Archive for the ‘blog’ Category
I have written previously about the insights which historic travelogues can provide for family historians and others interested in Old World homelands. It is true that they may be partisan, and prey to a whole host of prejudices and received opinions about places and peoples. They may also be tantalising – one wishes that the author had dwelt longer on a particular subject, or written in greater detail about a place that is of especial interest to the reader but receives only a passing mention from the author. But by their very nature these books were produced by outsiders, and therefore tend to be detached and unsentimental; they are written with fresh eyes keen to see and to compare with what they know; and it is rare that ones come away at the end of such travel-writing without an enlarged sense of what the place was like in the past.
I have just finished reading Henry Fanshawe Tozer’s Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor, which was published originally in 1881 but is now widely available as a scanned print-on-demand volume (my own copy is from Elibron Classics, which has a nice range of historic travel writings). Tozer’s name alone is surely enough to identify him as a Victorian gent with an interest in the classics and antiquities. More specifically, he was a graduate of Oxford, a clerk in holy orders, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His main intellectual sphere of interest was Greece and the decaying Ottoman Empire.
Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor was the fruit of Tozer’s travels from July to September 1879, in other words very shortly after the famine of 1874 and the Russo-Turkish war of 1877/78. His book is interesting from a number of different perspectives – as a testament to a type of 19th century English gentleman, now all but extinct, and their manners abroad; as a record of the distressed state of the region in the late 1870s; for its descriptions of places and peoples met along the way, including typical habitations and features of agriculture; and for oddities such as manna and fat-tailed sheep.
To me it is also interesting for its definition of Armenia. I have tended to use fairly interchangeably the terms “Anatolia” and “Asia Minor” (which may be regarded respectively as Turkish and Greek concepts) to represent the entire geographical area of modern Turkey. Not so Tozer. For him, Asia Minor or Anatolia has a clear meaning; at a certain point travelling west to east, it gives way to Armenia; just as the latter segues into Kurdistan to the south and what might be called Pontus running along the southern seaboard of the Black Sea. More specifically, what separates Asia Minor from Armenia is the mountain range called the Anti-Taurus, or Aladağlar in Turkish. On the western side lie towns such as Kaiserieh (Turkish Kayseri) and Sivas which, although having an Armenian population as well as Turkish and Greek, are not in Armenia. Once you cross the Anti-Taurus you reach Armenia – ergo, the towns of Kharput (Turkish Elâzığ), Mush (Muş) and Erzeroum (Erzurum) are in Armenia. This is not to say that the towns are exclusively Armenian, for they were not – indeed, in Kharput, for example, Tozer estimates that there were only 500 Armenian households against up to 4,500 Turkish households. Rather, the towns were the outposts and centres of Ottoman rule; while the countryside was predominantly Armenian (Tozer writes that “the villages in the plain are almost entirely occupied by Armenians”) and here as everywhere it is the country which defines the national character of a region. Incidentally, many American-Armenians have immigrant ancestors who give “Kharput” (or a variant such as Harput, Kharberd, Kharpert etc) as their place of origin on passenger lists and manifests, petitions for naturalisation etc – it is important to exercise caution and not to assume that the ancestor was from the town itself rather than one of the multitude of Armenian villages in its catchment area.
Even in Armenia by Tozer’s definition, the Armenians “do not form an absolute majority of the population”. As Tozer states, “bad government” has led to much emigration, amplified by the recent war which drove Turkish Armenians into Russian Armenia. Moreover, Circassians had settled in Armenia after fleeing the Russian Empire during and following the Russo-Circassian Wars, and Kurds were pushing north and occupying former Armenian villages, further affecting the balance of population. Nevertheless, by rights the Republic of Armenia today should extend west, a third of the way across eastern Turkey, to Kharput. That it does not is the fault of multiple factors, principle among them the 1915 Genocide but also including the successive abandonment of the Armenian people by all the victorious Allies and Soviet Russia after WW1.
23rd to 29th January 2012 was Holocaust Memorial Week. It is fitting that this week the French Senate passed a bill which will make denial of a different Holocaust – the Armenian genocide of 1915 – illegal in France.
Imagine if, more than 65 years after the fact, the German or Austrian state denied the Holocaust. It’s unthinkable. Although in neither case was the state apparatus entirely cleansed of Nazis and their sympathisers, responsibility for the Shoah was accepted, reparation was made, and laws enacted which make Holocaust denial a criminal offence (as the pea-brained British historian David Irving found out during his 13 months in an Austrian gaol).
Yet nearly 100 years have passed since the Turkish state, in its then guise of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, perpetrated the 1915 Genocide of the Armenians, and still the Turkish state, academia and society generally refuse not just to accept responsibility but even to acknowledge the historic fact of the Genocide.
The Ottoman Empire was corrupt and incompetent but at least it was multinational and, for the most part, despite systemic discrimination embodied in law, in practice it was not always intolerant of minorities and other races and religions within its borders. The modern Republic of Turkey, on the other hand, was built upon Turkish nationalist and supremacist foundations. Turkey has tried to cleanse its territory of other peoples, through violence, expulsion and coercion. After the Armenians and Greeks were neutralised in Turkey, the only really large minority group remaining on its territory are the Kurds, who retain their identity despite more than eight decades of Turkish state persecution. The Kurds do not yet have a state of their own, nor do they have influential friends in USA or elsewhere prepared to support their rights. However, one can expect this to happen in time and Turkey’s reaction then will be interesting. In the meantime, the centenary of the Armenian genocide approaches in 2015 and one can expect further and ever more strident denials emanating from Ankara.
To start the year, here is a selection of eight books recommended for family historians in the English-speaking world with roots in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus:
Armenia
The Crossing Place, by Philip Marsden, 1993. This is subtitled “A Journey among the Armenians”. Marsden travels across the Armenian communities of the Middle-East and Eastern Europe to the Republic of Armenia but it would be wrong to think of this book simply as a travelogue, as it is more a reflection upon the survival of Armenia and the meaning of Armenian-ness in the Old World. Of course it touches upon the 1915 Genocide but equally it highlights the determined persistence and endurance of Armenian life.
Bosnia
Bosnia: A Cultural History, by Ivan Lovrenović, 2001. Most English-language books about Bosnia tend to be written from an outside perspective and to pontificate about the 1992-95 War. This book is one of the refreshing exceptions to that trend and is recommended reading for anyone with roots, whether Croat, Jewish, Muslim or Serb, in this part of the continent.
Greece
Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, by Juliet du Boulay, 1974. I like reading anthropological and ethnographical works for the insight they give into the everyday lives and mindsets of a people. This book covers every aspect of the lives of the villagers of “Ambeli” (a pseudonym), a remote hamlet on the island of Euboea (Evia). There is still continuity despite changing times, and this work will give the family historian a profound sense of the lives of their ancestors in rural Greece and, of course, of how their distant cousins back in the old land continued to live well into the latter half of the 20th century.
Latvia
Walking Since Daybreak, Modris Eksteins, 1999. This is a family story written by a Canadian Latvian academic but, at the same time, a history of Latvia in the first half of the 20th century and a rare view into the lives of the officially recognised Displaced Persons, those individuals and families who for one reason or another found their way into UN relief camps in Occupied defeated Austria, Germany and Italy in the period 1945-52.
Lithuania
The Lithuanians in Scotland, by John Millar, 1998. Unlike all the other books I have chosen for this list, this one is more about the lives of an Eastern European people in their host land than their native land. This book is an easy read and very good on the lives of Scottish Lithuanians and the difficulties they experienced in Scotland (such as anti-Catholic prejudice and being mistaken for Poles). As the title suggests, though, it will not give you much on the home country Lithuania (which was of course part of Imperial Russia at the time of emigration).
Poland
I might have chosen one of several works by the tremendous contemporary writer Andrzej Stasiuk. I have selected Dukla (1997). It’s imaginative non-fiction, reflections on the nature of being in the remote rural and mountainous Beskidy regions of Poland’s Podkarpackie province (once part of the Austro-Hungarian Galicia kronland). There are satellite dishes and there are motor cars, but there is also a strong sense that, beneath the superficial changes of modernisation and despite the impositions of the Communist era, peasant life in this part of the country at the end of the 20th century continued pretty much as was from previous centuries.
Russia
I couldn’t choose between two Great Russian Novels in the tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. These are Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1959) and Vasily Aksyonov’s Generations of Winter (1994). The former is the greater work of art, but both cover a vast sweep of Russian history in the 20th century and capture the Russian experience in all its daunting multiplicity.
Serbia
A Serbian Village, by Joel M Halpern, 1956. This is subtitled “Social and Cultural Change in a Yugoslav Community”. While this might sound like a dry academic book, the author, an anthropologist, writes in fascinating detail about the particularity of daily life, culture and customs in the village of Orašac. Although by the 1950s life in the Šumadija region had already started to embrace modernity, there is still enough of traditional rural Serbia intact to make this book a great insight into the lives of peasant ancestors from continental Serbia.
I first read Russell Hoban in about 1982, at the suggestion of my English literature teacher. Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker is set in East Kent, where I grew up and was attending school, which fact no doubt played some part in the recommendation. Whether it was otherwise an appropriate recommendation for a teenager is rather doubtful (although no more doubtful than the early works of Ian McEwan and the complete oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, which were also on the list my teacher gave me to while away that particular long summer holiday).
It was only when Hoban died earlier this month that I realised that he was not an Englishman but an American, and in fact the American-born child of Jewish immigrants. In the 1930 US census, he appears as the five-year old Pennsylvania-born Russell Conwell (sic), and is described as being the nephew of the newspaper advertising editor Abraham Hochban and his wife Jennie, Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews from Volhynia (or “Poland, Voline”, as it says in the census return). Wikipedia states that Russell was the son of this couple and that Conwell was his middle name not his surname, so presumably there is a clerical error in the census and/or a mistake on Wikipedia.
Abraham or Abram Hochban had married Jennie Dimmermann in Philadelphia in 1915 and became naturalised as a US citizen in 1922.
He had arrived in Philadelphia on 30th November 1913, on board the “Frankfurt” from Bremen in Germany. He appears in the incoming passenger list as Avram Gochbahn, not Hochban or Hochbahn. It is always worth remembering when undertaking genealogical research involving Russian records that the Russian alphabet lacks the letter H and uses the G instead. It is therefore not unusual to find names which we expect to begin with an H to be shown with a G in Russian language records and in English or German language records for which Russian language documents have been the source (as is the case here). Avram is recorded as being aged 19 (i.e. born circa 1894), single, and a clerk; his address (and that of his next of kin, his mother) appears to be Warschau (i.e. Warsaw).
The naturalisation papers give his date of birth as 3 June 1894. The passenger list states that Abraham had been born in Ostrog in Volhynia (now Ostroh in Ukraine). However, the naturalisation papers suggest that he was actually born in “Orgeiw”, Bessarabia (today Orhei in Moldova) but had been resident in Ostrog before emigration. Where was he actually born? Research would be necessary to determine this but it may be that Orhei, which like Ostrog had a thriving Jewish population, is the better candidate. In this instance, the need for caution is thrown up by the discrepancy in the records but, even where records appear consistent, one should still be cautious – across the Russian Empire the names of towns were often also the names of provinces or districts, and it cannot be automatically assumed that the town itself is intended.
The latest Bluebird Research Google Map is a work-in-progress showing the location of the Yezidi villages of Kurdistan. At present, the map shows primarily those villages which are extant and were not destroyed during the post-WW2 era in Iraq, when Yezidis (and other Kurds and minority groups) were subject to periodic persecution, sometimes of genocidal ferocity, by the Baathist state in Baghdad.
Sites of destroyed villages will be added where they can be ascertained. These will be evident when the map is viewed at higher magnification – the settlement will often appear as if rubbed out and few if any traces may be visible on the satellite image.
In addition, the map shows some of the modern collective villages into which Yezidis (and others) were forced during the Baathist rule. Generally, the population of four or more villages were deported from their centuries-old traditional settlements in the mountains and rehoused in planned but usually poorly executed collectives on the plains. Sometimes the collective would be named after one of the source villages; alternatively, different quarters of the collective might be named after the razed mountain villages, with the former inhabitants of each living in the eponymous neighbourhoods.
The location of the Yezidi villages of the Republic of Armenia is shown on Bluebird Research’s Google Map.
Old and new names of the Yezidi settlements are given. Armenian script can be and is transliterated into the Latin alphabet in a number of different ways, and the map legend gives some variants as well the standard modern name form.
If a village is shown without comment, it means that it is understood to be a wholly Yezidi village, as is the case especially with the two clusters of villages in Aragatsotn province, respectively west of Talin and around Alagyaz.
Some of the ancient Yezidi places of habitation in Aragotsotn, especially those NE of Mount Aragats, have been claimed to date back to the 11th century (and certainly they date back to at least the 16th century). Others are of much more recent origin, having been settled during or after the second decade of the 20th century, when Yezidis fled oppression in Turkish lands in eastern Anatolia.
One old Yezidi village in the Marmarik valley has not been located exactly, nor its modern name ascertained. This is Soukh-Bulakh (or -Bulagh, the Turkic word for a spring), which appears in a 19th century Russian gazetteer as a small Yezidi settlement of 16 “hearths”. It is possible that the site has been abandoned. Please contact us if you know the location of this village.
Bluebird Research would be pleased to hear from any family historians researching Yezidi ancestry.
The latest in the series of Bluebird Research maps showing the location of Armenian communities across the Middle East is for Lebanon. This shows places of worship for all three Armenian confessions – Armenian Apostolic, Armenian Catholic and Armenian Evangelical (or Protestant). As well as identifying the churches, in addition the settlements and districts with a significant Armenian population are also displayed.
Click here to open the Armenian communities of Lebanon Google Map.
Bluebird Research has created a Google Map showing the location of the Armenian communities and places of worship in Syria.
The Armenian population of modern Syria is concentrated in Aleppo (Armenian Haleb) and in a long line of settlements just south of the Turkish border, stretching from Kesab and its satellite villages above the Mediterranean Sea, east along the frontier to Derik (or Al Malikiyah).
Hagop Goudsouzian is a Canadian-Armenian documentary film-maker and two of his works are of particular value to Armenians in diaspora interested in family history and questions of identity.
The first is Armenian Exile, instalment one of a three-part work-in-progress. You can read about (and, if interested, order a copy on DVD) here.
The second part of Goudsouzian’s trilogy is My Son Shall Be Armenian, which is available to view online or to purchase on DVD at the National Film Board of Canada website.
The final part of the trilogy is due out soon.
There has been an Armenian community in what is today Iran and what was formerly Persia for many centuries, and some extremely ancient Armenian Apostolic churches are to be found in the north of the country – for example, the so-called “black church” of Surp Tade Vank south of the town of Maku and the Surp Stepanos Maghartavank monastery in a gorge near Julfa which form part of a UNESCO-recognised world heritage ensemble of exceptional interest.
Armenians of the Ottoman Empire sought refuge in Persia at the time of the 1915 Genocide, while other immigrants arrived after the Russian Revolution, and the Armenian population of Iran may have risen to a million or more at its peak. Today, however, the community is dwindling due to emigration, although not on account of political or religious factors, as one might assume. While there is some inevitable discrimination given that modern Iran is by definition an Islamic state, a majority of those local Armenians leaving Iran are doing so for economic reasons and emigrating particularly to USA (rather than to the Republic of Armenia or Western Europe). Some of the traditionally strong Armenian communities, such as those in the New Julfa (or Nor Jugha) quarter on the south side of Isfahan and in the city of Tabriz and the vicinity of Lake Urmia, have seen significant drops in population. Although the actual figures seem to be unknown and the process of emigration is continuing, it is thought that the total Armenian population of Iran may have fallen to as low as 75,000 in the years since the 1979 Islamic Revolution overthrew the liberal, westward-leaning Shah.
The Armenians in parts of Persia also had strong links with India and especially with the British in India, operating alongside (and often on behalf of) the Honourable East India Company along the overland trade routes to the subcontinent. This is why there are Armenian churches in various cities in India, even though the actual Armenian community is now greatly reduced in number. Armenian cemeteries are also important for those British researchers with East India Company connections, as the burials of the British usually took place in Armenian cemeteries where there was not a Church of England or other Protestant church. In Iran this practice remained prevalent until the end of the 19th century. A very good example of this is at the port of Bushire (Bushehr) in Iran. See the websites produced by Liz Chater and Abdol Rasool Shadman for some transcriptions and photographs of the cemetery.
Bluebird Research has produced a Google Map showing the Armenian communities and places of worship (not all extant today) in Iran. If you have Armenian roots in Iran, or experience of Armenian family history research in Iran, we would be delighted to hear from you and may be able to assist you with your genealogical research.
Bluebird Research has created a Google Map showing the location of today’s Armenian communities in Iraq.
The Armenian population of the country is declining – since 2003, many Armenians in the major cities have either moved to safer rural locations, especially in Kurdistan, or left Iraq altogether and emigrated to other lands in the Middle-East (for example, Syria) or to the Republic of Armenia or to Europe or USA.
Earlier this year there were reports that register offices and state archives in Belarus had started to take an uncooperative stance towards Belarusian citizens of Polish descent seeking to document their immediate ancestry. The number of applicants applying for documentary evidence of vital events – birth or baptism, marriage, death or burial – for their parents, grandparents and great grandparents had risen sharply. However, this was not due to a sudden interest in Polish family history in Belarus. Rather, acquiring such certificates proving Polish ancestry has the practical effect of enabling a Belarusian citizen to enter Poland without a visa, following a new law which took effect in Poland in March 2008.
Belarus under Lukashenko is sometimes described as the last Stalinist state in Eastern Europe. The general standard of living is low, unemployment high, and a number of basic freedoms taken for granted across the rest of Europe are denied. Movement across the border into Poland – a member state of the European Union and relatively affluent compared to Belarus – is therefore a potentially attractive option for Belarusians with Polish roots. Furthermore, the so-called Karta Polaka which is issued by Polish consular authorities to the Belarusian Poles entitles them not just to free movement into Poland but also the right to employment without a work permit and to receive some state benefits include schooling and emergency healthcare.
The Belarusian state regards the issuing of the Karta Polaka with suspicion and is attempting to stem the flow of its citizens into Poland by denying them the necessary civil registration or Roman Catholic parish register documents required to make the application to the Polish consular authorities.
Belarus is of course not the only state affected by the Polish state’s extension of certain privileges to ethnic Poles outside its borders. The same law applies to all citizens of the successor states to the former USSR. While this has limited applicability in, for example, Estonia, where there are few Poles, it has potentially significant repercussions to states on Poland’s eastern border (Lithuania and Ukraine as well as Belarus) and to those more remote former Soviet republics to which many victims of the periodic purges and repressions of the minority nationalities of the Soviet Union were deported (for example, Kazakhstan).
The Karta Polaka has excited much interest and there are reports of hundreds of thousands of applicants at Polish consulates in such places as Ivano-Frankivs’k, Luts’k, L’viv and Vinnytsia in Ukraine, as well as Grodno and Brest in Belarus.
As the Karta Polaka is only issued to citizens of the former Soviet states named in the Polish legislation, it is unlikely that access restrictions to family history records will extend to genealogists in the worldwide Polish diaspora. However, these recent developments are likely to fuel the general nervousness and suspiciousness of some civil servants – both registrars and archivists – in Belarus and we may find that the level of cooperation and speed of service is affected when undertaking genealogical research in Belarus.
Traditionally a Muslim marriage in rural Bosnia was primarily a matter of fulfillment of local social customs, not of formal recognition by the state or the Islamic authorities. In fact, nearly always such temporal or spiritual validation of a union merely sealed a fait accompli. In the former Yugoslavia, a couple, once wedded according to local custom, would attend the relevant municipal register office of their district and there obtain a marriage certificate; the civil ceremony was short and required only two witnesses, there were seldom guests present and the couple was simply meeting the legal requirements of the secular state. An Islamic ceremony might then follow in the groom’s home (not the mosque) with the hodža (or imam) blessing the marriage, but a great many couples dispensed with this religious ceremony.
Before WW2, some Muslim couples in Yugoslavia did not bother with the civic ceremony and therefore their marriage was not legally recognised by the state. Instead they would register their marriage with the kadi for the district, who would issue them with an Islamic marriage contract.
The genealogist might wish to note that a Bosnian Muslim marriage might not be legalised until weeks, months or even a year or more after the event (for instance, at the same time as registering the birth of the first child of the marriage, especially when the couple’s village was some distance from the municipal register office).
There was seldom a long engagement. The ideal wedding according to custom would be one at which there was a procession, a communal feast and an elaborate exchange of gifts, and of course this required careful planning which might well extend the engagement period. However, for reasons of expediency and economy, a significant number of brides were married swiftly “through the window” rather than through the door. What this idiom means is that the couple eloped, although not as the term is usually understood in, for example, Western Europe or North America. Often the elopement was an open secret in the village, and the groom’s family and not infrequently the bride’s were aware of the plans; the stylised elopement simply enabled the wedding to take place without the grand fuss of the feasting and the ritualised and expensive gift-giving. In the cases of genuine elopement, the groom would come to his bride-to-be’s bedroom window in the evening and she would steal away into the night. The couple would not be absconding, though – instead, they would go straight to the groom’s family home. The traditional residence pattern in rural Bosnia was heavily patrilocal, meaning that upon marriage the bride immediately took up residence in the groom’s house, which usually meant in her mother-in-law’s house (until such time as the groom had funds to build his own house). After the elopement, male kin of the groom would then visit the bride’s household, bearing gifts, to make peace.
Another facet of Bosnian Muslim relations in rural areas is a customary prohibition against marriage within nine degrees of kinship (this was true of Bosnian Christians as well). Of course not everyone had such an in-depth understanding of their ancestry or the often complex network of inter-relationships in the village, and the prohibition might be more observed in the breach. Nevertheless, the practical effect of this, in combination with the patrilocality, was that in small rural communities most women married outside their native village into the village of their husband. What this means is that the men in a small village tended to be native to it, while a majority of the married women came from outside. This is another feature of Bosnian Muslim life in the smaller rural communities which it is worth bearing in mind when researching your family tree.
The Banat is one of the regions of Europe known as contact zones, where peoples of different ethnicity, religion and language co-existed, and to an extent still co-exist – sometimes harmoniously, sometimes uneasily, as is the case the world over.
Imagined as a Venn diagram, the Banat is perhaps a natural intersection for the Serbs to the west (who had pushed north to escape the Ottomans) and the Romanians to the east. However, there is also an artificial historical factor, caused by the ruling Habsburgs’ intervention and planned settlement of the land in the 18th century and more natural immigration of Imperial subjects in the 19th century. The majority of these were German speakers – they became known as Swabians, although Swabia was only one of various German regions from which they came. In addition to the Germans, the Banat received, among others, Bulgarian, Croat, Czech, French, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, Spanish, Swiss and Ukrainian settlers – mostly but not exclusively Catholics (there were also Protestants of different persuasions, among them again many German settlers). And further broadening the mix of peoples in the area were Jewish merchants and professionals, Austrian civil servants, and Gypsy (locally Tsigani or Ţigani) settlements.
Resources and professional genealogical research services for those with German Banater ancestry are well-established. In the wake of WW2, rightly or wrongly, the Germans in Yugoslavia and Romania became persona non grata. The descendants of the Banat Germans now live in Germany, in Canada, in USA and elsewhere and, like all displaced and diaspora peoples, show a keen interest in their roots (roots which, of course, pass through the rich black soil of the Banat and extend beyond it to Baden and Lorraine, Westfalen and Württemberg).
However, Bluebird Research, as well as undertaking German genealogy in Serbia and Romania, can assist with your genealogical research in the Banat whatever the nationality or religion of your ancestors. We work in both Romania and Serbia; we are just as interested in the cultural and social history of the Hungarians and the Slovaks of the Banat; we have a special interest in the Jewish communities, now mostly lost; and in the Serbian Orthodox families, many of which can trace their histories back to “continental” Serbia (for instance to Šumadija), or to Herzegovina, or to Montenegro.
If you have ancestors from the Banat, and would like professional assistance with your family history research, please get in touch with us for a free assessment and estimate of costs. Research is affordable and success rates are generally high.
Montenegro, Crna Gora, may well be the most beautiful land in Europe. Everywhere you encounter startling and dramatic natural landscapes. Furthermore, with the exception of certain stretches of coastline which have been despoiled by development – by ugly and insensitive recent hotel and villa building – and the sprawl around the capital Podgorica (late Titograd), the built environment is of great attractiveness and interest.
A journey south-eastwards on the southern side of Lake Skadar is a lovely illustration of this. As you leave the lakeside village of Virpazar where the Crnojević river enters the lake, the road starts to ascend and wind its way slowly up the mountainside; these hairpin bends continue as the narrow road pursues its path high above the lake through rocky terrain and ancient chestnut forests towards the Albanian border.
From the start one can see the old Serbian Orthodox monasteries on the islands which dot the lake margin on this side – Manastir Starčevo, Beška, Moračnik. The siting of monasteries on these rocky outcrops would have served two purposes – both a spiritual retreat from the secular world, and a hope of protection from the periodic threat of the Turks. Tiny single-cell Orthodox or Catholic churches are to be found around the Montenegrin villages on this side of the lake, frequently planted on the tops of peaks or in otherwise seemingly barely accessible defensive and visually arresting positions – every one demands a photograph. As you continue south-eastwards, in the distance across the lake on the Albanian side one can see the city of Shkodër, while here in Montenegro churches start to be interspersed with the modest mosques and delicate white minarets of the local Albanians; soon, these start to be preponderant. The villages of the Rumija mountains that overlook the stillness of Skadar Lake are little more than hamlets, yet each one, Christian or Muslim, has its own rightness and sense of belonging to the landscape.
It is with disappointment that the journey ends; a viewpoint is reached near the international border with Albania, after which the road turns sharply back on itself and heads inland towards Vladimir and ultimately the port of Ulcinj.
The modest population of this corner of Europe has survived the centuries in situ, eking out a slight existence and a still essentially unchanged way of life, despite the modern horrors of politics and nationalism. Some villagers will have made their way out, maybe to other parts of the former Yugoslavia, or across the border into Albania, or to find work in Germany, or perhaps even to USA. Bluebird Research can undertake professional family history research across Montenegro but, if we are honest, we do not expect ever to have a case from Rumija and perhaps that is how it should be.
Bosnia and Herzegovina – BiH – is one of the few remaining places in Europe which are uncharted and unfamiliar to family historians in diaspora. It is also little travelled by tourists, at least beyond Sarajevo and Mostar and the important Catholic pilgrimage site at Međugorje. Visually the country is immensely stimulating but not immediately understood – it takes a few days to gather and process impressions and thoughts and make some sense of what you are experiencing.
Earlier this month I travelled from the Montenegro border crossing at Šćepan Polje, via Brod, Kiseljak and Vitez to Travnik, then back east through Zenica, Visoko, Sarajevo, Rogatica, Višegrad and beyond to the Serbian border at Kotroman. The most striking visual element is of course the prominence in the landscape of mosques (or džamije in what some guidebooks now euphemistically call “the local language”) and Muslim cemeteries. The latter are often sited on hillsides. The slim white grave-markers or nišani are elegant and, while many are simple and unadorned, others may be topped with a stylised representation of a turban or some other symbol such as a coffee pot. Islam requires prompt burial of the deceased and four or five sample grave-markers often lean together outside the cemetery ready to be purchased and put to use. The clusters of sleek gravestones reminded the childhood reader in me of the Hattifnattar in Tove Janson’s Moomin books.
The country is now divided into different entities, with Republika Srpska largely Serbian and the Federation segmented into a number of different cantons which are predominantly Croat and/or Bosniak (or Bošnjak – as most Bosnian Muslims prefer to be known since the War). However, it is incorrect to think of the country as having been neatly partitioned along religious or ethnic lines, and there is still much more mixing of population than media reports tend to suggest. The notion of cantons has been foisted upon Bosnia as if this borrowing from Switzerland could magic up the many privileges of the Swiss with their Catholic and Protestant religious, and French, German, Italian and Romansh language, harmonies, and their laissez-faire affluent burgher lifestyles. Reality in Bosnia is more complicated and not amenable to facile solutions imposed from outside.
But there is of course much ongoing outside influence. In predominantly Bosniak towns, the flow of money from Turkey and Saudi Arabia is apparent in the form of banks, airline advertisements, and investment in new mosques and medresas. Bosniaks have become re-Islamicised; or, rather, the young are embracing a Muslim identity that would have been foreign to the majority of their parents, grandparents and great grandparents in Tito’s Yugoslavia and even before WW2.
Meanwhile, in most towns in Bosnia the locals seem to have arrived at a pragmatic accommodation with one another’s faiths and nationalities. Mixed marriages were common throughout the former Yugoslavia and the bigger the town the larger their proportion. In the small town of Vitez, the population of which is roughly evenly balanced between Croats and Bosniaks, I ate lunch at the home of a Croat who had married a Slovenian and whose half-Russian aunt had married a Serb. This is the complex reality of Yugoslavia then and of BiH still.
The prospects for genealogical research in Bosnia and Hercegovina vary by place. If records survive, and were not destroyed during the various conflicts of the 20th century, it is usually possible to research Bosnian genealogies if one’s ancestors were Croats, Serbs, Sephardic Jews or, for that matter, Austrian Germans or other Imperial staff resident in Bosnia-Hercegovina during the period of Austro-Hungarian rule. The situation with respect to Bosnian Muslim ancestry is less straightforward, while Gypsy family history is regarded as all but impossible – registration of vital events by Gypsies was rare before the mid- or late 20th century and is unlikely to be complete even today.
Bluebird Research may be able to help you if you are in need of professional assistance with your family history research in Bosnia and is always pleased to hear from those investigating their ancestry in Bosnia. Please feel free to contact us for advice or an opinion on the prospects of success and the likely costs of research.
Sasun (also Sasoun or Sassoun) is both a village and the name of the eponymous district in Western Armenia, now Sason in Turkey. Like the surrounding region of the Ottoman Empire – the Anatolian towns of Bitlis, Diyarbakir and Mush – it was ethnically cleansed and systematically depopulated of its Armenians by the Turkish state forces and irregulars. Massacres occurred during 1893/94 and its aftermath, and again in 1904, before the 1915 Genocide and the Great War finally eliminated the Armenians from the land.
Those local Armenians, or Sasuntsis, who were not killed or converted under duress to Islam, went into hiding or fled Turkey. In 1917/18, many of the remaining local families accompanied the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Turkey, some not simply crossing the Russian border but continuing refugee journeys on to Tiflis, to Vladikavkas and to Armavir (the Russian town near Krasnodar which had been founded by Cherkesogai Armenians in the early 19th century). Their descendants are now either in diaspora (for instance, in Russia or having left via Batumi or some other Black Sea port for America) or in the modern Republic of Armenia. In Armenia, they settled especially in villages in the Talin area of Aragatsotn province – places such as Mastara, Nerkin Sasunashen and Shgharshik.
What this small story illustrates is that while it is true that few Armenians in the English-speaking diaspora have roots (= ancestors born) within the current borders of Armenia, it is likely that a significant number have distant relatives living there today. These kin – cousins two or three or more times removed – will be either the descendants of Armenians who fled Turkey directly into Russian Armenia, or returnees (hayrenadarts). Returnees or repatriates are Armenians who emigrated to Soviet Armenia, usually not having been born in the territory, so that the return or repatriation is emotional rather than literal. They came at various times but especially in 1931-33 and again during the 1946-48 Nerkaght or Homecoming. Most had been born, or would have had parents born, in Ottoman Turkey but they came to Soviet Armenia from Cyprus, Egypt, Iran and Syria and also from further afield, from France and Greece and America. Many, especially those tempted by Soviet propaganda, may have been disappointed with conditions upon arrival in Armenia but nevertheless made a life in their adopted homeland.
This week the family history website Find My Past has published the central index to the register of merchant seamen on British vessels. The original record series was created by the then Registrar General of Shipping and Seaman (part of the Board of Trade). It is now held on microfiche at The National Archives in Kew, England and can be seen under shelf references BT348, BT349 and BT350.
The resource takes the shape of record cards which form a central index to seamen registered to serve on British-registered vessels within the period from approximately 1918 to 1941.
What makes the Central Index Register cards interesting from an Eastern European genealogical research perspective is that many of those employed in the British merchant navy were engaged at overseas ports. For example, there are large numbers of records relating to Estonian, Greek and Latvian sailors. Additionally, there are smaller but still significant quantities of seamen from Cyprus, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia, and even some from landlocked Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Some of these men may have settled and even become naturalised in Britain but presumably a majority remained citizens or subjects of their country of birth.
The front and back of each index card have been scanned and an online index published so that the records of individual merchant marines can be searched for and located. Two, three or more cards of different dates exist for some individuals.
The cards evolved a little over time, from CR1 to CR2 to CR10 types, and the details recorded changed too. However, the basic format remains the same, as does the core detail of name, year and place of birth, rating, Discharge A Number, ship name and/or official registered number, and date. Some cards give physical descriptions, while others sport a black and white passport-style photograph and signature.
The data is handwritten onto the printed index cards. The handwriting is not always legible and may be faint or contain abbreviations. The place of birth information on the cards will reflect the date at which they were created and the spellings current at that time, sometimes anglicised or misspelt. For example, the Estonian islands of Hiiumaa and Saaremaa often appear as Dagö and Ösel respectively (typically minus their diacritics), being their old Swedish names, and similarly the Saaremaa capital Kuressaare is often given as Arensburg.
This online collection is not a complete record of those sailing on British merchant vessels between the Wars. The majority of cards dating from 1913 to 1921 are known to have been destroyed in 1969. Moreover, a fourth record series at The National Archives (shelf reference BT364) is not being published, on account of data protection and personal privacy concerns. The series BT364 also covers the period 1921 to 1941 and was extracted from the materials that now comprise BT348 to BT350 inclusive. It remains possible that this series, which has also been scanned and indexed, may be released too in due course.
A final note: while some of the individuals contained within these records will have seen service additionally in the Royal Navy at some date, it must be emphasised that the majority would have served only on British merchant vessels and were not in the armed forces.
Imagine. Millions of individuals are researching their ancestors. Hundreds of professional researchers have come into being to assist in the reconstruction of these family histories. Original registers are being imaged and indexed to broaden access and facilitate the process of research.
No, not 2011 in North America or Britain or Australia, but the mid-1930s in Nazi Germany.
From April 1933, all citizens in Germany were required to research and document their family tree, at least back to the level of their grandparents, and to obtain as evidence the corresponding certified copies of entries in birth and marriage registers (while SS officers had to zealously research their pedigree back to 1750 and other high level Nazi Party functionaries had to go back to 1800).
The reason for this rush of interest in genealogy was, of course, to validate one’s Aryan credentials, or determine one’s degree of Aryan purity, as the case may be. And one’s genealogy had grave consequences, for those who were non-Aryan (by which was meant Jewish) and for the great many who were Mischlinge or of mixed blood – at the very least, discrimination and persecution. Determining the status of each individual was not as straightforward as one might now think, and such factors as Jewish conversion to Lutheranism or Catholicism, or dropping out of the Jewish community without conversion to Christianity (Austritte), or illegitimacy, or disputed parentage, meant that the state had to interpret and decide upon tens of thousands of moot cases.
Various official Nazi bodies were involved in the process. Foremost was the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung (the “Reich’s Centre for Genealogical Research”). Once the necessary tree had been recreated and register entries had been found and authenticated, the documentation had to be submitted to the Reichsstelle, where bureaucrats would then rule as to whether one was Aryan, three-quarters Aryan, half-Aryan, quarter-Aryan or non-Aryan.
In 1934 the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung embarked upon an ambitious project to microfilm parish registers, both to preserve the originals and to make the material more readily available to the state. Accordingly, registers were called in from the churches to a central micro-reprographics studio in Berlin. A copy was returned to the incumbent of the church, and the master held in the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung archives.
The Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung also created a massive central card index system for ease of reference. This comprised abstracted births and baptisms, with particular attention paid to the baptisms of converted Jews, from which it constructed its own handy Jüdische Personenstandsregister. This Register comprised the so-called Judenkartei, the index cards relating to Jewish converts. In fact there were two copies of these particular index cards. The original Judenkarte remained in the Reichsstelle’s archives, while a copy was gifted to the Evangelical Lutheran Church – the latter is now housed at the Evangelische Zentralarchiv in Berlin.
During the meticulously orchestrated Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938, the Nazis not only razed or damaged synagogues, smashed Jewish property and assaulted Jews, but also carefully removed Jewish vital records from the synagogues, so these could be put to use by the state. Likewise, in 1939, the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung took over the Jewish genealogical record collection of the Gesamtarchiv der Deutsche Juden. The Gesamtarchiv had been collecting original birth, marriage and death registers from synagogues across Germany for over 30 years, held vital records for hundreds of local communities across Germany and had also created a card index of Jewish births in Berlin (where the sheer size of the community and number of synagogues made it difficult to find a particular record unless one already knew the exact place of registration).
Within seven years, mandatory genealogy had affected the lives of millions in Germany and, of course, impacted in particular upon the lives of the hundreds of thousands of German Jews. Today we do genealogy for a different reason, to affirm identity and heritage, but it is perhaps wise to remember that genealogy can also be put to sinister uses in the hands of eugenicists, racial supremacists and ultra-nationalists.
This blog article owes much to Prof Deborah Hertz. For further information on the uses to which the Nazis put genealogy, see Prof Hertz’s 1997 article “The Genealogy Bureaucracy in the Third Reich” published in the periodical Jewish History (Vol 11, No 2).
The Austro-Hungarian, or Habsburg, Empire, also known as the Dual Monarchy, collapsed and fractured during WW1 and new nation states emerged from its ruins, including of course the modest Central European state of Austria itself.
It is difficult to argue against today’s received opinion that empires are bad things and that it is wrong for one people to rule over another. In practice, though, the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire was largely benign. It is true that from time and time, and perhaps particularly although by no means exclusively in areas under Hungarian rule, emerging nationalisms were suppressed; sometimes this was by show of force, but by the late 19th century the Empire had become largely a bureaucratic organism.
The great elegist of the Empire, Joseph Roth, does not attribute the collapse of Austro-Hungary to the rise of Yugoslav and Romanian and Czechoslovak nationalism, but to the overweening pan-Germanic nationalism which was to have such devastating consequences for Europe.
In his 1938 novel The Emperor’s Tomb (translated by John Hoare, pub Granta, 1999), the character Count Chojnicki — a cipher for Roth himself — prophesied before the outbreak of WW1 that “Austria will perish at the hands of the Nibelungen fantasy”1. “It is the Slovenes, the Poles and Galicians from Ruthenia, the kaftan-clad Jews from Boryslaw2, the horse traders from the Bacska3, the Moslems from Sarajevo, the chestnut roasters from Mostar who sing our national anthem “Gott Erhalte”, while the Germans in the Empire sing German martial and chauvinist tunes. Similarly, the narrator and protagonist, Trotta, writes of the “tragic love which the Crown Lands4 bore to Austria”:
“The gypsies of the Puszta5, the Huzulen6 of Subcarpathia, the Jewish coachmen of Galicia, my own kin the Slovene chestnut roasters of Sipolje, the Swabian7 tobacco growers from the Bacska, the horse breeders of the Steppes, the Osman Sibersna8, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the horse traders from the Hanakei9 in Moravia, the weavers from the Erzgebirge10, the millers and coral dealers of Podolia11: all these were the open-handed providers of Austria.”
After WW1, reflecting on the demise of Austro-Hungary and the mediocrity to which defeated Austria had sunk, Chojnicki bemoans “the fatheads from the Alps and the Sudeten Germans, those cretinous Nibelungen… It was not our Czechs, our Poles, or Ruthenians who betrayed us, but the Germans, only the Germans, at our very heart.”
- Nibelungen: mythological nonsense popularised by Wagner
- Boryslaw: Boryslav, a small town now in Ukraine
- Bacska: properly Bačka, a region now largely in northern Serbia
- Crownlands: provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
- Puszta: the steppes of the Alföld, the great Hungarian plain
- Huzulen: the Hutsuls, a Ruthenian or western Ukrainian people
- Swabian: 18th century German settlers in the Banat in northern Serbia and adjacent Romania
- Osman Sibersna: a phrase not properly translated into English from the original German language die osmanische Sibersna but presumably referring to Ottomans of Bosnia-Herzegovina
- Hanakei: the Moravian people of the Haná region around the town of Olomouc, Czech Republic
- Erzgebirg: the Krušné Hory mountain range, also now in the Czech Republic
- Podolia: here western Podolia is meant, being the region around the city of Ternopil‘, now in Ukraine