bluebird research

An estimated 12,000 visitors attended the 2011 Who Do You Think You Are? Live event at London’s Olympia exhibition centre, Attendance figures for the 2012 show, which was held last weekend, are not yet out but, if my experience is anything to go by, interest in the event does not appear to have diminished. The core participants remain essentially the same. However, 2012 saw several new exhibitors. Two of these suggest a possible opening up of the British family history marketplace to the viability of interest groups with wider continental European roots. 

Firstly, Belgian genealogist Marie Cappert had a little space offering professional research services in France and the Low Countries – she can be contacted at hist.defamilles@gmail.com.  

Although one should never underestimate the diaspora communities, such as the long-standing Polish and Russian ones, in France and Belgium, of more immediate relevance to those with Eastern European roots is Kresy-Siberia, which seemed to be attracting definite interest. The organisation endeavours to increase awareness of the Polish role in the British armed forces (especially the air force) during WW2 and the subsequent resettlement of tens of thousands of Polish ex-servicemen in the British Isles, as well as the story of the earlier military and civilian evacuation of Poles from the Soviet Union via Iran and East Africa. Polish genealogy is booming in post-Communist Poland as well as in diaspora and the availability of online information is increasing, although it remains the case that it is essential to know, or to be able to discover, the exact place of origin of an ancestor before one can research meaningfully in Poland or in the pre-WW2 Polish territories now in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. 

While at Who Do You Think You Are? Live, I also had the opportunity to speak with the always helpful volunteers at the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain stand, and with the Sephardic expert Schelly Talalay Dardashti, who was both speaking at the event and helping to staff the My Heritage stand. One of Schelly’s special interests is Sephardic Jewry from the former Ottoman and Persian Empires. Much of the former community in modern Iran and Iraq has of course left and now lives in diaspora. Getting Jewish genealogical records or information out of Iran in particular is a literally hazardous business – the Iranian state regards world Jewry as an extension of Israel and any Jewish genealogical research in Iran as a political act. This makes any research within Iran tantamount to subversion, and therefore too contentious and risky to be engaged in by anyone resident within the country on behalf of foreigners. There are, however, possibilities for Armenian research in Iran, at least through the Armenian Apostolic Church authorities (not through the Iranian civil registration or state archive system), which Bluebird Research has been investigating in recent months. However, it remains the case that any genealogical research in Iran will be slow-moving, protracted, and carry only limited prospects of success.