the Masters of Arts), which is arranged much like an outdoor sculpture park in leafy surroundings and where one can pay homage to Dostoevsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky et al; and the older, largely 18th century Lazarevskoe, which has a mad profusion of funereal hardware, with frankly bizarre and idiosyncratic symbolism adorning some of the monuments. The third cemetery, the one in the grounds of the monastery proper, is in a state of some disrepair but also of incongruity – there is a tall modern memorial to the Orthodox clergy who were persecuted under Communism, but there are also both early and late Soviet graves. The later Soviet gravestones show the dead hand of the system that smothered Russia, bearing the likenesses of stolid stony-faced time-serving apparatchik and nomenklatura men. But the Soviet headstones from the 1920s make prominent use of the red star (bringing to mind Krzhizhanovsky’s “red metal stars on thin wire stems fidget[ing] nervously in the wind”*), eschew religious symbolism and sometimes attempt radical redesign; from the names one can identify Armenian, Central Asian and Jewish as well as Russian Bolsheviks who died prematurely in that first decade of the new post-Revolutionary era; and one can sense that sense of promise and hope that was dying unfulfilled with them.
*”The Thirteenth Category of Reason” in Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull (NYRB, 2009)
Zhytomyr, or Zhitomir (also Shitomir in German), is a Ukrainian provincial capital, seat of the Zhytomyr oblast, but is of immense significance for family historians with German-Ukrainian roots and specifically for those from Ukrainisch Wolhynien. This is the region of Volhynia to the west of Kyiv formerly dense with German settlements and colonies founded during the 19th century. The German population was particularly concentrated in the triangle between the towns of Zhytomyr, Novohrad-Volynskyi (or Nowograd-Wolhynsk, previously known as Zwiahel or Swehl) and Korosten.
Ukraine operates, in theory if not always in practice, a 75-year “modern era” closure period, meaning that records from before 1936 (at the time of writing) should be on open access in state archives rather than closed, for reasons of data protection and personal privacy, in register offices (known by the acronym RAHS and administered by the Ministry of Justice).
The state regional archives in Zhytomyr are one of the most efficient and cooperative in Ukraine. Among their holdings is an important collection of German Evangelical Lutheran parish registers for Wolhynien. These vital records all date from before 1936, of course, and are particularly strong for the period from about 1900 to 1920. The collection is not complete but includes, among others, births/baptisms, marriages and deaths/burials for the parishes of Emiltschin, Heimthal, Radomysl, Tutschin, Shitomir itself and Nowograd-Wolhynsk. There are also name indexes in the archive and a collection of police files which contain biographical information on individual inhabitants.
The same archive also houses a number of records of interest to those with German Baptist roots, e.g. in Tutschin.
Bluebird Research offers research services at Zhytomyr state archives and is also able to assist at other locations which hold Wolhynien Lutheran records, such as the St Petersburg archives which hold the bishop’s transcripts for the years 1836-1885 (the original parish registers being lost, only these contemporaneous copies survive).
Please contact us for a free assessment if you are interested in professional family history research assistance in Ukraine or Russia.