Archive for the ‘poland’ 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.
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
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.
The former Russian Empire gubernia or province of Volhynia, part of the region which Poles know as kresy, was divided at the Treaty of Riga in 1921. The western side was joined to newly re-independent Poland, while the eastern side became part of the Ukrainian SSR. Towns such as Lutsk and Rivno became officially Polish Łuck and Równe; Zwiahel and Żytomierz became formally Ukrainian Novohrad-Volynskyi and Zhytomyr. In the Imperial Russian era, Poles had made up a minority of the overall population across Volhynia but held disproportionate influence, usually forming the local elite in both town and country areas.
The situation on the ground was not so straightforward, however. Volhynia was an ethnically mixed region, home to Germans (for whom it was Wolhynien), Jews (who called it Vohlin in Yiddish), Poles (who called it Wołyń) and Ukrainians (Volyn), with a corresponding mix of religions. Even this does no justice to the granular complexity. For example, Roman Catholics, unless they were German, were usually regarded as Poles, even if they spoke only Ukrainian; but it was a moot point as to whether they were Poles who had lost their mother tongue over time, or Ukrainians whose ancestors had converted due to Polish landowner or clerical pressure. Moreover, while the population may not have been especially literate, many peasants and other villagers were bilingual.
Furthermore, there was little national consciousness. Just as in neighbouring Polissia immediately to the north, also split after WW1 between Poland and, in this case, the Belarusian SSR, the peasantry identified themselves primarily by their religion or by their social estate as peasants: many, when questioned by early Soviet ethnographers, stated that they were “locals” and spoke the “local” language.
Of course the Soviets, having gained formal control over Ukraine at the Treaty of Riga, sought to modernise and develop what was still a largely traditional society, religious, insular and self-sufficient. The Soviets wanted the backward periphery to acquire the new forward-looking Soviet consciousness. One way in which the USSR of the 1920s and early 1930s tried to achieve this was through recognising and encouraging national minorities. This involved tidying up the particularities of “local” cultures – for example, Poles had to be Poles and, if they were not sufficiently Polish, they must be polonised, meaning that Ukrainian-speaking Roman Catholics were classified as Poles and encouraged to learn proper Polish. Each national minority was acknowledged and appropriate local administrative structures were put in place to develop and of course to try to Sovietise each national group. Within Zhytomyr okrug, a special Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region (Marchlewszczyzna in Polish) was set up in 1925, centred around the Polish village of Dołbysz (re-named Marchlevsk after the Polish activist Marchlewski), during this phase of Soviet enthusiasm for the minorities. However, this was not to last.
The Soviets found that the local population in Marchlevsk and elsewhere in Volhynia was not compliant. The locals were averse to collectivisation, they failed to fulfil command economy quotas, they persisted in their old ways of life, preferring to remain upon their scattered homesteads and in their small hamlets rather than congregate in efficient centralised nuclear villages and towns. The experiment in encouraging national minorities backfired, not on the Soviets but on the minorities themselves. Increasingly they began to be seen as wreckers, saboteurs, conspirators, collaborators, spies; not good Soviet citizens but consciously or subconsciously working for capitalist Poland or Nazi Germany.
Volhynia didn’t really have any fat exploitative kulaks to purge but, nevertheless, in 1930 some 15,000 “kulaks” and “enemy Poles” were identified. In 1935 the Marchlevsk polraion was dismantled. Some 35,000 Poles were deported to eastern Ukraine, and 4,000 volunteer eastern Ukrainian families brought in to take their place. In the following year, 1936, there were mass summary deportations of approximately 70,000 Poles and Germans from Volhynia to Kazakhstan. In 1937/38 an estimated 56,000 Poles and German were arrested, charged and then imprisoned or deported.
The deportees became so-called special settlers in the remote semi-arid northern reaches of Kazakhstan. By 1945 the number of national minority special settlers in Kazakhstan had reached 900,000, including minorities from Karelia, the Caucasus and the Russian Far East as well as from the kresy. They were expected to cultivate the previously uncultivated steppe grazing lands of the Kazakh nomads (who themselves had been deprived of their traditional manner of life, forced into collectivised or urban existences). The new special settlements each comprised a founder population of 1,500 people, and initially were simply numbered rather than named. Later, the settlers named them, often reflecting their places of origin (such as Podilske or Volynka). The conditions imposed on the special settlements were not entirely punitive but there were restrictions upon travel and a requirement to register monthly with officers of the NKVD, the state apparatus which managed them. Special settlers were not in receipt of internal passports – from 1932, when they were re-introduced by the Soviets, until reforms in 1956 during the post-Stalin thaw, these were granted only to Soviet citizens in towns or working on state farms, not to peasants or collective farm workers.
The national minorities were encouraged to assimilate and to become Homo sovieticus. Mixed marriages were commonplace. Native language fluency diminished at the second or third generation. A new Soviet identity was forged. Today one must expect there to be a resurgence of interest in roots, in ancestry and in the historic homeland, among these peoples who were made to colonise Kazakhstan, just as, in an entirely different context, the growth of identity politics since the 1970s in the melting pot of USA has led to an increased desire to understand one’s family history and the specificity of its immigrant experience.
*This blog owes much to Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place (Harvard University Press, 2004), to which the reader is referred for more on Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region and also on its German equivalent, the Pulin German Autonomous Region.
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.
London’s Olympia again hosted the annual Who Do You Think You Are? Live exhibition last weekend. I attended on both Saturday and Sunday and spoke with many family historians from all sorts of backgrounds and with the full range of experience from complete beginner to jaded and cynical old-timer.
Comparing this year’s WDYTYA event to last year’s, one has to say that the trends I wrote about in this blog have continued. All exhibition space was taken and there were some new exhibitors (such as Genes Reunited) and some returnees (Lincolnshire Family History Society, I believe). There has been no diminution in interest in family history in Britain. The show was busy every day and certainly it looked as though family historians were spending as if there were no recession.
The American giant Ancestry hoovered up even more floor space than last year and seemed to be sporting taller stands. It is now floated on the US stock exchange and preparing to register offshore so as to evade UK corporation tax (a wheeze already employed by S&N Genealogy, with its myriad misleading web domains).
This year is the Society of Genealogists’ centenary year and it was good to see them with a big footprint at the show and reasserting themselves at the heart of the world of British family history where they belong.
It is always fun to check out the more niche stallholders, to meet with the nice folk at the Anglo-German Family History Society stand, to browse through the second-hand book shelves, and to boggle one’s mind at the astonishing volume and variety of records which have been indexed or transcribed by the unsung heroic family history society volunteers.
This year, as last, the majority of the questions I took from family historians with roots outside the British Isles related to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors from Russian Poland, usually via London’s East End. The problems brought to me were identical to last year’s too, as of course they would be, because this is necessarily the defining question of all such research: how to find out exactly where in Russian Poland an ancestor came from. The 1911 census of England & Wales too rarely gives a specific place name, although this year I was pleased to see a census return where the place of birth was recorded by the householder as “Lodge”, meaning Łódź (briefly renamed Litzmannstadt by the Nazis and the sad site of a notorious ghetto). It is a sobering and depressing thought that each of these family historians of Jewish descent with whom I spoke last weekend is perhaps only here through luck, by virtue of an ancestor having the means, or the pluck, or the desperation, to get out of Poland before the Nazis rolled in.
Incidentally, there is truth in the suggestions about the English Census Office producing both German language and Hebrew language 1911 census forms. Recently, I have seen one German and two Hebrew forms, the German one completed in German by the head of the household but the Hebrew ones filled in in English. However, this tiny number may represent the sum total of those German and Hebrew returns completed by householders in 1911, meaning that a great many unused foreign language forms printed by the Census Office must have been pulped. I wonder if one hundred years ago questions were raised in parliament about the waste of public funds…
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.
The situation of the peasantry in the 19th century Russian Empire is much more complex than generally thought, and a genealogist with ancestors in the territories of rural Russia should be aware of this complexity so as to better understand the likely circumstances under which their ancestors may have lived.
Firstly, it is not true to think of the peasantry as being a single undifferentiated mass, or to say that all peasants were serfs. The Russian Empire was expanding in all directions at the start of the 19th century. The Poles in the Partition were not enserfed when they came under Tsarist jurisdiction; nor were the Finns after 1809 or the Bessarabians after 1812. Furthermore, where serfdom had previously existed in the Baltic, it began to be modified, first in Livonia (or Livland – roughly the north of modern day Latvia and the south of Estonia), where there were reforms in 1804, and then in Estland (today’s northern Estonia) and Courland (or Kurland, western and southern Latvia) where there was landless emancipation of the serfs during the years 1816 to 1819. This introduces another point worth emphasising: emancipation did not necessarily lead to increased prosperity and, in fact, the opposite was true in these Baltic regions – the serfs were freed without being gifted or sold land and therefore became more destitute than they had been before the reforms.
Elsewhere in the empire, most minorities, such as the free agriculturalists, were not subject to serfdom, something that the Russian peasantry did not understand and which could cause resentment – why should German colonists, for example, be free when native Russians were not?
Secondly, there were different types of peasant in the lands of Imperial Russia.
There were state peasants, who were literally owned by the state and worked upon state lands. They were the responsibility of the Ministry of Finance and later, from 1837, the Ministry of State Properties. Although state peasants enjoyed some rights and freedoms (for example, they could acquire smallholdings of their own and even become civil servants), they had to pay taxes, maintain roads and supply recruits to the army. Moreover, the state was a largely indifferent owner and did not invest in its properties.
Then there were privately-owned serfs, who were the property of the landowning aristocracy and gentry. Absentee landowners often left an estate manager in charge, not infrequently to exploit the serfs on the estate. Some landowners permitted their serfs to remit in cash not labour dues – in other words, instead of working upon the landowner’s estate, they could leave the land and go to work in a town or city, and pay their owner in lieu. Of course, while some serfs made a substantial amount of money and were able to purchase their freedom, the majority remained upon the land in reduced circumstances.
The serfs in Russia were emancipated from 1861. Unlike in the Baltic region of the empire in 1816, the serfs were able to purchase their dwelling and land, so as to become independent smallholders. As redemption prices for the privilege of emancipation were way beyond the means of many serfs, the state lent them monies at 6% annual interest for up to 49 years, thereby creating a generation of peasants perpetually in arrears to the state.
Then there was the issue of military service. By 1815 the Russian Army was 1 million strong and the state, entering peacetime, was apprehensive of demobilisation and its impact upon communities across Russia and its potential for unrest. At this point, it needs to be explained what military service entailed. Men were recruited at aged 20 years for a period of 25 years (reduced to 15 years from 1834). Once enlisted, a serf became a free man in law; hence, once demobbed he would be his own man, with no immediate source of employment but with the experience of handling a weapon. To mitigate the risks that this entailed, the army found ways of making military service mean life service, not releasing men at the end of their term (for instance, by imposing extra service as a penalty for the many disciplinary offences).
Between 1815 and 1858, the state found an ingenious way of dealing with demobilisation and managing the risk to stable civilian life of releasing ex-soldiers into the community. So as not to demobilise troops, agricultural “military colonies” were established. Previously uninhabited state land was colonised by a mixture of soldiers and state-owned peasants commandeered from elsewhere. The soldiers retained the status of soldiers, although in their everyday lives they became agricultural labourers working for the state peasants. The army was therefore kept at full strength and made economically productive and self-supporting. Furthermore, the reserve army was strengthened because of the newly acquired status of the state peasants residing in these military colonies. The head of the household and the eldest son remained state peasants. However, younger sons were classed as military canonists (the term used for sons of soldiers during their minority) and joined the reserve at aged 18 years. It is estimated that by 1825 over 750,000 soldiers and families had been settled on these military colonies in areas such as Mogilev, Novgorod and St Petersburg, as well as in the southern region of Ukraine.
Much has been written about Jewish aversion to military service and, of course, the Jews shared the same reasons as the Russian peasantry for not being keen on being conscripted into the army, plus had plenty more valid religious reasons of their own. In fact, the Jewish population of the Russian Empire was not subject to military service until 1827. However, from then on, the state pursued a russification programme for the Jews and required them to be available for service from aged 12 years. Community elders had to select the recruits whenever demanded each year and of course this led to tension and frequent flight to evade the draft.
It is interesting to note that the infantry divisions of the Russian Army tended to be garrisoned around the periphery of the empire, especially in the west. While therefore there might be a solitary division in the Caucasus, or one in Orenburg towards the restless Kazakhstan, the vast majority were stationed in occupied Congress Poland and the westernmost gubernia of Russia (areas now in Belarus’ and Ukraine) where there was a perceived and sometimes a very real threat of politically or economically driven internal unrest.
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.
Class was essentially a feature of rural society in pre-Partition and indeed Partitioned Poland.
At the top of the tree was the great nobility, the elite 30 to 50 families, in possession of wealth and titles. Immediately beneath them was the średnia szlachta or middle nobility, prosperous and estate- and village-owning, and with a strong sense of internal class solidarity fostered by frequent inter-marriage – it has been estimated that there may have been approximately 300,000 middle nobility towards the end of the 18th Century as the partitions began to dismantle the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
More numerous still was the drobna szlachta or peasant nobility, which itself was stratified and known by various other terms, such as szaraczkowa (or “grey” nobility, from their plain clothes), zaściankowa (“village” nobles), zagonowa (“bed”, as they owned but small beds of land) and gołota (“naked” nobility, who owned no land whatsoever). These nobles had tradition and pedigree, coats of arms and political rights, but whilst economically independent were rarely prosperous. Over time, subdivision of their land through inheritance and natural increase over the generations meant that a single petty-nobility family might grow to effectively occupy, or itself become, a village, or even two or more villages. The chief distinction between the peasant nobility and the great and middle nobility above them was that the peasant nobility owned no serfs and therefore usually subsisted only just above or at the same economic level as the landless peasants, who made up the lowest stratum of traditional Polish society.
The city dwellers were outside this class structure. Of course, many of the great and middle nobility owned substantial town houses or palaces. But the merchants, craftsmen, small traders and unskilled labourers who made up the mass of the urban population were just as frequently not ethnic Polish but, for example, German or Jewish. The larger Polish cities to the east – such as today’s L’viv or Vilnius – would likewise have a concentrated Polish and Jewish population but would be urban islands in a rural sea of Ukrainian or Lithuanian, rather than Polish, peasantry.
The ancestry of the Polish szlachta makes a particularly interesting subject for family history research, which Bluebird Research would be delighted to help you investigate. Kindly contact us for more information.
It would be naive to expect family history research in Russia, and many other places within the former Soviet Union, to follow the comparatively smooth path that it can take in most of the English-speaking world and in many countries in Western Europe. Even if the First World War, the ensuing Civil War and the Great Patriotic War (as the Second World War is known in Russia) are put to one side, millions were arrested, killed, internally deported, or incarcerated in the Gulag. For a great many others, the social revolution provided for a new, albeit still relative freedom of movement, and travel for education, employment and political career, often across great distances and what are today’s international borders, became commonplace.
The NKVD, a precursor of the KGB, disappeared many tens of thousands of Soviet citizens at Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. The victims were drawn in from all across the USSR and from all sections of society, from the poorest to the elite, from the apolitical to the committed Stalinist, and from the capital itself to the remotest corners of the Soviet empire. The photographer and collector of Soviet era visual art David King gathered mugshots of some 166 of these victims for publication in a volume called Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin (Francis Boutle, 2003). Apparently, King obtained the photographs from the NKVD’s interrogation files held by Russian human rights organisation Memorial, which documents the Soviet repressions across Russia and campaigns for official rehabilitation of the victims. It publishes regional and local memorial books and lists of the executed.
Among the haunting photographs in King’s selection are the following:
Fedor Andreevich Baikov – peasant, born 1861 in Moscow, executed 20 October 1930 on charges of anti-Soviet agitation
Pyotr Petrovich Dragachevatz (Dragačevac) – lithographer, born 1886 somewhere in what was later Yugoslavia, executed 19 April 1939 on charges of anti-Soviet espionage
Stefan Leonovich Geltman – collective farm technical manager, born 1886 in Zamość, Poland, executed 20 September 1937
Wolf Shmulievich Genpelman – Jewish apprentice locksmith, born 1914 in Dombrovitsy, near Rivne (Rovno), Volhynia, Ukraine, executed 1 November 1940 on charges of being counter-revolutionary
Yelena Ignatievna Oshmyago – railway guard, born 1911 in Sprugi, Belarus, executed 10 October 1939 on charges of railway sabotage
Dionis Petushkov – Russian Orthodox monk, born 1863 in Tver’, Russia, executed June 1931 on charges of anti-Soviet activities
Ruzya Iosifovna Todorskaya – technician, born 1900 in Łódź, Poland, executed 9 October 1937 as a Trotskyist
Throughout the long 19th century, while thousands of Poles went into exile or campaigned and rebelled against the partition and occupation of their country, thousands of other Poles served in the Russian army, both as officers and as other ranks, just as they served in the imperial civil service, the police and the prison service throughout the length and breadth of the Russian empire.
There were various types of exemption from military service. Only sons were entitled to exemption, as were eldest sons acting in loco paternis due to the actual head of household being no longer able to support their family. Other young men were exempt for reasons of ill health.
As for the balance of non-exempted men, a lottery existed to determine who should be enlisted. A community was required to furnish the army with a certain number of recruits and, as this number was usually smaller than the number of non-exempt men available, lots were drawn to select which of the eligible would have to go for a soldier.
The loss of a son to the army was keenly felt by the family for a multitude of reasons, even in times of peace when no conflict was on the horizon and there was no imminent fear of his death. Firstly, there was the loss of the contribution made by an able-bodied member of the family, whether as a worker on a subsistence smallholding or as a wage-labourer in the town or country. Then there were the personal feelings of separation of a young man leaving home for the first time and entering into the unknown. In the mid 19th century, the standard term of service in the Russian military was seven to 15 years and conditions in the army were harsh; often the length of service was extended as a result of disciplinary action. During this period, communication between soldier and family was likely to be infrequent, even if the soldier was literate. And of course, unlike emigration, service in the Russian army was involuntary and, at least for the more politically and nationally conscious families, would have carried if not exactly shame – for military service was widespread and all but unavoidable for most – then the oppressive consciousness of being a powerless subject people.
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.