Archive for the ‘galicia & bukovina’ Category
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.
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
“An immigrant shall be considered an undesirable immigrant if he cannot show that he has in his possession or is in a position to obtain the means of decently supporting himself and his dependents (if any)”.
from: An Act to Amend the Law with Regard to Aliens, 11 August 1905 (5 Edw. 7. c13), 1 (3a)
The Aliens Act 1905 was enacted in response to growing public alarm at the waves of Eastern European Jews which had been arriving in England from the Russian Empire since 1881. Much of the alarm was stoked by exaggerated media reports – even the respectable Whitaker’s Almanac claimed in 1902 that 140,000 Jewish immigrants were arriving each year, despite the average annual number settling throughout the period being 4,000 to 5,000 (partly this misperception was due to the very large number of trans-migrants for whom England was but a staging post en route to America). The Aliens Act put an end to unrestricted entry into Britain, although numbers picked up again in the years before the outbreak of war in 1914 as Jews claimed political or religious asylum, which continued to be permitted under the 1905 Act. It was WW1 which effectively halted Jewish immigration – thereafter, the only group which arrived in any numbers were the Polish Jews among post-War Belgian refugees.
It is often said that the Jewish immigrants arrived in response to poverty, persecution and pogroms in Tsarist Russia. The picture is more nuanced: it was, for example, the fear of pogroms which drove many to leave, as pogroms mainly affected a few communities in southern Russia (for instance, Odessa and Chişinău in what are today Ukraine and Moldova). Emigration was driven more by the obligations and restrictions upon Jewish life, which placed a cap on potential and ambition. As is well known, between 1791 and the Revolution in 1917 the majority of Jews had to reside within the Pale of Settlement. Even those, such as university graduates and Guild merchants, who were exempted and could live beyond the Pale (only 4.1%, according to the 1897 Russian census) had to pay an annual tax for the privilege. There were quotas for Jewish university student numbers: a decree in 1887 restricted the numerus clausus to 10% of the student body in those cities in which Jews were entitled to reside, to 5% elsewhere and to a mere 3% in Moscow and Petersburg. Jews were excluded from the professions and the vast array of career options in the Tsarist civil service. Nor could Jews become army officers. This was ironic as it was precisely compulsory and onerous military service which impelled many young Jewish men to emigrate. The trade unionist Joseph Fine, giving evidence before the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1903 cited escaping military service as one of four principal reasons for Jewish immigration in Britain (see David Englander’s A Documentary History of Jewish Immigrants in Britain 1840-1920, Leicester University Press, 1994). The other three he gave were the 300 roubles the Russian government fined the fathers of sons who escaped military service, which prompted many to emigrate instead; the poverty of the artisan and small tradesmen class into which excessive numbers of Jews were forced through lack of other options; and the proscribing of trades unions, in which many Jews were active.
These were all “push” factors in migration. Of course, “pull” factors were exerted by Britain. It had an open door policy till 1905; it had a liberal tradition as the home of refugees; it could be a first stop on an intended eventual continued journey to America; and, of course, its ever-increasing Jewish population led to a chain of migration as friends, wives, sweethearts and children followed the (usually male) initial migrants from a shtetl or neighbourhood.
By the time of the 1911 census of England, the Jewish population is thought to have been in the order of 257,000. The exact number is unknown: the census is silent on religion and race. Numbers have been variously estimated based upon such factors as the known size of particular long-established communities and the numbers of individuals who declared their place of birth as, for example, Poland, Romania or Russia.
The 1911 census is a snapshot of the population as at Sunday 2nd April 1911. It is a superb resource for those studying their Jewish family history, particularly those late 19th and earlier 20th century immigrant families (the wealth of resources available before the public release of the 1911 census made the researching of earlier, established Anglo-Jewish families somewhat more straightforward). For instance, the 1911 census asks married couples to state the duration of their marriage, the number of children born to the marriage, the number of children still living and the number now deceased. It is therefore possible to calculate the approximate year of marriage. Treat the date with caution, as the duration of marriage figure may well have been rounded, usually upwards, and the longer a couple had been married the more likely it is that rounding will have taken place. The number of children may surprise. Sometimes this will be because the census shows the existence of hitherto unknown children (tantalisingly so, if they are not resident at the family home). Sometimes, it will be the prodigious family size which surprises. Immigrant Jewish fertility rates were high but it is less well known that infant mortality rates were low, due to better hygiene and childcare practices than much of the surrounding gentile population (see Eilidh Garrett, Changing Family Size in England and Wales: Place, Class and Demography 1891-1911, Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Of course, there were many exceptions and not all families were large. The family of Abraham Bevistein (a boy soldier “shot at dawn” in WW1) is one. At the time of the 1911 census, he was residing at the family home at 5 Anthony Street, Stepney. His parents Joseph and Rebbeca (sic) Bevistein state they have been married 16 years (which places the event circa 1894/95) and have had two children only, both of whom survive and are living with them – Abraham, 15, and Kate, 12. Against all four, the place of birth is given as “Russia Poland”. This means that we know that the family arrived in England after the birth of Kate in around 1899 (in fact, they arrived in 1902). The nationality is Russian. This indicates that Joseph had not been naturalised by that date: the £5 fee, if not the need for a formal petition and police report, may have been off-putting for a tailor such as Joseph living in a two-room dwelling. This common failure to naturalise later made many alien Jews vulnerable to being returned to Russia to fight in WW1 under the 1917 Anglo-Russian Convention.
When the Bevisteins arrived in England, they stayed briefly at the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter in Leman Street, London. Newly arrived immigrants could stay there for up to 14 days while orientating themselves, seeking accommodation and employment, or readying themselves for an onward journey to America or elsewhere. Admission registers survive and the 43,000 names from the 13 volumes covering admissions from 1896 to 1914 are searchable online . The Bevisteins were admitted, recorded under the spelling Biberstein, on 1st October 1902.
The different spelling of the surname highlights the importance of considering name variants when making census searches. Remember that the names of recent immigrant families might not have stabilised by 1911 and English would very likely have been the third or fourth language in which they became literate (after, for example, Polish, Russian and Yiddish).
The painter Mark Gertler was also born in London to Jewish immigrant parents, although, as the 1911 census return makes clear, his came from Austria rather than Russia. He was born in Spitalfields and at the time of the 1911 census was a 19-year old art student studying at the Slade. The Gertlers came not from Vienna or elsewhere in today’s Austria but, as was often the case, from its far-flung province of Galicia, today divided between Poland and Ukraine. Whereas the 1911 census form stipulates “if born in a Foreign Country, write the name of the Country”, the Gertler return is unusual in delivering an exact place of origin (Przemyśl, in today’s Poland). Unfortunately, this is all too rare. If the census simply states “Russia”, the birthplace could have been anywhere within the then Russian Empire, which often means today’s successor states such as Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine rather than Russia itself. If “Poland” or “Russian Poland” is stated, this narrows down the region to the then Congress Poland, which it should be noted does not at all coincide with the borders of modern Poland.
Landsleit, immigrants from the same hometown, often settled in the same communities or neighbourhoods or streets, and knowledge of this may assist if your own ancestor’s 1911 census is silent as to exact place of origin. For instance, a significant number of the Jews in Leeds were Litvaks from the Kovno gubernia, who travelled purposely to Leeds to join the clothing industry. Generally, where places are given on the 1911 census, they are in the Yiddish or transliterated Russian form, not the name current today (e.g. Kovne or Kovno, not the Lithuanian Kaunas). It is important to note that “Kovno” may well refer to the Russian gubernia or province rather than necessarily to the city itself (although that was 36% Jewish at the time of the 1897 Russian census). Incidentally, the 1911 census return for the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter mentioned earlier is unusually forthcoming about place of origin, perhaps because as a charitable institution it felt obliged to record information more diligently than the average householder. For instance, on the second page of its census return, birthplaces include, as well as the expected Grodno, Kovno and Minsk, less expected Russian places of origin such as Radomsk and Samaroff, and even some Bulgarian towns.
As mentioned earlier, many Jews landing at London and other east coast ports were trans-migrants rather than immigrants intending to reside permanently in Britain. The trans-migrants may have stayed in Britain only long enough to cross the country to Liverpool or Southampton to catch their steamer to America. Others stayed in England for years and then decided (or had saved the money) to emigrate to America. Although it was possible to travel direct from, say, Hamburg to New York, it was significantly cheaper to break your journey in England – £5 15s compared to £7 15s in 1902 (according to David Cesarani, The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry, Blackwells, 1990) – and this was one of the main reasons why trans-migrants to America appear in such numbers in the British passenger lists.
America was not the only destination for trans-migrants. Litvaks in particular passed through England on the way to the Cape in South Africa. Others headed to Canada, of course, and to South America. On the night of the 1911 census, Nestor Derenzuk, a 26-year old agricultural labourer from Grodno (now in Belarus), was one of the persons staying at the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter. He is described as having been married for four years and having two children, both alive. However, they are not staying at the Shelter with him and it can be inferred that they were still in Grodno and would join him later if he made a success for himself overseas. In fact, a search of the outward-bound passenger lists show him, as Nestor Derenczuk, leaving England from Dover four days later, on 6th April 1911, bound for Buenos Aires. The passenger list also shows that he had arrived at London on 27th March 1911 on a United Shipping Co vessel. Other men, also farm labourers, were on the same vessel arriving in London in March, in the Shelter on census night, and embarking on the same ship from Dover as Nestor Derenczuk and he was clearly travelling as one of a party. Did he make it to Argentina? Did his family ever join him there? We do not know. We can only catch a glimpse of his life through the official documents he left behind, and imagine the rest.
Last week I attended a fascinating talk by Larysa Bolton, archivist at Tameside Local Studies and Archives Centre in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester. Larysa outlined the history of the Ukrainian community in Manchester and then spoke more specifically about her role in collecting community archives.
The Ukrainians in the city have been reinforced since 1991 by a new wave of immigrants but the longstanding community is founded on two earlier waves. The first of these comprised essentially economic migrants from the Austrian province of Galicia (Halychyna to Ukrainians) in the 1890s and 1900s. The second wave was mostly of political refugees, from the same region (which had become, between the World Wars, SE Poland) via occupied defeated Germany and Austria, in the immediate post-WW2 era (under the British government’s European Volunteer Worker scheme of 1946-1951). Most Ukrainians tended to settle around Red Bank and Cheetham, along the artery north out of the city towards Bury.
From the archival point of view, neither the first nor the second wave of Ukrainian immigrants placed great importance on preserving the documentary history of their life in UK. This is changing, partly through successful archival outreach work and partly through the growing interest in family history as second, third and later generation descendants of immigrants discover their Ukrainian roots.
Useful introductory websites concerning the Ukrainians of Manchester include those of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain and this Multi-Cultural Manchester Ukrainian page.
Bluebird Research undertakes family history research in Poland and throughout Ukraine and is happy to provide advice on genealogical research in Eastern Europe for those investigating their Ukrainian family history.
The Poles arrived in the Brazilian state of Paraná from the end of the 1860s up to the start of the First World War. They came from all three parts of partitioned Poland. Some of the earliest settlers were from Opole in Śląsk and from Gdańsk in the Prussian sector of the Partition. Later many came from Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and from such provinces as Lublin and Siedlce in Russian Poland (sometimes almost entire villages emigrating), for instance at the time of the so-called “Brazilian fever” of 1895-97 and another peak around 1910-12. Periodically, Brazil, hoping to solve its post-slavery labour shortage, offered a free one-way passage to migrants from Europe to entice them to make the journey of up to two months.
Most of the Polish emigrants were from the landless or smallholding peasantry. They emigrated in the hope and expectation of free or cheap land and of possessing their own homesteads or farms in Brazil. They found themselves living on a frontier, often in isolated communities. Many had to clear the forest or uncultivated land to become small independent farmers, working up to 100 hectares, but just as many settled in towns and were employed on the railways or in industry. They often lived in self-contained and self-sufficient communities, which preserved a distinctively Polish culture for generations.
The Brazilian census of 1920 apparently counted 32,299 individuals of Polish birth. However, this is almost certainly an under-estimate as, of course, the Second Republic was not created until 1918 and all Poles who emigrated before that date would have done so as subjects of other states (e.g. Austrian or Russian) and are likely to have been recorded as such in official paperwork in Brazil.
Nowadays, their descendants reside in the central and southern part of Paraná state, especially around the capital Curitiba, where many settlements have significant if not majority populations with Polish ancestry, even if Brazilian Portuguese is their first language.
The Third Partition of Poland took place in 1795 and the partitioning powers of Austria, Prussia and Russia embarked on a process of registration of the inhabitants of the formerly independent country. This affected all sections of society – the Polish gentry (szlachta), town dwellers, Roman Catholic and other clergy, and the peasantry – and was implemented as part of the process of social control and political subjugation. Jews, who had enjoyed some autonomy under the old Polish state, now had to register with the civil authorities, a process which required a surname. Where surnames were not already in use – as was often the case – civil servants would assign a name to a family as part of the registration process.
Norman Davies writes in his Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present (Oxford University Press, 2001) of how the young ETA Hoffmann, the German writer and musician, approached the momentous task of giving surnames to a people. He was posted and worked as a civil servant at Poznań (Posen), Płock and finally Warsaw.
“He glares at a client in deathly silence, and then shouts out the first word which comes to mind. This word, which enters into the Register, becomes the client’s official surname. At the end, Hoffmann says when the certificate is to be collected, and calls for the next customer.”
As described, the process, even when not demeaning, was completely arbitrary and often simply a matter of caprice:
“Before dinner, or on an empty stomach, he issues serious or melancholy surnames, after dinner more amusing ones.”
Davies relates how apparently one Friday Hoffmann gave Jewish registrants the names of fish; on Monday the names of flowers. On other days, everyone was given the names of birds, or church-related names. Once, hung-over following a drinking bout with a Prussian army officer, Jews coming to Hoffmann’s office were given military names such as Festung, Fojer, Pistolet, Szyspulver, Trommel, Trompeter and Harmata.
Even if some of these stories are apocryphal, the attitude of the partitioning authorities to their new Jewish subjects is clear. Davies’ account also flags the point that Jewish family historians should not necessarily read too much into the surnames on their family tree.
The first waves of Greek Catholics – mostly Carpatho-Rusyns or Ruthenes, but some Slovaks and Hungarians – arrived in USA circa 1868 to 1870, mostly from what was then NE Hungary and within a few years also from the Galicia in the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy. The most significant early settlements, all well-established before 1890, were in the American towns shown below (with the archeparchy or eparchy from which they obtained their priest given afterwards in brackets):
Freeland PA (Munkács)
Hazleton PA (Munkács)
Jersey City NJ (Lemberg)
Kingston PA (Eperjes)
Minneapolis MN (Eperjes)
Olyphant PA (Eperjes)
Scranton PA (Munkács)
Shamokin PA (Peremysl)
Shenandoah PA (Lemberg)
Wilkes-Barre PA (Munkács)
The Greek Catholic eparchy from which the parish priest was taken may indicate something of the majority origin of the parishioners – i.e. Eperjes (today Prešov in Slovakia), Munkács (now Mukachevo in Ukraine), Lemberg (L’viv, Ukraine) and Peremyshl (Przemyśl, Poland). However, it must be emphasised that these ecclesiastical districts are adjacent to one another and do not heed international borders. For example, an immigrant from Peremyshl eparchy may have been born equally in what is today Poland or in Ukraine.
Greek Catholic communities to develop throughout the 1890s and beyond, especially in Pennsylvania (for example, parishes were formed in Audenried, Braddock, Freeland, Lansford, Johnstown, Leisenring, Mahanoy City, Mayfield, McKeesport, Minersville, Mount Carmel, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Ramey) but also in New York State (Brooklyn, Buffalo and Yonkers), New Jersey (Passaic, Perth Amboy and Trenton) and Ohio (Cleveland).
The Ruthenians or rusyny are a Slavic people occupying the eastern Carpathians and observing none of history’s changing international political borders. Many Ruthenes emigrated to North America during the decades before the First World War, although the use of “Ruthene” or “Ruthenian” in, for example, American and Canadian passenger lists and immigration records of that era also referred to the Greek Catholic Ukrainians of Galicia. Today, the Ruthenian homeland is divided between Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine, with most living in the Ukrainian Zakarpats’ka oblast’.
The rusyny were originally Eastern Orthodox but the majority of communities converted to Greek Catholicism at different dates after 1596. David Buxton’s The Wooden Churches of Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1981) describes in great detail and, with black and white photographs and plans, the beautiful traditional blockwork timber churches built by the Boyko (or Bojko), Lemko and Hutsul ethnic groups throughout this region.
The churches of the Boyko and Lemko are orientated similarly and share the same basic tripartite structure of a western narthex; the central nave or naos, where the congregation stands; and, separated from the naos by the iconostasis, the eastern sanctuary, which only the priest may enter. In Boyko churches, a dome is raised above each of the three sections but distinctively with the central dome, the one above the naos, raised higher than the others. The churches tend to be small and symmetrical, and to have an external gallery (opasannya) on all sides. The bell tower is a separate structure standing to one side. Lemko churches, on the other hand, are usually larger and grander, and are distinguished by the western section – the narthex – being topped by a tall tower (often a bell tower), giving them a very different profile.
Hutsul churches are cruciform, adding an additional cell either side of the central naos. They may have a single central dome, or a dome additional on each of the other four components. As with Boyko churches, there was often a covered gallery around the whole building and the bell tower stood separately.
Wooden buildings, no matter how well constructed, are subject to destruction by fire and, of course, are vulnerable at times of war and conflict. Many striking Carpatho-Rusyn wooden churches have been irretrievably lost and others moved to the open-air ethnological museums or skansens. However, it is still possible to see late 17th, 18th and 19th century wooden churches at their original sites in the Ruthenian lands of SE Poland, NE Slovakia and Western Ukraine.
Bluebird Research offers professional family history research across Ukraine, including:
- officially recognised Displaced Persons who were resettled from Europe after World War Two
- former members of the Galizien (Halychyna) Division and Ukrainian National Army, many of whom were settled in Britain after the end of WW2
- western Ukrainian (Galician) Greek Catholic, Lemko, Boyko, Hutsul and Roman Catholic (latynnyky) emigrants to North America, especially the waves of Canadian immigrants from 1891 to 1914 and from 1920 to 1939
- families with roots in Kyiv and in Left-Bank Ukraine
- German ancestors from Black Sea, Gluckstal, northern Bukovina, Volhynia etc
- Hungarian families from Transcarpathian Ruthenia (part of Czechoslovakia between the Wars) now Zakarpats’ka oblast’
- Jewish communities from across Ukraine including Galicia, Podolia and Volhynia
- Polish families from western Ukraine (Małopolska Wschodnia: the former województwo lwowskie, stanisławowkie, and tarnopolskie)
For an opinion or estimate of costs for research in any area of Ukraine or any speciality, please feel free to contact us.
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.
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.
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.
In 1989, the writer Gregor von Rezzori returned to the place of his birth for the first time since 1936.
He had been born into the elite caste of the pre-WW1 Austro-Hungarian civil service, in which his father served as a supervisor and administrator of the Romanian Orthodox Church estates and monasteries in Bukovina. In the remodelled post-War world, Romania acquired Bukovina and the former Austrian governing class there became déclassé. The von Rezzori family was among the minority which stayed on, residing in Czernowitz (now officially Cernăuţi), the capital of Bukovina, where Gregor himself had been born in 1914 and lived as a boy. Although he attended a boarding school in Braşov (Kronstadt) in Transylvania, and dwelt subsequently in Vienna, Bucharest, Berlin and Firenze, he continued to think of himself as a Czernowitzer.
Of course, much had happened in the intervening 50 years before von Rezzori returned to his birthplace, now called Chernivtsi. Bukovina had been bisected in 1940. Its top half, including Cernăuţi, was ceded by Romania to the Soviet Union and the transfer of territory was confirmed after the War. From that date, Chernivtsi ceased to be a provincial capital and became a town of little moment on the periphery of Ukraine.
To his surprise, upon his return von Rezzori finds the city largely intact – of major landmarks, only the synagogue had been destroyed, inevitably razed by the Nazis during their occupation in 1941 – and in good repair. There was the inevitable and ubiquitous urban sprawl of high-rise apartment blocks where once the city had almost imperceptibly merged into the surrounding countryside. What appeared to von Rezzori to have changed was the character of the city:
“My hometown gained world fame as the melting pot for dozens of ethnic groups, languages, creeds, temperaments and customs… Nothing could be detected now of the restlessly vivacious, cynically bold and melancholically sceptical spirit that had distinguished the children of this town and made them known and famous throughout the world as Czernowitzers… the spirit of Czernowitz was due to the unique propinquity and juxtaposition of the Bukovina’s multiplicity of populations” (The Snows of Yesteryear, trans HF Broch de Rothermann, New York Review Books, 2009).
Czernowitz has been “cleansed of its hodgepodge of Swabian Germans, Romanians, Poles, Jews, Prussians, Slovaks and Armenians… The motley ethnic variegation had been replaced by a homogeneous breed of people…. These were Ukrainians. In the old days we called them Ruthenians, one of the many minorities in a place where there was no majority”.
Of course, von Rezzori views Chernivtsi through eyes that might not distinguish between a local Ukrainian with deep Bukovina roots and a modern Hutsul, or between western Ukrainians and the Soviet era immigrants from central and eastern Ukraine foreign to Bukovina. However, the great diversity of the city, the outcome of centuries of organic growth and the occasional jolts of conflict, has gone. Like L’viv, like Vilnius, like other cities of the borders and contact zones of Eastern Europe, Chernivtsi lost something irreplaceable during the history of the 20th century.
There were scarcely 19 years of peace in interwar Lwów, between September 1920 and September 1939. Ironically, the city which had been at the forefront of Polish national and cultural activism during the long years of partitioned Poland became somewhat peripheral now that the country was united and independent. Its prestige declined. From having been Lemberg, the capital of the self-governing Austro-Hungarian crownland of Galicia and the fifth largest city of the Empire (behind Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Trieste), it became Lwów, one of many satellite cities within the orbit of the Polish capital Warsaw. And of course the ambitious and the unemployed, students and professional elites, now gravitated towards Warsaw.
There were three national communities in the city. During the Austrian era, from 1772 to the Great War, the authorities counted the population by religion rather than nationality, as, to a greater or lesser extent, an empire exists by denial of nationality or at least of national expression.
Between 51% and 53% of the city’s inhabitants were Roman Catholic. These were overwhelmingly Poles, with a very small minority of Austrians and assimilated Germans and Armenians (although a separate Armenian Catholic Church still functioned in Lwów).
18% or 19% were Greek Catholics, who were rusyny or Ruthenians, and increasingly identified themselves as Ukrainians as the 19th century advanced and the community’s national consciousness awakened.
27% or 28% were Jewish. The Jews of Lwów had traditionally resided in two designated areas and continued to do so even after regulations were relaxed in 1867. The first area comprised a largely affluent and assimilated community in the neighbourhood of three streets in the old town: ul Żdowska, Ruska and Zarwańska. The second area was a more working class and religiously Orthodox Jewish community in the Krakowskie and Żółkiewskie suburbs.
These three large national communities interacted and shared certain common aspirations during the era of Austrian rule, despite the irreconcilable incompatibility of Polish and Ukrainian national claims to the city and despite a wide range of internal differences. For instance, the Jewish community included assimilationists and Polish nationalists; Zionists; Bundists and communists; and largely apolitical Orthodox Jews. The Jews appear to have least frequently intermarried with the other two communities: it seems probable that intermarriage was restricted to those who not only assimilated but also converted to Catholicism. However, marriage between the Polish Roman Catholics and Ukrainian Greek Catholics was not unusual.
It has been calculated that 16% of pre-WW1 marriages were mixed*. This needs to be placed in context of the respective sizes of the two communities. For instance, in 1900 there were 82,590 Roman Catholics and 29,327 Greek Catholics in Lwów. When this numerical imbalance is factored in, it means that one in three Poles may have been marrying a Ukrainian. Mixed marriages declined after Galicia became part of independent Poland and tensions between Poles and Ukrainians increased, but even in the 1920s mixed marriages are estimated at 8%.
These figures are salutary. History is necessarily written in generalisations with only occasional references to individuals by way of exemplification. The reality for individuals is granular and subject to infinite degrees and gradations of experience. In pre-Soviet era Lwów, there may well have been some “pure” Polish and Ukrainian families but it would not be surprising for family history research to demonstrate or suggest otherwise.
*Estimates of intermarriage are by Lidia Zyblikiewicz, cited in Philipp Ther’s “War Versus Peace” (Harvard Ukrainian Studies XXIV (1/4) 2000).
Records for the different communities in Lemberg / Lwów / L’viv are today found in L’viv and Warsaw. Bluebird Research offers professional family history research services in L’viv, across Ukraine and Poland, and would be delighted to undertake genealogical research on behalf of anyone with Jewish, Polish or Ukrainian – or mixed! – ancestry from the region.
The first and largest wave of Ukrainian emigrants to North America took place between 1891 and the outbreak of War in 1914. These were almost exclusively economic migrants and, of course, chain migrants: both pioneers and those friends and family who followed them learning of their success. To generalise, these Ukrainians emigrated to rural regions of Canada (an estimated 171,000 to the lands of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan) and urban centres of USA (maybe 250,000 in number).
It is important to understand that these early Ukrainian Canadians came from the most distant provinces of Austro-Hungary – from Galicia and Bukovina. On contemporary records – pre-War passenger lists, immigration records, land settlement records and censuses – they are therefore likely to be described as Ruthenians from Austria. Galicia is now split west-east between Poland and Ukraine, while Bukovina is now divided north-south between Ukraine and Romania. Almost without exception, therefore, these Canadian immigrants hailed from what is today western Ukraine, not from the central Kyiv area or eastern (so-called Left-Bank) Ukraine. They were unRussian.
Ruthenians from Galicia were invariably Greek Catholics and, where literate, wrote using the Latin rather than the Cyrillic alphabet found in eastern Ukraine and Russia. There was no tradition of the use of patronymics now common throughout Ukraine. Their names may have been recorded in parish registers in Latin or Polish spellings: you can safely assume that Latin Joannes and Polish Jan was known to his nearest and dearest as Ivan. Of course, he may also show up as Iwan, reflecting Polish orthography, and once arrived in North America is likely to have become John.
For Canadian descendants of this first wave of immigrants (which had started as early as the 1870s but gained real momentum in the closing decade of the century), there are some tremendous ready-made resources available. Among these are the compendiums of Vladimir Kaye known as Dictionary of Ukrainian Canadian Biography. Mr Kaye produced three of these: Alberta and Manitoba were published, while (as far as I am aware) the volume for Saskatchewan remains in manuscript only. There are 941 entries in the Manitoba book. Here is an abbreviated extract from one:
YASKIW, Maksym, born 1853 in Rostayna, district Yaslo, Galicia, Austria, died 7 September 1911 in Rossburn. Wife Eudokia (Dora) born 1856 died 6 February 1942 at Rossburn. Children on landing: Vladimir 10, Yurko 16, Petro 8, Hanka 14. Arrived in Canada on SS Phoenicia, landing at Halifax 21 May 1899.
Rostayna and Yaslo are respectively Rostajne and Jasło in Polish and are situated in the far SE of the country. In 1900, the year after Makysm sailed to Canada, Rostajne comprised 63 houses and an almost exclusively Greek Catholic population of 366, according to the official Austrian gazetteer for Galizien.
Another excellent resource for Canadians beginning their Ukrainian family history is Ukrainians In Alberta, published in 1975 by the Ukrainian Pioneers’ Association of Alberta, which gives fuller biographies, often one or two pages’ long and with accompanying family photographs.
Bluebird Research is happy to offer assistance with family history research in both Poland and Ukraine and would be delighted to help and advise you investigate your family’s Galicia roots.