Archive for the ‘russia’ 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.
I first read Russell Hoban in about 1982, at the suggestion of my English literature teacher. Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker is set in East Kent, where I grew up and was attending school, which fact no doubt played some part in the recommendation. Whether it was otherwise an appropriate recommendation for a teenager is rather doubtful (although no more doubtful than the early works of Ian McEwan and the complete oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, which were also on the list my teacher gave me to while away that particular long summer holiday).
It was only when Hoban died earlier this month that I realised that he was not an Englishman but an American, and in fact the American-born child of Jewish immigrants. In the 1930 US census, he appears as the five-year old Pennsylvania-born Russell Conwell (sic), and is described as being the nephew of the newspaper advertising editor Abraham Hochban and his wife Jennie, Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews from Volhynia (or “Poland, Voline”, as it says in the census return). Wikipedia states that Russell was the son of this couple and that Conwell was his middle name not his surname, so presumably there is a clerical error in the census and/or a mistake on Wikipedia.
Abraham or Abram Hochban had married Jennie Dimmermann in Philadelphia in 1915 and became naturalised as a US citizen in 1922.
He had arrived in Philadelphia on 30th November 1913, on board the “Frankfurt” from Bremen in Germany. He appears in the incoming passenger list as Avram Gochbahn, not Hochban or Hochbahn. It is always worth remembering when undertaking genealogical research involving Russian records that the Russian alphabet lacks the letter H and uses the G instead. It is therefore not unusual to find names which we expect to begin with an H to be shown with a G in Russian language records and in English or German language records for which Russian language documents have been the source (as is the case here). Avram is recorded as being aged 19 (i.e. born circa 1894), single, and a clerk; his address (and that of his next of kin, his mother) appears to be Warschau (i.e. Warsaw).
The naturalisation papers give his date of birth as 3 June 1894. The passenger list states that Abraham had been born in Ostrog in Volhynia (now Ostroh in Ukraine). However, the naturalisation papers suggest that he was actually born in “Orgeiw”, Bessarabia (today Orhei in Moldova) but had been resident in Ostrog before emigration. Where was he actually born? Research would be necessary to determine this but it may be that Orhei, which like Ostrog had a thriving Jewish population, is the better candidate. In this instance, the need for caution is thrown up by the discrepancy in the records but, even where records appear consistent, one should still be cautious – across the Russian Empire the names of towns were often also the names of provinces or districts, and it cannot be automatically assumed that the town itself is intended.
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.
Among the aristocracy of Imperial Russia, as of course among the landed gentry in other places, some men of title fathered children by mistresses, of high and low birth, and by female serfs in their households and on their estates in accordance with the droit du seigneur. Those of the illegitimate children recognised by the father, and perhaps supported by him, would sometimes take a truncated version of his surname (as well as his patronymic) so as to acknowledge paternity but at the same time prevent confusion with the legitimate bloodline.
It seems that recourse to the dropping of the leading syllable of the surname was the practice most often adopted. For example, the surname Pnin, today most associated with Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, was borne by the poet Ivan Petrovich Pnin and was an abbreviated version of the surname of his father the statesman Nikolai Vasilyevich Repnin.
Similarly, the 18th century educationalist Ivan Ivanovich Betskoy was the illegitimate son of Ivan Yurievich Trubetskoy. Other examples include Golitsyn shortened to Litsyn, and Putivlev to Ivlev.
How a society disposes of its dead is one of the most interesting and often distinctive outward signs of its culture and values. When travelling abroad it is invariably an illuminating experience to pop into some cemeteries and take a look around.
Earlier this month I was in Russia. It is foolhardy to even consider generalising about a country the size of a continent so I should stress that I saw only small pockets of the Leningradskaya oblast in the NW.
The oldest graves I saw were not in graveyards at all but were kurgans, or barrows. You could be forgiven for overlooking these burial mounds, as they could be mistaken for natural features until you notice their placement and disposition – in this case (near the village of Staraya Ladoga in the Volkhovsky raion), commanding a sweeping panoramic view over one of those broad slow-flowing rivers that wind their way through and are so evocative of many parts of European Russia. Of course these are no ordinary graves but the final resting places of prominent chiefs of what in Russian are called Varyagi, or Varangians, the Vikings who traded with the early princely states of northern Russia. These particular kurgans probably date to between the 9th and 11th centuries. Today they are over-run with meadow flowers and grasses and their original purpose has been obscured, but they remain an outstanding feature of the local landscape.
On Vasilyevsky Island, one of the various islands which compose St Petersburg, I visited the Smolensky Cemetery or, to be more precise, the Russian Orthodox section of it (as opposed to the Lutheran and Armenian portions). Although not dating back to the founding of the city, this is at least 270 years old and still going strong, although a passerby might be forgiven for believing they were passing by a walled forest – the graves, along with bush and shrub, form the dense undergrowth of a mature woodland. The graves are packed in with a rich exuberance and a modicum of natural chaos, the antithesis of, say, the neat and orderly, regularly spaced stark white headstones of a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in Flanders. Mid-18th century graves sit alongside those of the casualties of an early 21st century air crash. There are Orthodox crosses of iron and wood and stone; stone tub type graves from the 1920s; headstones featuring a photograph of the deceased in ceramic or in carved relief; and grandiose mausoleums. And all types of beautiful Cyrillic script, in pre- and post- spelling reform alphabets, with the otchestvo or patronymic helpfully (for the genealogist) identifying the father of the deceased. Unidentified passerines sing high in the canopy and flit in the shadows; speckled woods spiral in the sunlight; a red squirrel peers round the side of a tree trunk; and believers in head scarves follow a path through the forest to the chapel of Saint Blessed Xenia of St Petersburg, where they kiss the icons and press their foreheads to the cool outer walls.
By the Aleksander Nevsky Lavra monastery on the SE side of the city, there are three separate cemeteries. Two are closed for burial and managed by the State Museum of Urban Sculpture; one is under the aegis of the monastery. The state ones are the Tikhvin (or Necropolis of the Masters of Arts), which is arranged much like an outdoor sculpture park in leafy surroundings and where one can pay homage to Dostoevsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky et al; and the older, largely 18th century Lazarevskoe, which has a mad profusion of funereal hardware, with frankly bizarre and idiosyncratic symbolism adorning some of the monuments. The third cemetery, the one in the grounds of the monastery proper, is in a state of some disrepair but also of incongruity – there is a tall modern memorial to the Orthodox clergy who were persecuted under Communism, but there are also both early and late Soviet graves. The later Soviet gravestones show the dead hand of the system that smothered Russia, bearing the likenesses of stolid stony-faced time-serving apparatchik and nomenklatura men. But the Soviet headstones from the 1920s make prominent use of the red star (bringing to mind Krzhizhanovsky’s “red metal stars on thin wire stems fidget[ing] nervously in the wind”*), eschew religious symbolism and sometimes attempt radical redesign; from the names one can identify Armenian, Central Asian and Jewish as well as Russian Bolsheviks who died prematurely in that first decade of the new post-Revolutionary era; and one can sense that sense of promise and hope that was dying unfulfilled with them.
*”The Thirteenth Category of Reason” in Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull (NYRB, 2009)
Zhytomyr, or Zhitomir (also Shitomir in German), is a Ukrainian provincial capital, seat of the Zhytomyr oblast, but is of immense significance for family historians with German-Ukrainian roots and specifically for those from Ukrainisch Wolhynien. This is the region of Volhynia to the west of Kyiv formerly dense with German settlements and colonies founded during the 19th century. The German population was particularly concentrated in the triangle between the towns of Zhytomyr, Novohrad-Volynskyi (or Nowograd-Wolhynsk, previously known as Zwiahel or Swehl) and Korosten.
Ukraine operates, in theory if not always in practice, a 75-year “modern era” closure period, meaning that records from before 1936 (at the time of writing) should be on open access in state archives rather than closed, for reasons of data protection and personal privacy, in register offices (known by the acronym RAHS and administered by the Ministry of Justice).
The state regional archives in Zhytomyr are one of the most efficient and cooperative in Ukraine. Among their holdings is an important collection of German Evangelical Lutheran parish registers for Wolhynien. These vital records all date from before 1936, of course, and are particularly strong for the period from about 1900 to 1920. The collection is not complete but includes, among others, births/baptisms, marriages and deaths/burials for the parishes of Emiltschin, Heimthal, Radomysl, Tutschin, Shitomir itself and Nowograd-Wolhynsk. There are also name indexes in the archive and a collection of police files which contain biographical information on individual inhabitants.
The same archive also houses a number of records of interest to those with German Baptist roots, e.g. in Tutschin.
Bluebird Research offers research services at Zhytomyr state archives and is also able to assist at other locations which hold Wolhynien Lutheran records, such as the St Petersburg archives which hold the bishop’s transcripts for the years 1836-1885 (the original parish registers being lost, only these contemporaneous copies survive).
Please contact us for a free assessment if you are interested in professional family history research assistance in Ukraine or Russia.
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.
“Until not long ago, family histories were something to hide… Everyone had scars on their family tree, a repressed father, an exiled aunt, someone with a prison record. It was better not to pass that information on to the children. So now people don’t know anything about where they come from or who their family members were. They don’t even know recent family history… On my father’s side, I know seven generations back, but on my mother’s side I couldn’t even give you the name of my grandparents.”
Gennadii Romanovich, archivist at State Archives of Zhytomyr Province, Ukraine (quoted in Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place, Harvard University Press, 2004)
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.
The Armenians and the Greeks were not the only nationalities to be largely removed from Asia Minor as Turkey redefined itself as a single-nation state in the post-Ottoman era. The Yezidis (or Yazidis) – Kurds with their own distinctive non-Islamic religion – have also largely disappeared, either assimilating into the Kurdish population, crossing the border into the Republic of Armenia or emigrating to continental Europe (e.g. Germany).
Bluebird Research has created a Google Map showing the location of the former Yezidi villages of the Kars oblast, or province, of the Russian Empire circa 1910 before it was re-taken by the Turks after the end of WW1. During the Russian era, the distinctiveness of the Yezidi people was recognised and these villages constituted their own administrative district or okrug.
Click here to view the Google Map showing the Yezidi Villages of Kars Province.
Bluebird Research has no experience of Yezidi genealogical research but is always interested in expanding its knowledge and would be delighted to hear from anyone who is researching their Yezidi ancestry.
“You cannot know the feeling of a man who has no home… Perhaps no others can understand the hopeless homesickness of us older Russians.”
“The whole world is open to me… Only one place is closed to me, and that is my own country – Russia.”
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff, New York Evening Post (26 Dec 1933) & “Some Critical Moments in My Career”, Musical Times 71 (June 1930)
A family historian in the English-speaking world searching speculatively for the marriage of an ancestor on an unknown date does not usually consider seasonality; that is, they have no preconceptions as to whether a wedding would or would not have taken place at any particular time of year. Furthermore, one rarely comes across any especially noticeable peaks or troughs in the frequency of marriages across the calendar year. Couples get married all year round, perhaps in the post-WW2 world showing a preference for summer weddings.
In contrast, in most rural societies across Eastern Europe before WW2 and certainly before WW1 when traditional ways of life were still very much intact, there was marked seasonality of marriage. This is reflected in the pages of any volume of a parish marriage register.
One of the two chief factors was the agricultural year. Throughout the growing season and especially during the harvest, farmers, smallholders and peasants were joined in the fields and in the processing of harvested crops by just about every available hand – villagers of both sexes and all ages would be involved and frequently laboured both long days and by moonlight. During this period, there was generally no time for marriage.
The second factor was the religious calendar. In particular, fasting created marriage seasonality. Especially in Eastern Orthodox communities, marriage was an occasion of extended feasting and therefore incompatible with the fasts, during which meat, dairy produce, rich oils and so on were eschewed. There are various individual feast days during the Orthodox calendar, upon which it would be unthinkable for a wedding to be celebrated. But more to the point there were two fasts of great length.
The first fast was the great or holy fast of the seven weeks of Lent. For instance, in the Serbian Orthodox calendar, traditionally the Church celebrated no marriages between Bele Poklade (a moveable feast, “white Shrovetide”, the last Sunday before Lent) and Đurđevdan (St George’s Day, 6th May).
The second fast took place over the 40 days leading up to Christmas. Again, for the Serbian Orthodox calendar, this is the Božićni Post period from 28th November up to Božić, the Orthodox Christmas itself, on 7th January.
Marriages therefore tended to cluster between these two extended feasts. Factoring in the principal months of agricultural activity, this produced a spate of weddings from mid-January to early March, and again from October to late November.
Of course, for other Orthodox societies, the harvest might move a few weeks according to latitude, altitude, climate and other factors. Similarly, fasting at Lent might well take place over fewer weeks. However, the pattern itself remains largely true and produces the same seasonal peaks in marriage.
One question I’ve been asked in the past, at family history shows or in emails, is about the British community in Russia in the 18th and 19th century. The usual question is: what would my ancestors have been doing out there?
It’s a good question and admits of no simple answer. As was the case with the British Empire, a disproportionate number of the Brits in Russia were Scottish and, to a lesser degree, Irish, even though at the time “English” tended to be used instead of “British” irrespective of actual nationality. The community was centred on the consulate and the merchant community, originally called the Russia Company’s British Factory, in St Petersburg. The merchants were essentially in the import/export business – exporting to Britain raw materials, such as flax, hemp, pitch and timber, and importing to Russia all kinds of the often fashionable British merchandise, ranging from tableware and fancy goods to race horses and carriages.
In addition to the merchants, however, there were all sorts of technical experts, especially in the 18th century, when naval officers and shipbuilders played a key role in developing the Russian navy. Other experts included landscape gardeners on Russian estates, engravers and clockmakers, and doctors.
However, it should not be thought that there were no lower middle class or working class Brits in the Russian Empire. For instance, the Russian aristocracy’s and gentry’s love of horses and horse racing created all sorts of opportunities for British grooms, ostlers, saddlers, blacksmiths, jockeys, horse trainers and of course horse dealers. Similarly, among the retainers of the Russian upper classes were many British governesses, nannies, nurses, tutors and housekeepers.
Some of the British settled in Russia and remained there for generations, occasionally marrying into Russian families but just as often intermarrying within the community or seeking spouses from the British Isles. However, others stayed only a few years, on contract or assignment, and the only indication of a Russian connection may be, for example, a single child in the family with place of birth Russia on a census return or other document.
The Manchurian city of Harbin, or Kharbin as it tends to be transliterated by Russians, became known as Belyi Kharbin, or “White Harbin”, to the Soviets, who depicted it as the refuge of the reactionary and royalist White Guard and its sympathisers. The history of Russian Harbin is much more complex and varied than this only partly true Soviet characterisation would suggest.
For starters, of course, Harbin was a pre-Revolutionary railway city when there was no such thing as Reds or Whites. The Russian community was founded in 1898 as the hub of the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway. The early settlers, therefore, were not politicised but were frontiersmen and pioneers, working on the railway and attracting all the support facilities that the town needed – builders to create housing, technical experts, service professionals such as doctors and teachers, shopkeepers and restaurant owners. The February 1913 census of Harbin enumerated 34,313 Russians in Harbin (Kharbintsy), almost exactly half the town’s total population of 68,549. In addition, there were 5,032 mostly Russian Jews and 2,556 Poles. Like many new settlements, there was out-migration as well – for instance, some engineers and labourers worked on a temporary contract and then left Harbin, while other Russians evacuated during and immediately after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/05 – but the general trend was incoming, with an increasing influx in the four or five years up to the census date.
Of course, this settlement was greatly boosted by the wave of incoming White Russians after the Revolution. Again, it is important to note that many of these used Harbin as a stopping-off place en route to elsewhere. Perhaps between 100,000 and 200,000 Russians arrived in Harbin during the 1920s but the settled Russian population was smaller – for instance, there are precise counts of 55,959 in 1927 and 55,924 in 1935, showing just how many were in transit.
But these figures also conceal significant differences within the community: although there were indeed plenty of veteran White officers and soldiers, royalists and old intelligentsia, not all of Harbin’s 55,000 or so Russians in the late 1920s and early 1930s were Whites. The situation is complex. In September 1920, the Russians in Harbin had become officially stateless and, to compound matters, Sino-Soviet agreements of 1924 decreed that henceforth only Chinese and Soviet citizens could work on the Chinese Eastern Railway and in its extensive ancillary operations in the city. This was the tipping point for Harbin Russians. They were faced with a choice – either accept Soviet or Chinese citizenship, or remain stateless and become unemployed. This was the point at which the Russian community in Harbin really split into opposing political camps.
The situation did not improve. In 1935, the USSR sold its share in the Chinese Eastern Railway to the government of what in 1932 had become the Japanese Manchurian puppet state of Manchukuo. At this date, the majority of Soviet citizens, including those who had opted for citizenship after 1924 and often held only provisional Soviet passports, moved to USSR. The movement was not auspicious. Their fate was to become immediately suspect in the eyes of the Soviet state. In September 1937 the NKVD moved to repress the 25,000 or so Harbiners in USSR. Some were accused of being Japanese spies, some were regarded as White Guard veterans, others still as having engaged in bourgeois professions or occupations such as owning a hotel or being involved in business. They were deported to labour camps or executed.
Significant numbers of Russians still remained in Japanese Harbin. They were obliged to register with the Japanese Bureau for the Affairs of Russian Émigrés. By October 1936, there were 25,942 Russian Harbiners on its books (plus some 1,952 Soviet officials and other citizens). By 1942, this number had risen to 36,711. This rise probably reflects improved registration more than incoming migration or natural increase.
In August 1945, the Soviet Army defeated Japan and occupied Manchukou, receiving at least a tentative welcome from many Harbiners, exhausted as they were by their decades of exile and insecurity. The latest turn of events was not auspicious either, however: the Soviets were keenly interested in the voluminous files of the Bureau for the Affairs of Russian Émigrés and some 15,000 Harbiners were promptly arrested, deported to labour camps or summarily executed. Those not arrested were permitted to apply for Soviet passports. China regained control of Manchuria in 1949. In 1954, the USSR granted Harbin Russians the right to be repatriated to such virgin land destinations as Kazakhstan and Altai. Some Harbiners took up this offer, while the remainder, sensing the closing pages of the final chapter of Russian Harbin, chose to emigrate, heading overseas to Australia, USA and various South American countries.
Today surviving Harbiners and their descendants form communities in Moscow, Novosibirsk, Omsk and Yekaterinburg, as well as in diaspora cities such as San Francisco and Sydney. There is a rising interest in the history of Russian Harbin, including among genealogists. There are resources available for Harbin family history research but these are dispersed – there are archival and library holdings in, for example, Moscow, St Petersburg and Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East. We welcome enquiries from researchers investigating their Harbin Russian family trees and are available for professional research assignments in Russia.
Setomaa is a land that does not exist on maps, inhabited by the Seto, or Setu, a small nation which is both threatened by assimilation and experiencing something of a cultural renaissance.
It is divided by the border between Estonia and Russia.
On the Estonian side, the Seto live in Mikitimäe and Värska parishes in Põlvamaa, and in Meremäe and Misso parishes in Võrumaa. A traditional Seto settlement differs from an archetypal Estonian settlement in being a compact or linear village rather than a looser cluster of scattered dwellings and farmsteads. Also, the Seto are Russian Orthodox, rather than the typical Lutheran religion of Estonia, and worship in a distinctive wooden chapel known as a tsässon.
On the Russian side, the Seto live mainly between the towns of Petseri (Pechory in Russian) and Irboska (Izborsk in Russian), which lie on the western edge of Pskov oblast’, part of the Northwestern Federal Okrug of Russia. The Seto are a recognised minority in Russia but this does not prevent assimilation. According to the 2002 census, only 197 Russian citizens declared themselves to be of Setu nationality (there were also some 28,113 Estonians). It is of course likely that some Setu stated that they were Estonian, or indeed Russian, or chose not to declare any nationality.
During Estonia’s first period of independence, from 1920 to 1940, however, before the German and then the Soviet occupation, all of Setomaa was in Estonia, in the then county of Petserimaa with its county town at Petseri. Petseri grew up around its monastery (now known as the Pskovo-Pechersky Dormition Monastery) which, as well as being the major landowner in Setomaa, was the spiritual centre of Russian Orthodoxy among the Seto.
Previously, before WW1, all of Setomaa was in the Pskov gubernia of the Russian Empire. For this reason, the population here died not acquire surnames as the Estonians did during the period from the 1810s to the 1830s. I have read that the Seto did not take surnames until 1921, before then using a Russian style combination of forename and otchestvo (patronymic). This seems late but may well be true. After all, looking further west, not all Swedes had a surname as such until the Släktnamnslagen 1901 made fixed family names compulsory.
Is there a Seto diaspora? Undoubtedly there must be, although I suspect that this is concentrated in Siberia and elsewhere across Russia, rather than in Australia, North America and Scandinavia. Presumably, Seto would have been among the June 1941 and March 1949 Soviet deportations of Estonians to Siberia and the descendants of those who survived and have not returned to Estonia might now exist in the Urals and in the regions of Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk and Omsk in Siberia.
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.
In the Russian Imperial provinces of Livland (also known as Livonia) and Kurland (also spelt Courland), the peasantry obtained surnames over a process of years between the 1810 and the 1830s (the so-called period of name-giving). It is worth a genealogist with roots in this region taking the time to understand the background to this process, as it may explain certain facts or why the family historian is confronted with a potentially insurmountable brickwall in their Latvian research.
The Livland and Kurland countryside were dominated by Baltic German landowners, with a scattering of Polish and Russian counterparts. The land was essentially divided up into large estates, which in turn contained individual farmsteads as well as the generic estate lands. Some of the peasants were effectively heads of farmsteads, notwithstanding the fact that they themselves, as serfs, were the property of the estate owner, to whom they paid dues. Other serfs were agricultural labourers who worked on the estate and/or farmstead lands. Both types of serf were legally bound to their owner on the estate, although movement between individual farmsteads was common for the agricultural labourers. Neither type of serf bore a surname; rather, they would be known by a combination of their first name and the name of the place (usually the farmstead rather than estate) to which they belonged. Sometimes, the name of the father might be used as a qualifier to differentiate between individuals of the same forename on the same farmstead.
The legal process of the landless emancipation of the serfs took place between 1816 and 1819, although of course its implementation on the ground in the provinces occurred over a period of time extending into the mid-1820s and beyond. The serfs were freed but were freed without land. This meant that although they had legal freedom of movement, including the right to move between estates, they tended to remain on the land they had worked in recent generations and which was still owned by the landowners; they had no land of their own to buy or sell.
The process of taking surnames took place concurrently with emancipation for families and individuals. The process was controlled by newly created peasant courts set up at county (pagasts) level. Once chosen, names could only be altered by approval of the court. Details respecting the old and the new names were entered into court minutes along with details of emancipation. Unfortunately, survival of these minutes and of manorial rolls confirming the new surnames is far from complete.
The state set down both rules and guidelines, refined a number of times in the early 1820s, for the taking of family names.
The head of a farmstead was responsible for choosing the name which would be borne by him and his lineal descendants. The name selected by a man in his 50s or 60s would therefore cascade down to his living children and grandchildren and thereafter to his as yet unborn remoter issue. However, if this family elder had already died and, instead, there were a number of adult sons in, say, their 30s or 40s, each of these brothers was free to choose their own surname. This means that while they may all have taken the same surname, this was not always the case – siblings may bear different surnames.
The agricultural labourers and the peasants employed solely on estate lands acquired their surnames generally at a somewhat later date than the farmsteaders.
One of the rules established early on, in 1822, was the prohibition on taking the surnames of the German landowners, other nobility and what we would now call celebrities, who clearly did not feel flattered when a newly liberated serf graced himself with their grand and distinguished name.
By 1824, guidelines were being issued on what were regarded as appropriate and acceptable surnames. Peasants were encouraged to take surnames with a literal meaning in the local Latvian vernacular, rather than Germanic names. A suitable name might be that of the farmstead upon which they lived and worked. Also, given the small pool of forenames used in most rural communities, the authorities tried to dissuade peasants from assuming names based on patronymics, so as to avoid a plethora of families adopting the surname Jansons after men named Janis, Jēkabsons named after Jēkabs, Pētersons named after Pēteris, and so on.
But these were only guidelines and in most cases the peasantry was able to select a surname of its own choosing without intervention from the authorities. The existence of unflattering names derived from physical appearance or character suggests that some were assigned to the individuals concerned by the court or even the landowner, perhaps because their own suggestions were rejected, or they could not decide, or were in such reduced circumstances that they were not in a position to exercise choice – we will never know. However, most names were indeed based upon the identity of the farmstead, or taken from nature (trees, birds, animals and geographical features), or from patronymics. Surprisingly perhaps, contrary to what we might expect from most European surname dictionaries, only a relatively small proportion of names were occupationally derived.
To see the rolling out of surnames, one need only compare the 7th, 8th and 9th revision lists, carried out respectively from 1815/16 (in some places not undertaken until as late as 1826), from 1833 and from 1850. The revisions were those Imperial Russian censuses enumerating the individuals living on estates – the term “revision” refers to the comparison between the present census and its immediate predecessor, noting the changes caused for instance by death and in- and out-migration from an estate. The 7th revision usually shows very few surnames. However, by the time of the 8th, a great many peasants had acquired surnames and the process is fully complete by the 9th revision in 1850.
For an in-depth study of the period of name-giving in Latvia as it affected one particular Livland estate, please see the excellent and very readable article “Patrilines, Surnames and Family Identity”, by Andrejs Plakans and Charles Wetherell, published in The History of the Family, vol 5 no 2, in 2000.
“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.
In the territories which were to become what we now call Estonia – the Russian provinces of Estland and Livonia (also known as Livland) – burials in churchyards were forbidden from 1772, at least in theory. The legislation was passed primarily for reasons of public health and sanitation. Henceforth, new burial grounds had to be beyond the immediate settlement. Of course, over time, settlements expand and therefore eventually such burial grounds were often enveloped within a growing town.
The Russian subjects of Estland and Livonia responded in different ways to the new laws.
The Baltic German elite – the landowners, the merchants and of course the Evangelical Lutheran clergy itself – had traditionally been interred in the immediate vicinity of the churches or even within the church itself. Many landowners now responded by establishing their own private family cemeteries on their estates, usually close to the manor and perhaps with a small chapel attached. They were emulated towards the end of the 19th Century by a growing number of ethnic Estonian landowners, who set up small family graveyards close to their farmhouses.
Of course, the German merchant classes, without land, were laid to rest along side the native Estonian population in the Lutheran parish cemeteries which sprang up. Not infrequently there was more than one burial ground within a large parish, for instance a cemetery might be created beside an outlying chapel of ease. Most family historians with Estonian ancestors will find them buried in these parish cemeteries.
There are some exceptions, however. During the 1840s there was a succession of crop failures and up to 65,000 Estonians are thought to have converted from Lutheranism to the Orthodox religion of Imperial Russia. There had always been Orthodox communities in the territories of Estonia – for instance, in the Setu villages of the SE, and in ethnic Russian settlements in the north-eastern Alutaguse district near what is now the border town of Narva. However, the mass conversion of peasantry in the years 1845 to 1848 created a swathe of Orthodox communities and therefore burial grounds, especially across northern Livonia. The conversions seem to have been a response to economic conditions and represented a switching in allegiance from the German Lutheran nobility which owned most of the land to the Russian Orthodox Tsar, in the hope that the latter would alleviate their distress and ameliorate their living conditions. Later in the 19th Century, there were further conversions in Estland, these being less voluntary and more driven by the pressures of the Empire’s Russification programme.
Estland was generally the poorer of the two provinces. As the peasantry had been emancipated landlessly in the 1810s, they were in practice usually tied to the estates upon which they had previously worked as serfs. Only a tiny percentage moved annually to neighbouring or more distant estates: it has been estimated that only 1% of the peasants in Estland moved between 1835 and 1849. Restricting as this was at the time, it is a great boon to family historians today, as it provides continuity of residence in a parish (kihelkond) and it is generally safe for a genealogist to make such a working assumption when conducting ancestral research during this period unless and until evidence emergence to the contrary.
For more detailed information on the various types of cemetery in Estonia, see the article “The Formation and Location Features of Estonian Cemeteries” published in Journal of Baltic Studies in 2006 (volume 37, issue 3).