Archive for the ‘poland’ Category
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.
Identifying the origin of surnames is not an exact science. One of the many sources of names is the natural world and other life forms, both plant and animal. However, it is not always clear why a particular name would have been chosen or, for that matter, where surnames which appear to derive from those of animals are simply cognates sharing a common etymological source.
In Poland, several surnames come from the names of birds, or at least appear to.
- Bocian bocian, or stork
- Czajkowski czajka, or lapwing
- Drozd drozd, or thrush
- Dudek dudek, or hoopoe
- Gołębiowski gołąb, or pigeon
- Jaskółski jaskółka, or swallow
- Kukuła kukułka, or cuckoo
- Orzeł orzeł, or eagle
- Ptak ptak, or bird
- Sikorski sikora, or titmouse
- Sokół sokół, or hawk
- Słowik słowik, or nightingale
- Wróblewski wróbel, or sparrow
- Żuraw żuraw, or crane
Most of these species of birth are big and noticeable, such as the stork and crane; or are perceived as fierce or brave, such as the eagle or falcon; or sing well, such as the thrush and the nightingale; or are a cause of delight, such as the swallow and titmouse; or are common, such as the pigeon and the sparrow. Many of the same birds also give rise to surnames in English, German and other European languages.
Dudek may be the odd bird out in the above list. The dudek is a delightful and distinctive bird. It rightfully appeared on a commemorative Polish 20 złotych coin issued in 2000. However, according to William F Hoffman’s Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings, dudek may also mean a nincompoop (but what came first, the bird or the nincompoop?) and it is also possible that the surname may come from a diminutive of duda or bagpipes (Duda is a very common Polish name).
If you read Polish and would like to know more about the dudek, or simply to see some photographs of a hoopoe family, check out the dudki on Dr Przemysław Sujak’s page. Fortuitously, Dr Sujak’s own surname comes from the sójka, or jay.
The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (UNRRC) was created in 1943, largely to organise and administer the growing number of wartime refugees in Europe, those who became known as the Displaced Persons (DPs). By 1947, UNRRC was overseeing a total of 762 Displaced Person camps: 416 were in the zone of occupied Germany run by the Americans, 272 were in the British zone, 45 in the French zone, with an additional 21 in Austria and eight in Italy. Each camp could be expected to hold 3,000 or more DPs. Many more DPs lived not in these refugee centres but received out-relief in the community. In 1948, UNRRC was succeeded by the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), which continued to fulfil the same remit.
None of the DP camps were in the communist zone, for the simple reason that, now Nazi Germany was defeated, the DPs were effectively refugees from communism. The Soviets wanted all Central and Eastern Europeans of all nationalities to be repatriated to their place of origin. The Western Allies wavered between repatriation, inaction and resettlement (which, in this context, meant emigration). The sheer number of DPs, the logistics of resettlement abroad, fears about the unpopularity of immigration with electorates back home, and the reassurances of the Soviets (a wartime ally, after all, with which relations were still reasonably cordial), made repatriation an attractive and simple option. However, the Displaced Persons themselves categorically did not want to be repatriated and information regarding the fate of those who did return voluntarily, or for want of other options, and those who against their will were returned by the Allies to the Soviets gradually made the West firm up its policy to one of resettlement abroad.
In the end, in fact, economic self-interest, not humanitarian concerns, facilitated the resettlement of DPs. Even those economies not devastated by war needed to recover and build, and there was a growing demand for inexpensive manpower. Belgium wanted coal miners. Canada had a labour shortage and wanted workers for agriculture, forestry and the railways, as well as domestic service. When the availability of the pool of DP labour became widely known, governments rushed to take advantage and, as a result, DPs ended up on schemes which took them to countries such as Argentina and Brazil as well as the more expected Australia, France and USA.
The Poles in Britain are an especially interesting case. The Polish government and army in exile had been based in London and, for example, Polish airmen played a significant role in the Royal Air Force. At the end of the War, 115,000 Polish veterans (including those from Lt Gen Władysław Anders’s II Polish Corps, known as Anders’s Army) were formed into the Polish Resettlement Corps (or Polski Korpus Przysposobienia i Rozmieszczenia or PKRP in Polish) and granted the right to settle in Britain in recognition of their contribution to the war effort. Poles also featured prominently among the 86,000 Displaced Persons brought to Britain after the War as European Voluntary Workers (EVWs) under the so-called Operation Westward Ho.
Various records relating to Polish servicemen are held at different locations in Greater London and can give extremely useful genealogical information (including any kin back in Poland and, vitally for a jurisdiction with decentralised record-keeping, place of birth). Brief details of those who subsequently became naturalised can be found in the official London Gazette and often in The National Archives’ online catalogue. Records are closed (as all post-1922 naturalisation files are) but a Freedom of Information Act request will usually be successful in opening them to the individual or their near kin.
Bluebird Research offers professional family history research both in Poland and in Polish resources held in UK. Contact us for advice or an assessment.
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.
The writer Bruno Schulz is not much read in the English-speaking world nowadays, nor perhaps anywhere outside Poland and Israel. You can find pretty much his entire fictional output in a single volume English translation by Celina Wieniewska.
Schulz was the small-town Jewish boy who never really made good, a kind of obscure provincial Franz Kafka with a runaway mind veering towards the fantastic. He came from a modest and alternately successful and failing middle class background. His father Jakub Schulz was a clothier and later a bankrupt; his mother Henrietta or Hendel nee Kuhmärker took over the family business. The family appears in the JewishGen Ukraine Database, the commonplace nondescript name Schulz drawing no attention to itself, just one more lost Jewish name among many. But there is Bruno, born in Drohobycz in 1892 (actually 12th July 1892). It is not clear whether the civil authorities recognised the Jewish marriage of his parents, although the family is thought to have been an assimilated one, as some family entries seem to be registered under the mother’s maiden name Kuhmärker rather than Schulz. It was not at all unusual for Galician Jewish births to be recorded under the mother’s maiden name both in the days of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and during interwar Polish times; therefore, it is advisable to search under both names.
Most summaries of Bruno’s family life refer to a single sister Hania and brother Izydor. However, there appear to have been two more siblings at least, namely Isak, who died as a three-year old boy in 1879, and Hinda, who also died aged three years of age in 1890; quite possibly there were others who died in infancy or childhood. Hania appears to have been born circa 1873 and to have married Moses Hoffmann in 1900; at the time of her marriage, according to JewishGen, she was spelling her name Anna or Chane. They had a son Ludwik in 1903. Izydor seems to have been born as Baruch Israel in 1881. He was a successful engineer with oil mining interests in Galicia; a 1912 directory shows that he was then residing at ulica św Bartłomieja in Drohobycz. He died in 1935.
As for Bruno, he became an art teacher in the local school, wrote his fiction and received moderate acclaim for a while. Like Kafka he never married, although he had a string of female friends and correspondents and eventually was affianced to Józefina Szelińska, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who taught Polish and later worked in the bureau of statistics (perhaps the register office?). For her sake he renounced his religion, becoming officially “faithless”, but the intended resulting register office wedding never came to pass. Schulz survived the first Soviet occupation of Polish Galicia but was not to survive the subsequent Nazi occupation.
As a modern poet once sang, “Every moment leads toward its own sad end”. Bruno Schulz was shot by a Nazi named Karl Günther while carrying a loaf of bread back home to the ghetto in November 1942.
Last Friday and Sunday I attended the Who Do You Think You Are? Live exhibition at London’s Olympia, answering questions on resources for family history and giving research advice.
For a newcomer to family history – and the interest in family history has yet to reach a plateau and continues to mount – the scale and corporate gloss of the event may come as something of a shock. Family history is big business now. This year’s principal sponsor was the multinational corporation Ancestry. As well as the customary somewhat clinical Ancestry stand where visitors could search Ancestry databases, on offer also was the Ancestry scanning bay and the Ancestry members-only hospitality suite, a kind of hybrid between a gated community with its own private security and a business-class airport lounge laying on complimentary refreshments and a little ineffective back massage.
Who Do You Think You Are? Live grew out of the Society of Genealogists’ annual show, which used to take a more modest and less expensive exhibition space in Victoria. Three key events precipitated the explosion of interest in family history in England – the online release of the 1901 census in 2002, the publication of the birth, marriage and death indexes by the company now known as Find My Past, and the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? TV series. Wall To Wall, the makers of the Who Do You Think You Are? documentaries, saw an opportunity to piggyback the long-standing annual SoG event and co-opt the family history societies. This seemed like a partnership at first but it now looks increasingly like there is a cuckoo chick in the family history community’s nest, slowly pushing it out.
Which brings me back to Ancestry. A visitor entering Who Do You Think You Are? Live was funnelled through the Ancestry stand. He or she may not have been subjected to a body scan or relieved of all their cash, but the American corporate giant is unmissable. Meanwhile, over in a far corner of the exhibition centre, on the far side of the area reserved for family history societies, the visitor could see, if they had the stamina, stands which are in fact far more interesting and which reflect the range and diversity of family, local and social history organisations that have become marginalised. Passing the Anglo-German Family History Society stall, with its books on sugar bakers, pork butchers and WW1 alien internees on the Isle of Man, the visitor would have reached the British Deaf History Society and, in the very corner, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain, with its humble trestle table, small selection of fascinating volumes and enthusiastic volunteer staff. The JGSGB and its ilk cannot afford more floor space, or a prime position with guaranteed footfall, but I hope that they and all the local and subject societies had a worthwhile weekend and can continue to carve out a niche for themselves within what is now the family history marketplace.
A good seven or eight of the family history enquiries I took at Who Do You Think You Are? Live concerned Jewish family history research. Most enquirers knew or believed that their ancestors had roots in Poland, although one had Dutch and another German-Jewish ancestry. However, all Jewish researchers are likely to confront the same brick wall: how to establish a place of origin outside Britain, if this is not recorded in family papers or lore. And this is no easy question to answer.
The census returns, including the 1911 census released in 2009, seldom name a specific place. Too often the census return states merely Austria, or Poland, or Romania, or Russia, or Russian Poland. Even where a city or town such as Kovno or Warsaw or Wilna is given, it is not necessarily the case that this is the actual place of origin rather than a convenient shorthand for a district or region of the same name.
Naturalisation records may give the required information but, of course, many immigrants, and perhaps a majority of the poorer ones, settled without going to the trouble or expense of formal naturalisation (or wished to avoid the encounter with the authorities that it entailed). Naturalisations are indexed in The National Archives’ online catalogue and can also be found in the London Gazette. However, the researcher will need to access the underlying naturalisation file, or what survives of it, at The National Archives in Kew to find out full details. Naturalisation records before 1921 are on open access but those of later date require a Freedom of Information Act application.
Family historians with Jewish roots are welcome to contact Bluebird Research with any questions they have. Or, of course, they might wish to contact the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain…
In the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar in Poland, the first two days in November carry a popular resonance equalled only by Christmas and Easter. All Saints’ Day, the 1st November, is followed by All Souls’ Day. Strictly speaking, the former remembers those who have already attained heaven, the latter the faithful who have not and who will be helped by the prayers of the living. The holiday is not the preserve of the observant, however, and many atheist and agnostic Poles visit the graves of deceased relatives to light candles and remember, a custom known as Zaduszki. For, as Andrzej Stasiuk writes in one of his essays collected in Fado (Dalkey Archive, 2009), “what would humankind be without ancestors?”
“Once a year we mark with fire the places where we’ve buried our dead, so that they might abide forever, so that they can be visited, so that they can be found. No one testifies to our own existence better than them…. So then, once a year we mark those places with light so that the dark, empty, uninhabited and boundless reaches of space should know we’re engaged in a battle with them, a battle with their nothingness, their indifference.”
Poland is not the country it once was. The Second World War shifted it 100 km to the west. It lost many of its eastern marches, the kresy, to the Soviet Republics of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. In return it received the so-called recovered territories in the west vacated by Germans. Displaced Poles from the kresy were repatriated to within the revised borders, often to the recovered territories. Other Poles from within the new borders also moved to the recovered territories – these were known as resettlers rather than repatriants. During the Communist era, still more Poles moved for education, for employment, for careers, for relationships, and so on. As a result, All Soul’s Day is not a local affair. People cross the country in all directions to visit the cemeteries in which lie the graves of their ancestors.
“At dusk everyone leaves, climbs into their cars and buses and goes back home. The cemeteries are left deserted and illuminated… On All Souls’ Day, a journey across Poland resembles a fairy tale or a dream. Fires burn in the darkness. On hills, outside the town limits, in black wildernesses, suspended in the depths of night like twinkling magic carpets, like fiery mirages, like apparitions woven from tiny red and gold and green flames, cemeteries come to life.”
Of course, some ancestral homes now lie well outside the borders of modern Poland and are unlikely to be visited by many, if at all, from year to year.
Stasiuk visits as many of the local cemeteries as he can, remembering the dead, even though his own ancestors are not from the corner of SE Poland where he now resides. He visits Austro-Hungarian military cemeteries from the First World War. He visits the Lemko cemeteries, often all that remain of Lemko villages razed and depopulated during or immediately after the Second World War. “Some of them lie in remote places, in abandoned valleys”; even here, though, in the wild borders down by the Slovak border, others have come before him and a handful of candles flicker into the night.
The German state brought calamity upon the German people, as it did on all peoples of Europe, and elsewhere, during World War Two. While it may be difficult to muster sympathy for the great mass of Nazis and their sympathisers in Germany proper and Austria, millions of ethnic Germans – the Auslandsdeutsche, or Volksdeutsche – resided in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.
Nazi Germany over-ran Poland in September 1939 and large regions were annexed as Reichsgaue, becoming Danzig-Westpreußen (which comprised Polish Pomorskie) and Wartheland (Poznań and the eastern half of Górny Śląsk). The Nazi policy here was twofold and implemented immediately: to deport all Jews and Poles, and to import Volksdeutsche to settle the farms and properties of the dispossessed. Agreements were reached quickly with the governments of the three Baltic countries, Italy and Soviet Russia to arrange the patriation (it cannot really be called repatriation) of the Volksdeutsche. An estimated 75,000 Baltendeutsche came from Estonia and Latvia alone. In 1940, tens of thousands followed from the so-called Generalgouvernement (hitherto central, southern and eastern Poland), Bessarabia, Bukovina and elsewhere.
Of course, an unknown proportion of these ethnic Germans must have been Nazis or sympathisers, particularly perhaps those who had been landowners amid otherwise non-German populations, and the petit-bourgeois burghers of larger, predominantly ethnic German towns. Plenty joined the Waffen SS later on in countries such as Hungary. However, many of the Volksdeutsche in rural areas, the long-established agricultural colonists in regions such as the Banat, Bessarabia, Galicia and Volhynia, probably felt no affinity with the Reich and no inclination to be disturbed from the soil which their families had cultivated for generations. They too were swept up and sent packing by the frontline activists of the resettlement or Umsiedlung organisations: entire villages of German smallholders and artisans were unceremoniously evicted and forced to plod west by horse and cart.
Just as the Nazis over-reached themselves militarily in the depths of Russia, so they over-stretched themselves and over-estimated their competence at resettling their Volksdeutsche. Up to half a million may have been settled on hitherto Polish farmland in the Reichsgaue, where they faced the understandable animosity of as yet unevicted Poles, but for at least that number the reality of Lebensraum was languishing in ever more crowded camps for the duration of the War. The number of the displaced kept rising too. As the defeated German army retreated from the Eastern Front towards Berlin, many of the Volksdeutsche in their path felt that they had no alternative but to accompany them or risk vengeance at the hands of the Red Army and the inhabitants of the resurgent nation states which Nazi Germany had conquered.
Significant records relating to the Baltic and Eastern European Germans were removed to Germany during WW2 but others remain in archives in the lands where they were created. Bluebird Research can help and advise in German family history research across Eastern Europe: contact us for an opinion.
There were scarcely 19 years of peace in interwar Lwów, between September 1920 and September 1939. Ironically, the city which had been at the forefront of Polish national and cultural activism during the long years of partitioned Poland became somewhat peripheral now that the country was united and independent. Its prestige declined. From having been Lemberg, the capital of the self-governing Austro-Hungarian crownland of Galicia and the fifth largest city of the Empire (behind Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Trieste), it became Lwów, one of many satellite cities within the orbit of the Polish capital Warsaw. And of course the ambitious and the unemployed, students and professional elites, now gravitated towards Warsaw.
There were three national communities in the city. During the Austrian era, from 1772 to the Great War, the authorities counted the population by religion rather than nationality, as, to a greater or lesser extent, an empire exists by denial of nationality or at least of national expression.
Between 51% and 53% of the city’s inhabitants were Roman Catholic. These were overwhelmingly Poles, with a very small minority of Austrians and assimilated Germans and Armenians (although a separate Armenian Catholic Church still functioned in Lwów).
18% or 19% were Greek Catholics, who were rusyny or Ruthenians, and increasingly identified themselves as Ukrainians as the 19th century advanced and the community’s national consciousness awakened.
27% or 28% were Jewish. The Jews of Lwów had traditionally resided in two designated areas and continued to do so even after regulations were relaxed in 1867. The first area comprised a largely affluent and assimilated community in the neighbourhood of three streets in the old town: ul Żdowska, Ruska and Zarwańska. The second area was a more working class and religiously Orthodox Jewish community in the Krakowskie and Żółkiewskie suburbs.
These three large national communities interacted and shared certain common aspirations during the era of Austrian rule, despite the irreconcilable incompatibility of Polish and Ukrainian national claims to the city and despite a wide range of internal differences. For instance, the Jewish community included assimilationists and Polish nationalists; Zionists; Bundists and communists; and largely apolitical Orthodox Jews. The Jews appear to have least frequently intermarried with the other two communities: it seems probable that intermarriage was restricted to those who not only assimilated but also converted to Catholicism. However, marriage between the Polish Roman Catholics and Ukrainian Greek Catholics was not unusual.
It has been calculated that 16% of pre-WW1 marriages were mixed*. This needs to be placed in context of the respective sizes of the two communities. For instance, in 1900 there were 82,590 Roman Catholics and 29,327 Greek Catholics in Lwów. When this numerical imbalance is factored in, it means that one in three Poles may have been marrying a Ukrainian. Mixed marriages declined after Galicia became part of independent Poland and tensions between Poles and Ukrainians increased, but even in the 1920s mixed marriages are estimated at 8%.
These figures are salutary. History is necessarily written in generalisations with only occasional references to individuals by way of exemplification. The reality for individuals is granular and subject to infinite degrees and gradations of experience. In pre-Soviet era Lwów, there may well have been some “pure” Polish and Ukrainian families but it would not be surprising for family history research to demonstrate or suggest otherwise.
*Estimates of intermarriage are by Lidia Zyblikiewicz, cited in Philipp Ther’s “War Versus Peace” (Harvard Ukrainian Studies XXIV (1/4) 2000).
Records for the different communities in Lemberg / Lwów / L’viv are today found in L’viv and Warsaw. Bluebird Research offers professional family history research services in L’viv, across Ukraine and Poland, and would be delighted to undertake genealogical research on behalf of anyone with Jewish, Polish or Ukrainian – or mixed! – ancestry from the region.
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.
The first and largest wave of Ukrainian emigrants to North America took place between 1891 and the outbreak of War in 1914. These were almost exclusively economic migrants and, of course, chain migrants: both pioneers and those friends and family who followed them learning of their success. To generalise, these Ukrainians emigrated to rural regions of Canada (an estimated 171,000 to the lands of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan) and urban centres of USA (maybe 250,000 in number).
It is important to understand that these early Ukrainian Canadians came from the most distant provinces of Austro-Hungary – from Galicia and Bukovina. On contemporary records – pre-War passenger lists, immigration records, land settlement records and censuses – they are therefore likely to be described as Ruthenians from Austria. Galicia is now split west-east between Poland and Ukraine, while Bukovina is now divided north-south between Ukraine and Romania. Almost without exception, therefore, these Canadian immigrants hailed from what is today western Ukraine, not from the central Kyiv area or eastern (so-called Left-Bank) Ukraine. They were unRussian.
Ruthenians from Galicia were invariably Greek Catholics and, where literate, wrote using the Latin rather than the Cyrillic alphabet found in eastern Ukraine and Russia. There was no tradition of the use of patronymics now common throughout Ukraine. Their names may have been recorded in parish registers in Latin or Polish spellings: you can safely assume that Latin Joannes and Polish Jan was known to his nearest and dearest as Ivan. Of course, he may also show up as Iwan, reflecting Polish orthography, and once arrived in North America is likely to have become John.
For Canadian descendants of this first wave of immigrants (which had started as early as the 1870s but gained real momentum in the closing decade of the century), there are some tremendous ready-made resources available. Among these are the compendiums of Vladimir Kaye known as Dictionary of Ukrainian Canadian Biography. Mr Kaye produced three of these: Alberta and Manitoba were published, while (as far as I am aware) the volume for Saskatchewan remains in manuscript only. There are 941 entries in the Manitoba book. Here is an abbreviated extract from one:
YASKIW, Maksym, born 1853 in Rostayna, district Yaslo, Galicia, Austria, died 7 September 1911 in Rossburn. Wife Eudokia (Dora) born 1856 died 6 February 1942 at Rossburn. Children on landing: Vladimir 10, Yurko 16, Petro 8, Hanka 14. Arrived in Canada on SS Phoenicia, landing at Halifax 21 May 1899.
Rostayna and Yaslo are respectively Rostajne and Jasło in Polish and are situated in the far SE of the country. In 1900, the year after Makysm sailed to Canada, Rostajne comprised 63 houses and an almost exclusively Greek Catholic population of 366, according to the official Austrian gazetteer for Galizien.
Another excellent resource for Canadians beginning their Ukrainian family history is Ukrainians In Alberta, published in 1975 by the Ukrainian Pioneers’ Association of Alberta, which gives fuller biographies, often one or two pages’ long and with accompanying family photographs.
Bluebird Research is happy to offer assistance with family history research in both Poland and Ukraine and would be delighted to help and advise you investigate your family’s Galicia roots.
Siberia inhabits the popular imagination as a vast penal colony stretching from taiga to tundra, horizon to godforsaken horizon; a journey’s end of deportation and exile; a kind of limbo in which the politically unacceptable were quarantined for indefinite but invariably soul-destroying periods and permafrozen into powerlessness by the Russian state, whether imperial or Stalinist.
And all this is true. But there is another and paradoxically contrary Siberia which coexists with the first and which is a surprising land of opportunity and optimism. From the early 19th century, migrants from across European Russia began to see and seek out the potential of colonising the sparsely populated but resource-rich lands east of the Urals, where Asian Russia begins. In Siberia, the long controlling arms of the Russian Orthodox Church and the centrist state did not always reach, and land was available for the taking rather than inevitably belonging to a prince or count or some other absentee landlord. So pioneers, from freed serfs and landless peasants to dissenting Old Believers, continued to push eastwards in their horse-drawn carts, beyond Yekaterinburg and Omsk, towards the Far East. The opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1891 suddenly accelerated this flow. By 1899 the Railway stretched as far as Chita, subject to a Lake Baikal ferry crossing from Irkutsk.
In 1896, following a concession from China, work began on a spur of the Trans-Siberian Railway called the Far East Railway or Chinese Eastern Railway. This left Russian territory after Chita, cut across Manchuria and through the city of Harbin, re-entering Russian territory just outside the port of Vladivostok. The railway was completed in 1903 and prominent amongst its engineers and workers were an estimated 7,000 Poles.
Poles were no strangers to Siberia and the Far East. Thousands had been deported there following uprisings against Russian rule in 1831 and 1861-63. Poor peasants from the Kingdom of Poland emigrated to Siberia in search of land. By the start of WW1, there were perhaps 70,000 Poles living in Siberia and Manchuria, with a notable community, thriving and organised, in Harbin.
The First World War increased this number, with the arrival both of prisoners of war and of evacuated peasants from the Russian Polish gubernia of Lublin, Łomża and Siedlce. The subsequent Revolution and Civil War brought further refugees including the so-called Trans-Amurians, Polish gentry who had settled beyond the Amur River in 1910 and fled the Bolsheviks for Harbin in 1917; and the remnants of the 5th Siberian Division of Fusiliers which escaped the Bolshevik forces and were evacuated from Harbin, via Vladivostok, in the summer of 1920.
Most of the Poles in eastern Siberia and the Far East removed to newly independent Poland between 1921 and 1925, although a small community remained in Harbin, Manchuria in the 1930s. In Poland, those who returned from Siberia were known as Sybiraki irrespective of their own, or their family’s, origins as colonists, exiled political prisoners, PoWs or wartime refugees. While some went on to enjoy successful careers in the young Poland, other veterans could not assimilate into the new post-War society and remained nostalgic for Siberia.
Family history research in Siberia is, needless to say, not straightforward. Bluebird Research has a professional researcher able to make searches but the prospects of success very much depend on the quality and precision of the background information available to us at the start of the investigation. We are happy to provide a free opinion. Additionally, we are always interested in increasing our own knowledge and understanding and would be delighted to hear from family historians who have undertaken successful searches in Siberia or Manchuria.
Today, in the era of identity politics, it is expected of everyone that they possess a clear and unequivocal identity and in particular that they identify with a particular nation state, commonly the one in which they were born and/or live.
In some regions of Europe (and of course elsewhere), this is very much a modern phenomenon and a consequence of the nation-building projects of the 19th and 20th centuries. Particularly in the large and sprawling multi-ethnic empires that crumbled during WW1, less focused identities formerly existed.
For instance, in the Ottoman Empire and not just in its Anatolian heartland but also in so-called “Turkey in Europe”, religion rather than nationality or ethnicity was the defining feature. The Empire recognised its component regions, of course, but thought of the constituent populations as Muslim, Christian and Jewish, with Christian perhaps subdivided into Greek Orthodox, Armenian and so on. These religious communities were known as millets. As late as the 1920s, both the Greek and the Turkish states found that they had to impose national identities upon particular populations where they were lacking. For instance, Cappadocia was home to up to 100,000 Orthodox Christians. They were known as Karamanlides, but this did not denote ethnicity or race: it simply meant that they were Turkish-speaking and wrote in Turkish but using the Greek alphabet. Although loyal to Turkey, enjoying good relations with their Muslim neighbours, and not thinking of themselves as Greek, they were caught up in the great Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923/24 following the Treaty of Lausanne. Removed from their centuries-old heartland in Anatolia, they became unwilling refugees in Greece, where they had to forge a new, national rather than religious, identity and learn a new language.
In what is today Belarus, too, national identities were far from fully formed even between the World Wars. In the years 1918-1924, when a massive repatriation programme was under way to return refugees and other displaced persons from Soviet Russia to their former places of origin in newly independent Eastern European successor states, many effectively Belarusian refugees entered their religion (Orthodox) in the box marked “nationality” on the registration forms: even Belarusian nationalists recognised that the people had little or no national consciousness.
Poland acquired extensive eastern marches following the collapse of Tsarist Russia and a war with the Bolsheviks. One of these new provinces, województwo Poleskie, was ethnically very mixed and had a particularly small Polish Roman Catholic minority population (14.5% according to the 1931 Polish census). As well as approximately 6.7% in Polesie who declared themselves explicitly to be Belarusian, no less than 62.4% (about 800,000 people) identified themselves as “locals” (tutejszy or tutejsi) and their language as “local”. This was a peasant people, speaking a mix of Belarusian and Russian with some Polish and Lithuanian elements; many were illiterate. Some became polonised before WW2 and the end of the Second Polish Republic, but most came to be regarded as Belarusians and found themselves living in the Belarusian SSR from the 1940s.
Belarus is not an easy place in which to conduct family history research. For a start, its geographical location meant that it was fought over in both World Wars and many places where vital records were held – churches and chapels, synagogues, town halls and archives – were accidentally or deliberately destroyed during the conflicts. For instance, an estimated 80% of the buildings in the capital Minsk were destroyed during WW2. This means that for some localities the surviving documentary record begins in 1945; all earlier records may be lost.
Secondly, its territory has been much disputed and its current borders do not much resemble those of its inter-War predecessor the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic: much of Belarus’s current western lands were part of Poland at that time. And before WW1, what is now Belarus was overlain with a number of the gubernias of Tsarist Russia. What this means is that surviving vital records for localities within modern Belarus may not be located within the country itself. Many records are to be found in Poland, especially Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic parish registers. Others are in Lithuania and, almost certainly, in Russia. As more archives are catalogued in detail, or existing catalogues published or translated, it is quite likely that new sources for Belarusian research will emerge over time.
The civil register offices in Belarus are known by the acronym ZAGS. This is where contemporary events of birth, marriage and death are registered and where post-WW1 registers are kept. These records are effectively closed to general research, although of course next of kin and attorneys will be granted copies of register entries upon application and submission of evidence of entitlement. In due course, the ZAGS registers are transferred to the National Historical Archives, where they are catalogued and made generally available on open access. However, a strict cut-off point does not appear to be operated. As some ZAGS offices possess records for the pre-WW1 period, sometimes even extending back into the late C19th, it is never entirely certain whether all surviving records within Belarus are already in the National Historical Archives or, alternatively, whether others remain at one or other of the ZAGs. The reverse is also true, in that birth, marriage and death registers from the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, which one would expect to be held in the ZAGS and to be closed, are in fact already in the National Historical Archives.
Catalogues provide good visibility of the holdings in the National Historical Archives, which are situated in Minsk and Grodno. Study of these catalogues reinforces the point made earlier about the loss of records: where there are surviving registers for individual localities, these are invariably piecemeal due to loss or destruction at different times. It is impossible to generalise. Records for one Russian Orthodox parish locality, for example, may extend seemingly unbroken for 80 or 90 years, while for another locality nearby only a handful of years may be extant.
Bluebird Research has contacts on the ground in Belarus and will happily provide you with an opinion on the feasibility of and prospects for research. Please supply as much background information as you have, including place of birth or residence, ethnicity and faith.
The village now known as Polonezköy, sometimes shown on maps simply as Polonez, lies within easy driving distance of İstanbul, on the Anatolian rather than the Thracian side of the Bosporus. It was founded as Adampol in 1842 by Polish political exiles. The village grew slowly over the years, augmented for instance after 1858 by Poles demobilised from the bands of Ottoman Cossacks who had fought under Michał Czajkowski (known as Sadyk Pasza) with the Turks against Tsarist Russia in the Crimean War, and again after the 1863 January Uprising against conscription into the Russian army was brutally suppressed in 1864.
The Polish population of Polonezköy was never large – there were 88 residents by 1866, and 165 in 1920, for example – and probably never exceeded 250. Just as many Poles left as arrived, some returning to Poland and others moving to Istanbul. The villagers took Turkish citizenship in 1938. Relations with Turkish Muslims were good and there was inter-marriage with local Turks and some conversion from Catholicism to Islam. No more than 20 or 25 Polish families still reside or own property in the village. Local surnames include Biskupski, Kępka, Minakowski, Nowicki, Ochocki, Ryży, Wilkoszewski and Ziółkowski.
The burial register of Our Lady of Częstochowa begins in 1848 and records the interment of over 330 individuals. There are more than 200 surviving graves with legible monumental inscriptions. Photographs of the cemetery on the village website http://www.polonezkoy.com/cemetery.html show that these appear to be mostly in very good condition.
These days, the community is mainly involved in tourism, the village being a popular daytrip from İstanbul as well as an attraction for Polish visitors to Turkey.
Earlier this year, Yale University Press published The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread by Maria Balinska, about everyone’s favourite breakfast roll. The book has been positively reviewed in the press.
This put me in mind of an earlier publication called The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World by Mimi Sheraton (Broadway Books, 2000). The bialy differs from the bagel in not being boiled before baking and in having in the centre a depression, filled with onion or poppy seeds, rather than a hole. It originated in Białystok and acquired its short name after being brought to New York by immigrant Yiddish-speaking bakers some time after WW1. It appears to have died out in its native Białystok with the disappearance of the Jewish community.
Białystok was a large and densely populated city by the mid-C19th, when it was situated in the Grodno gubernia of the Russian Empire. The majority of the city’s population was Jewish: by 1895, 47,783 Jews out of a total population of 62,993 (76%). As well as merchants, shopkeepers and tradesmen, many worked in the textile industry or were otherwise part of a growing urban proletariat which was later to become radicalised and active in the Bundist movement. From 1920, the Białystok area was incorporated into newly re-independent Poland.
Ancestors from Białystok found, for example, on the English or American census returns, or in other sources of use to family historians, may give their country of origin as Russia, or Poland, or Russian Poland. Beware that, as well as being the name of the city, Białystok was also a uezd (district) within the Grodno gubernia in Tsarist times, and a larger eponymous województwo (province) in Poland during the inter-War years: therefore, it is possible that ancestors claiming to have come from Białystok may have come from the surrounding area and used the name for convenience.
Researching family history becomes much more satisfying when, instead of concentrating narrowly on direct ancestors, the collateral branches of the same family are also investigated and the search turns round and heads towards the present day. Notwithstanding the shoah, the Jewish diaspora from Białystok is global, and a genealogist is just as likely to discover that he or she has surviving kin today in Argentina or Australia as in Israel or USA.