Archive for the ‘lithuania’ 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.
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.
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.
Czesław Miłosz relates the story of an independently wealthy Warsaw Jew named Felix, who had taken up residence in Vilnius’s Hotel Europa*. In 1939 Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had discovered just enough friendship for one another to partition Poland between them along the euphemistic “peace boundary” (or Molotov-Ribbentrop line), and Felix was now seemingly trapped in Vilnius within an enlarged Soviet Union. Moreover, in the summer of 1940 he was relieved of his moveable assets by a duplicitous lawyer acquaintance. However, Felix found a way out by Trans-Siberian rail across the continent-sized USSR to its Far-East border with Japanese-occupied Manchuria. This was even less feasible than it may sound, as the Soviets permitted such travel only to those with a Japanese visa – and by mid-1940 it was no longer possible to acquire such a visa legitimately.
However, in Vilnius lived a rabbi named Silberstein with preternatural gifts of prescience: while exit visas were still to be had, he had done the rounds of the overseas consulates and filled his passport with as wide an array of stamps as possible. There also existed in Vilnius at that time extremely gifted illustrators, graphic designers and printers. Rabbi Silberstein’s Japanese visa therefore served as a template and could be duplicated as needed but, as Miłosz writes, “it was marked by one defect: no one in the city knew the Japanese alphabet, and therefore could have guessed that each visa contained the name of its first owner. When the five-hundredth Silberstein passed over the Manchurian frontier, the Japanese began to worry…”
Whether this part of the story is apocryphal in whole or in part, Felix did escape to Shanghai and thence via Australia to USA, only to be killed in a motor vehicle accident in Hawaii.
It is also likely that the good rabbi’s original bona fide visa was one of those issued by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Vice-Consul in Kaunas in independent Lithuania, and one of the Righteous Among The Nations. His story can be read on Wikipedia.
*see the essay collection Proud To Be A Mammal: Essays on War, Faith and Memory, pub Penguin, 2010.
Who was recruited?
In the early 18th century, the expectation was that one man would be enlisted into the army from every 20 families within a community each year. All social estates, high and low, were liable for military service. However, over the decades many privileges and exemptions were granted so that by 1858 an estimated 20% of the otherwise eligible male population of the Empire was in fact exempt – this included landowners, members of merchant guilds, those with a higher education and the like, but also all those living in specific regions of empire such as Bessarabia. The burden of “other ranks” military service therefore fell heaviest on the peasantry and the urban poor.
How were recruits selected?
In rural Russia, the peasant community itself – the mir – was responsible for putting forward a list of candidates. While the mir or commune probably knew who among its members was eligible for the draft, the undertaking of the Russian censuses, producing the periodic but somewhat irregular revision lists (now of great value to family historians with roots in the former Russian Empire), formalised the process by identifying and recording the population. Unlike censuses in Britain, for example, which were used solely for social planning, the Russian revisions were used explicitly for taxation and conscription purposes.
Each year, the commune produced a shortlist of potential recruits which was then submitted to an army induction centre set up temporarily for the purpose in the nearest town in the volost or uezd (or district). The requisite number of men would then be conscripted into the army, while those not selected could expect to be put forward again the following year. Of course, some men were rejected by the army for not meeting its physical criteria and would unlikely to be conscripted in any year. Others, such as those with disabilities, were deselected by the commune itself and never made the list. To a certain extent, both the commune and the army were sensitive to the fact that each conscript was a lost worker and a lost taxpayer, with the peasants knowing that someone else would have to make up the deficit in labour and money. This meant that there was usually a conscious effort to spare only sons, or only working males in families. In a household of many brothers or sons, it was almost inevitable that one or more would be drafted. However, it was also possible for wealthier farmers to use influence or to purchase a surrogate from a different community to take the place of their brother or son who had been placed on the shortlist. Finally, commune members perceived to be unproductive, or exhibiting anti-social behaviour or committing petty crimes, would be sure to top the shortlist.
While therefore the commune exercised a measure of influence over who was recruited and who not, it is easy to see that the whole process of conscription was a source of stress and tension within each community. This was particularly the case as army service was neither short nor sweet…
How long did a soldier serve in the army?
- Before 1793, a soldier could expect to serve in the Russian army for life.
- From 1793, this was reduced to 25 years.
- From 1834, military service was reduced to 20 years.
- From 1874, the term of service was reduced to 18 years, of which initially the first 5 years were to be spent in the regular standing army and the subsequent 13 years in the reserves. However, later this was changed to 3 years in the army and 15 years in the reserves.
What happened to a new recruit?
Enlistment into the army was a transformational experience. Not only would the recruit very probably leave the vicinity of his native village for the first time but he would be unlikely to return for many years, if at all. Instead, he would be swallowed up into the army corpus, be billeted upon unwilling householders and endure all the hardships of army life which were severe even during peacetime.
However, something else rather peculiar immediately happened to a new recruit. His legal status in Russian society changed. That change was a form of emancipation, albeit deferred until such time as he was discharged from the army. Upon joining the army he ceased to be exposed to any of his former tax or labour obligations, whether to state, church or landowner. Effectively, he was now a free man, just a free man conscripted into the unfreedom of army life.
What about soldiers’ wives and children?
If a recruit was already married, with or without children, the usual scenario was long term separation. There was no easy mechanism for wives and children to go upon the strength, although some managed to continue to cohabit with their men when they were stationed in garrisons or fortresses. Instead, the recruit’s family was subject to great uncertainty and potential hardship. Wives, too, became legally free when the soldier attested. This meant also that they were entitled to an internal passport granting freedom of movement and employment. However, a disproportionate number of wives either drifted into prostitution in towns, or had illegitimate children; some remarried bigamously.
Soldiers’ children were a subcategory in the system of social estates. Sons, including until 1856 the illegitimate children of soldiers’ wives (where the soldier was not himself the father), were registered and expected to enter military service when they came of age.
In Imperial Russia, the status of women and children was determined by that of their husbands or fathers. This is why a soldier’s wife became free when he was recruited. However, this also meant that a soldier’s widow who remarried could become a serf or a peasant owing normal dues once again, and similarly a soldier’s daughter who married a serf lost her free status and became herself enserfed (until emancipation).
Unmarried recruits were of course strongly discouraged from marrying.
What happened to a soldier once discharged from the army?
If a soldier survived the hardships of a full term in the army, he would be discharged to enjoy for the first time and as best he could the freedoms he had acquired when he was recruited. Now he had theoretical freedom of movement; he was exempt from taxation; he did not have to labour for the landlord. However, at the same time he received only a small lump sum and had no immediate means of support. Therefore he was also free to become jobless and hungry and poor. In these circumstances, it was not unusual for a discharged soldier to have to live upon charity, or to become a hawker or a casual labourer, or to struggle to ply a trade. Other old soldiers entered state service as messengers or guards, or in the police or fire services. Additionally, until reforms in 1867, significant numbers of retired soldiers were settled in so-called veterans’ towns or on virgin lands owned or claimed by the state, often in frontier situations.
Others where they could returned to their native village to farm the family plot if it still existed, or to buy a new plot if they had the money. In fact, the 1867 returns henceforth required discharged soldiers to return to the community from which they had been recruited, at least partly to prevent the social problems associated with ex-soldiers which were a growing cause for concern in cities and towns.
In May 2001 I visited Trakai in Lithuania. A mini-bus took me and a handful of Japanese tourists the 30 or so km from Vilnius bus station and dropped us off outside the major tourist attraction, the restored Trakai Castle situated romantically in lake Galvė. While the others headed across the footbridge to the castle with their cameras at the ready, I wandered by myself the length of the little town to see what I could find of the Karaim.
Karaism is a non-Talmudic Mosaic faith and the Karaim, or Karaites, are a dispersed people with what are generally regarded as Turkic but sometimes as Jewish roots, living in scattered communities across the former Soviet bloc.
Historically in what is today Ukraine, Karaim lived in the towns of Lutsk (inter-War Polish Łuck) and Halych (after which the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia is named). In addition, communities were to be found in the Crimea in towns such as Bakhchisaray (Bağçasaray), Feodosiya (Kefe) and Yevpatoria (Keslev). One of the best-known traditional centres of the Crimean Karaim was Chufut Kale (Çufut Qale) but this was abandoned during the 19th century. The Crimean Karaim often lived by trade and therefore sometimes had mercantile links and family outposts in Black Sea ports (e.g. Kherson and Odessa) and the Eastern Mediterranean (e.g. Egypt and Constantinople).
The Karaim in Lithuania arrived at some date before the end of the 14th Century, almost certainly as officially invited and privileged settlers involved in defence. It is not clear whether the original settlers came from the Crimea or from Lutsk. In any event, while military service may have been the prime mover behind their arrival in Lithuania, soon many Karaim were involved simply in agriculture or in trade.
The most well-known settlement in Lithuania is that at Trakai but smaller communities survive in Panevėžys and Vilnius. There is a Karaim cemetery in each of these three places. The one in Trakai is disappearing amid meadow and woodland on the other side of lake Totoriškiai facing the town – inscriptions are mostly in Hebrew but with some Latin script. Karaim places of worship – prayer houses known as a kenesa – survive at Trakai and Vilnius but that in Panevėžys was destroyed in 1970, a victim of the atheist communist state and probably also the declining local population and the ongoing process of assimilation. Other Lithuanian Karaim communities such as the one in Biržai have become extinct or, like Naujamiestis, all but died out with only individuals or solitary families surviving. The Lithuanian Karaim population is now very small and dwindling: officially 423 in 1959, 388 in 1970, 289 in 1989 and 257 in 1997. Assimilation and out-marriage are serious issues for the survival of the community, which traditionally was endogamous and sometimes had to resort to sourcing marriage partners from Lutsk or even Crimea.
Another distinctive feature of the Trakai Karaim settlement is its vernacular architecture. The typical Karaim wooden cottage, sometimes painted in pastel or brighter shades, sits with its gable end with three ground-floor windows facing on to the street; the entrance is on the facade round the side.
One reason why the Lithuania Karaim community survives at all today is the official recognition it gained in 1863. In that year, they successfully asserted themselves as a Turkic people in contra-distinction to the Jews, with whom they had previously been associated in Russian Empire. The unforeseen consequence of this was that they were largely spared the fate of the Lithuanian Jews during the Holocaust.
Bluebird Research undertakes professional family history research across Lithuania and can help you with your genealogical research, whether your ancestors were Karaim, Jewish, Lithuanian or Polish. Please contact us for a free assessment.
Revision lists are the nearest Imperial Russian equivalent to the censuses conducted in places such as Canada, USA and Britain which are so familiar and indispensable to family historians in those regions. While those censuses were intended as a count of the population at a particular point in time and were conducted over a single night or weekend every 10 years, the Russian revision lists were generated for taxation purposes and were more irregular in frequency and duration, with each one tending to take up to a year or more to be completed.
The revision lists, also known as revision of souls, are extremely useful to those genealogists with ancestral roots in the Russian Empire, which of course covered great swathes of territory outside its current borders, for instance in the Baltic and in the modern states of Belarus and Ukraine. The term “revision” derives from the detailed comparison which is being made by the census-takers between the census being undertaken and its immediate predecessor.
Although revision lists evolved and therefore vary over time, essentially each revision list enumerates all residents (or at least all male residents) of a particular place. In the Baltic provinces, with the exception of land owned by church or state, most land was in the hands of a small number of the usually Baltic German elite. Their estates were divided into the demesne (the manor or farm – hof – and its surrounding estate lands) and the peasant farmsteads or smallholdings, all of which were named, and of which there could be a hundred or more on any one single estate. Agricultural labourers lived both on the estate lands and on the smallholdings of other peasants. Those smallholding peasants did not have an opportunity to own their farmsteads until this was made possible by the land reform measures implemented first in 1849 and then ratified in 1860 in Livland (Livonia) and in 1863 in Kurland (Courland). Thereafter, peasant ownership expanded rapidly until by the 1880s most smallholdings were owned by their occupiers.
What the revision lists provide, among other things, for the family historian is evidence of movement. This is because each revision records not just where an individual is resident at that time but also where he or she was resident at the time of the previous revision, if different. For example, the 1850 revision gives where a person was living in the 1833 revision. This of course makes it possible to track a person across time.
It is important to understand that migration in early and mid-19th century European Russia, for instance in the Baltic provinces, was generally local. Usually, we are not talking about emigration beyond Russia or beyond the province, but about small-scale movements of only 2 or 3 km in most cases.
Movement between estates was minimal. Those peasants making such movements were usually young men and women in their twenties getting married. Military conscripts were the only other major group of individuals who moved outside the estate.
Movements within an estate were common. Some smallholders moved to another farmstead, while many agricultural labourers were mobile, even moving annually between different farms on the estate.
A revision list such as the 9th revision in 1850 records departures and arrivals. For those individuals who were present at the time of the previous revision in 1833 and have left since, it records when they left and their destination. For those who were living elsewhere in 1833 and have since arrived, the place of origin is recorded. Just as the 1840 and 1850 American censuses, or the 1841 and 1851 English censuses, show only where individuals were living at those two dates, and are silent on any movements in between, so the 1833 and 1850 revision lists only plot where a person was at these two dates, not any interim places of residence. For instance, an agricultural labourer could quite conceivably have moved every year between the two revisions but will only be recorded on them at the two qualifying dates of 1833 and 1850. This also means that a person who is at the same place in 1833 and 1850 may of course have lived elsewhere in between but returned. The family historian must therefore accept that they are only being presented with snapshots in time and not with an unbroken seamless record of movement. Nevertheless, the significance of the revision lists cannot be under-estimated for those researchers investigating their ancestors and the structure and composition of family trees in the Russian Empire in the 19th century.
“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.
John Millar’s The Lithuanians in Scotland (House of Lochar, 1998) provides a very readable account of the lives of first and second generation Lithuanian immigrants in Scotland, covering their geographic distribution, their working and living conditions, their customs and traditions. It is fascinating on the name changes and how most immigrants took Scottish surnames (usually seemingly assigned to them rather than chosen voluntarily).
The book was written before the recent great explosion of interest in family history and, of course, was not written with the family historian in mind. Unfortunately, while it should prove essential reading to anyone trying to understand their Lithuanian roots in Scotland, it is less helpful for anyone wishing to extend their genealogical research back to Lithuania. The book is light on the places of origin of the Lithuanians who came to Scotland. Various places are mentioned in passing – “Vladislavovskiy district” (today known in Lithuanian as the border town of Kudirkos Naumiestis), “the valley of the Nemunas River”, “Mikolines dvaras near Mariampolė” (a dvaras is a farm or manor estate), “Sukalupio dvaras in the Naumiestis area” and Kaunas itself. If these places are plotted on a map of Lithuania, it does appear that Millar’s general statement that “the majority… came… from the Suvalkija area in the south-west of the country and from the Kaunas district” is probably true. This is the region south of the Nemunas and east of the Šešupė River, extending east to Kaunas.
However, it is important to understand that vital records in Lithuania – the Roman Catholic parish registers of baptism, marriage and burial – are held by specific locality. There is no centralised or regional indexing, and no computerised database. Therefore, it is vital to know or to be able to find out exactly where an ancestor came from to have good prospects of finding their birth or baptism in Lithuania and being able to research their family tree back from there.
One also needs to be mindful of not confusing a regional place name with a town or village name. For instance, Kaunas is both the town and the region – in Imperial Russian times, Kovno (Kaunas) gubernia covered the majority of what is today Lithuania. Similarly, Suwałki gubernia covered the Suvalkija region mentioned above plus adjoining territory in what is today Poland, including the Polish town of Suwałki itself.
The historical geography is especially important to grasp as, with the exception of Lithuanian immigrants who arrived in Scotland as Displaced Persons immediately after WW2, the Lithuanians in Scotland came to the country from the Russian Empire before the start of WW1. In historical documents, therefore, including Scottish census returns, Russian terminology is to be expected, as the Lithuanians were Russian subjects, who prior to their emigration had resided in the Russian Empire (“Poland” is often seen too, as Suwałki gubernia was part of Congress Poland, that part of partitioned Poland belonging to Russia).
If you are interested in taking your Lithuanian genealogy further, Bluebird Research is always happy to receive enquiries and provide a professional opinion on the prospects for family history research in Lithuania.
In Lithuania today three different forms of a surname may be recognised: male, married female and unmarried female. For example, Mr Budrikas married to a Mrs Budrikienė might have a spinster daughter named Miss Budrikaitė. Of course, the form that the surname takes makes it unnecessary to ask whether or not Ona Budrikienė or Marija Budrikaitė are married, or to use a title for either of them.
However, more historically, in speech there were additional forms of the surname for different members of the family, based upon age and sex. The wife of a Mr Švelnas would be Mrs Švelnienė. Their young son would be Master Švelnytis and an adult son would be Mr Švelnukas. Their young daughter would be Miss Švelnytė and an adult but unmarried daughter would be Miss Švelnikė.
(This particular example is given by EJ Harrison, a member of the British mission to Lithuania writing in 1922, shortly after Lithuanian independence.)
Generally speaking, of course, the names of minors are unlikely to feature in these forms in the official documentary record. However, the forms of the names based on diminutives (Švelnukas and Švelnikė in the above example) may have been used to distinguish between families resident in the same village (e.g. between father and son) and it is quite possible that there may be a shared ancestor where surnames with a common root are found in the parish registers and other records of a locality.
Before 1899, a Lithuanian immigrant arriving in USA would customarily be recorded on the incoming passenger lists and immigration records as a Russian, or perhaps as a Pole, although of course a Lithuanian can usually confidently be identified by his or her name unless it has become garbled in the paperwork, or was previously polonised or russified. However, by the time that the Bureau of Immigration started counting Lithuanians separately in 1899, it is estimated that there were about 275,000 ethnic Lithuanians resident in USA.
Many of the earlier immigrants headed for the coalmines of eastern Pennsylvania, where they settled in towns such as Scranton in Lackawanna County, Hazleton and Wilkes-Barre in Luzerne County, and Pottsville and Shenandoah in Schuylkill County. Of course, later Lithuanian immigrants settled in great numbers in New York and the industrial cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburg, where they were employed as skilled workers in factories.
From 1899, when Lithuanians should appear in their own right in American immigration records, to the outbreak of WW1 in 1914, the number of recorded Lithuanians was 252,594. There was a striking imbalance between male and female migrants – 67% male against 33% female. Moreover, the immigrants were overwhelmingly young – some 90% were aged between 14 and 45 years of age. These two statistics in combination point to the typical pioneering Lithuanian immigrant being a young single male economic migrant.
The Lithuanian communities often formed their own Roman Catholic parishes in America and some data from a few of these parish records is now available online, together with cemetery records and extracts from newspapers, at the Lithuanian Global Genealogy Society’s website.
When turning research attention back to Lithuania, the critical point for a genealogist is to know, or to be able to find out, exactly where an immigrant ancestor came from in the homeland. This is because the vital records in Lithuania were created and maintained at the local parish level. This means that it is usually not enough to know that an ancestor came from, say, the Kovno (Kaunas) or the Wilna (Vilnius) gubernia, as this covers far too wide an area; indeed, it is unfortunately unlikely to be enough even to know which uezd (district) within a gubernia an ancestor came from, although of course this helps and will usually be sufficient to provide a starting point in Lithuania.
If you find yourself ready to take your family history research back to Lithuania, please feel free to contact Bluebird Research for advice and an assessment of the prospects and costs.
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.
Like any other small immigrant community whose population is not being frequently replenished with new stock, the Lithuanian community in Scotland is in danger of completely assimilating – effectively disappearing – within the next 10 or 20 years.
The original migrants arrived in the early 1880s, coinciding with the introduction of a more repressive regime in Tsarist Russia following the 1881 assassination of Alexander II. Various reasons are cited for the influx of Lithuanians into Scotland, among the most common of which are political, religious and/or national persecution, or escaping conscription, and poverty. Suppression of the growing Lithuanian national movement may have played a role but I suspect that it was minor. One has to ask the fundamental question: why would a Lithuanian emigrate to Scotland during the era when, for example, USA operated a completely open door policy without even the annual quotas which were introduced in the wake of WW1? And, if they came to Scotland, why on earth would they emigrate to, for example, Bellshill and Mossend, Coatbridge and Uddingston, in North Lanarkshire as they did rather than, say, Edinburgh or Dundee?
Of course, chance and chain migration may have been involved – one or two Lithuanians, fresh off the boat in Leith, happened to find jobs and land up in Bellshill and others followed. But I believe the real reason must have been that they were purposely recruited, in Lithuania itself, to work in the mines. Whether the agents of the Scottish mine owners and ironworks were seeking skilled labour or cheap labour is a moot point.
One thing is for sure: Scotland may not have been experienced as a universally welcoming new home. The Lithuanians were, for starters, not just foreigners but moreover they were Catholic rather than Protestant and they were competing, or were perceived to be competing, for local jobs. This antagonism recurred whenever there was an economic downturn and rising unemployment, for instance during the severe depression of the 1930s.
In this environment, and without a steady flow of new immigrants to reinforce the population, the process of assimilation gathered pace. Lithuanians changed their names, for convenience and to stand out less. They married out. They quickly became bilingual and then started to use English more than Lithuanian. Some will have moved on to USA and several hundreds returned to Lithuania following its independence in 1918 after the Great War. Despite some newcomers after WW2, when UK accepted Displaced Persons from the zones it occupied in defeated Germany and Austria, the Lithuanian community appears to be dwindling and recognised as such.
The growth of recreational family history will lead to an increased awareness of the Lithuanians in Lanarkshire but unfortunately it will not revitalise the community. Scotland enjoys an excellent civil registration system and records can be searched online at the official ScotlandsPeople website. One beauty of the Scottish registration system, as opposed to the English & Welsh, and certainly those in Ireland, is that it captures aliases very diligently. Partly this is a function of Scottish women legally retaining their maiden surname after marriage; they therefore appear in the birth, marriage and death registers as, for example, Mary Millar or Scott or Wilson (in that case meaning that Mary was born a Millar, married firstly a Mr Scott and secondly a Mr Wilson). This keenness to record all names means that Lithuanians’ changes of name can be traced back through the records to shortly after their arrival. The one problem is that their names are not always spelt correctly in the registers (and of course never faithfully using the diacritics of the Lithuanian alphabet).
If you wish to take your research into your Scottish Lithuanian ancestry back to Lithuania itself, it is vital to know, or to be able to discover through research in UK, the exact place of origin in Lithuania. The reason for this is simply that all records of use to family historians are decentralised. Without a place of origin, therefore, it may not be possible to advance your enquiries. Try, as well as the birth, marriage and death records, Scottish census returns and British naturalisation records; elders within the family or the Lithuanian community generally may be able to point to a home town in Lithuania. And if you would like a hand in Lithuania, Bluebird Research offers reliable family history research with good rates of success across Lithuania and would be happy to undertake an investigation upon your behalf: contact us for a free assessment.
1922 was a year of great change in the land.
For the largely Polish landowners of Lithuania, it was a time of loss and sorrow. Land reform led to confiscation of their estates, leaving each with just a small plot around the manor or farmhouse in which they dwelt.
For the Lithuanian peasantry, it was a time of plenty. The same reforms redistributed former estate lands among the peasants, who therefore were now working their own land for the first time. Harvests were good and the peasants enjoyed a newfound prosperity.
1922 was also the high-water mark for Lithuanian Jewry between the Wars. The sudden spending power of the peasantry created a new demand for the goods produced by Jewish craftsmen and sold by Jewish traders. More importantly in the long term, however, a honeymoon period for the Jews of Lithuania was coming to an end.
From 1919 to 1922, Jewish and Lithuanian activists had worked side by side in the cause of the newly independent Lithuania. The country was governed from the left by social democrats and the progressive Populists (liaudininkai). Jews worked in the foreign ministry, for example, where their language skills and overseas connections helped in negotiations with the Germans, Russians, English and French. Jewish life flourished in Lithuania and attracted non-Lithuanian Jews from Russia and Ukraine, both those fleeing civil war and its aftermath, and those recognising the progressive state of Lithuania and the opportunities it might bring.
It was the liaudininkai who had pushed through the radical land reforms in favour of the peasantry. Ironically, once land reform had happened, the peasantry switched allegiance from left to right, from the liaudininkai to the conservative and largely Roman Catholic Christian Democrats. Government edged to the right and the civil service was gradually Lithuanianised. Jews started to be viewed with suspicion, especially those who had joined the communists en masse from the Bundists in 1921, or pushed for greater Jewish national autonomy. Jewish support had also been welcomed when Lithuania was campaigning to recover Wilno (with its large Jewish population) from Poland but, as this possibility receded and the situation on the ground was accepted, Jewish involvement in government no longer seemed as essential. Ultimately, a military coup in December 1926 produced a further lurch to the right and the Lithuanian National Union party took power for the next 14 years.
The years 1921 to 1923 are therefore key in modern Lithuanian history and may represent a point of great change in many individual family histories, whether Polish, Lithuanian or Jewish. Poles, adrift in the new state, would look ever more longingly towards Poland. Lithuanians asserted their new independence and for many the land reform was a great life-changing event, redefining their relationship to the land. And the disappointments after the early promise for Jews meant that many would channel their energies inwardly into their religion and communities, or outwardly into more radical politics such as communism or Zionism, or else look beyond the seas.
Bluebird Research has many years’ experience of successful genealogical research in Lithuania and is at your disposal should you require professional research. Please contact us for an assessment and estimate of possible costs.
In eastern Europe, the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution was chaos and population displacement on a previously unknown scale. Imperial Russia unravelled around the edges and new states struggled to assert their independence and pull away. In the former Russian gubernia of Kovno, Vilna and Grodno, moves were afoot to recreate Lithuania.
However, the issue here, as elsewhere in Europe, was that there were competing and mutually incompatible claims to land. It was impossible to satisfy all claims, as the population was not neatly parcelled up into ethnically or nationally homogeneous units. Most regions had diverse populations. In the city today called Vilnius, for example, Poles and Jews formed the majority and in its hinterland many of the pre-War landowners were minor Polish nobility or szlachta; yet the peasantry was Lithuanian. Force decided the issue and treaties ratified it. It was the new Polish state which emerged victorious, securing a Polish Wilno, just as it successfully secured Lwów as a Polish island in a largely Ukrainian sea.
At the start of 1918, as many as one in six Lithuanians were refugees within Russia. An estimated 550,000 were scattered across European Russia, from Minsk and St Petersburg to distant Voronezh and Yekaterinoslav. It took until 1924 to bring home all those who wanted to return and who Moscow and Kaunas would between them allow. Maybe as many as one third of Lithuanian refugees remained abroad and settled, willingly or otherwise, in Soviet Russia or Poland.
From 1921, the return of refugees was closely supervised by the authorities. Refugees were registered and issued with travel permits in Moscow. From Moscow they travelled by train to Rēzekne, Daugavpils and Kalkūni in Latvia, and thence across the Lithuanian border to Obeliai. At Obeliai – the only recognised point of entry into the country, although not the only one in practice – refugees were vetted, re-registered and issued with passes, usually to their place of birth or pre-War residence.
Those who were regarded as suspect were sent back to Moscow. And those refugees who wished to return to their pre-War homes in what had become Polish territory were often stuck in limbo for months on end in the Obeliai transfer camp, with an ever-present risk of humanitarian crisis – typhus, cholera and hunger.
Not all those coming to Lithuania were refugees. Optants – Lithuanian colonists long settled in Russia – paid their own way to reach the newly independent country. And from 1918 to 1921, the nascent Lithuanian state, in need of qualified administrative and technical experts, welcomed back not just its Lithuanian but also its Jewish middle classes. In fact, the immigration policy was so liberal before the change of government in 1922 that Jewish doctors, engineers and so on from elsewhere in Russia headed to Lithuania for the opportunities it presented.
For many researching their family history in Lithuania, the period 1915 to 1924 looms like something of a black hole. For a start, the family may not appear in the expected parish registers (assuming, that is, that such records were created and have survived). Over half a million spent several years effectively in exile in Russia and, of course, of these, some married, some had children and some died there. At Obeliai, too, refugees gave birth or died and, doubtless, in some cases married. The Lithuanian state did not recognise Soviet civil registry marriages so, in order to return with spouse and children, natives of Lithuania would have to remarry in a Roman Catholic or Orthodox ceremony: this can result in what appear to be illegitimate children born between the respective dates of the secular and the religious marriage.
Bluebird Research would be delighted to help and advise you as you investigate your roots in Lithuania.
Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire in the ten years either side of 1900 are generally thought of as having fled the persecution and poverty there for the safe shores of America. However, a lesser-known story is that of the Jews from Russia who travelled to South Africa.
These migrants came especially from the region around the city of Kovno, now known as Kaunas in Lithuania. As well as the city itself, many came from towns elsewhere in the Kovno gubernija (which corresponds to the greater part of central and northern Lithuania), such as Palanga, Panevėžys, Rietavas and Šiauliai.
They travelled via a port such as Libau (today’s Liepāja in Latvia) on ships bound, via the Baltic Sea and (after its opening in 1895) the Kiel Canal shortcut, for English east coast ports. From there, they travelled overland, usually via London, to Southampton to embark for the Cape.
This movement of people was not accidental: a whole business existed to cater for them, from the ticket agents in the Kovno area, to shipping lines such as the Wilson Line shuttling between Libau and Hull, to the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter in London which housed and orientated many of the trans-migrants, to the Castle Line and the Union Line which specialised in the route to the Cape.
And like any successful movement of people, it became self-perpetuating, as the new South Africans sent home letters, and money, encouraging others to follow suit. The first countrywide Union of South African census in 1911 indicates a population of 46,919 Jews, a majority of whom were Lithuanian Jews or Litvaks who had arrived since 1892 and were residing in the Cape. By 1921, the Jewish population had risen to 62,103, but with more of a shift in gravity towards the gold-mining and commercial centres of Witwatersrand in the Transvaal (which accounted for 33,515).
What this means is that a great many of those North Americans and British with Litvak ancestors are likely to have kin in South Africa. There are many good sources for Jewish family history research in Lithuania and prospects of success are often favourable, as long as the place of origin within the country is known or can be identified. Bluebird Research also has an excellent researcher in South Africa should genealogical research be required there.