Archive for the ‘ukraine’ 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.
Vital records of birth, marriage and death in Ukraine are decentralised: that is, they are held locally, at municipal level for the modern era and in regional state archives for earlier registers. What this means for a researcher in the widespread Ukrainian global diaspora is that it is essential to find out exactly where an ancestor came from in order to begin research in Ukraine.
There are various ways of doing this, if the place of origin is not confidently known from family records and lore. Passenger lists, immigration records, naturalisation records and, in some cases, births, marriages and death certificates in the immigrant land can all help. So too can a number of published sources, such as those for the prairie provinces of Canada mentioned in an earlier Bluebird blog. Another good source for the earliest immigrants is the cemetery headstone.
www.prairiesouls.com is a new website publishing photographs of gravestones for rural Alberta and, in a few cases, Saskatchewan. Many of the pioneer settlers, such as those in receipt of Western Land Grants searchable at Collections Canada, were Ukrainian or, as they were more likely to have been known at the time, Ruthenian (prior to the First World War, a self-proclaimed “Ukrainian” was most likely a nationally conscious Ruthenian). While it is not possible to see from the current arrangement of the website the exact coverage, it is possible to search by name, get a list of results and view individual images from the featured cemeteries.
The earlier the grave, the more likely it is to have a Ukrainian language inscription and to name-check the place of origin in the homeland. The original Ukrainian language spelling of the surname in the Cyrillic alphabet can be very important for research in Ukraine itself and is worth noting when found on a headstone, especially when the anglicised spelling of the name varies due to a simplification of the pronunciation and the lack of exactly corresponding characters in the Latin alphabet, as in the case in Prochinsky and Procinsky. One very helpful feature of the website is the translation into English of Ukrainian language information (name, date and place).
The place of origin is not always given and, when it is shown, it may be generic (Austria, Bukovina, Galicia etc) but sometimes the exact village is given, as in the case of the the Bryks family buried in the Old Wostok AB cemetery, said to have come from “Selo Dzurrin, Czortkiw, Austria” – the village of Dzuryn, west of Czortków in inter-War Poland, now Dzhuryn, Chortkiv, in the Ternopil’ oblast of Ukraine. Even if the grave of your ancestor does not name the place of origin, it is worth looking at others within the same cemetery to see if there is a pattern, as it was not unusual for members of settler communities to have come from the same area in the homeland.
By the time Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, there were no fewer than 45 Waffen-SS Divisions, although seven of recent formation were not up to strength. Each Division was numbered and named.
Central and Eastern Europeans featured in several of these Divisions (as of course did Belgians, Danes, Dutch, Norwegians and so on):
VII Prince Eugen – Volksdeutsche recruits from the Balkans
XIII Handschar – Bosnian Muslims
XIV Galizien – western Ukrainians
XV and XIX – Lettische, or Latvian Legions
XVIII Horst Wessel – Volksdeutsche recruits from Hungary
XX Estnische – Estonian Legion
XXI Skanderbeg – Albanian Muslims
XXII Maria Theresa – Volksdeutsche recruits from Hungary
XXIII Kama – Bosnian Muslims and Croatians
XXV, XXVI and XXXIII Hunyadi or Ungarische – Hungarians
XXIX and XXX Russische – Soviet PoWs
XXXI Böhmen-Mähren – Volksdeutsche recruits from Czechoslovakia
XXXII 30 Januar – Balts from Courland
For more details, see Norman Davies, Europe: A History, Oxford University Press, 1996.
It should be immediately apparent that the men in these units would have had very different reasons for joining the Waffen-SS. While the ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) and, say, the Hungarians may have shared many or all of the tenets of Nazi supremacist ideology, including anti-Semitism, it is much less clear that this would have been the case for some of the others. For instance, the soldiers in the Galizien Division (called the Halychyna Division in Ukrainian) almost certainly saw themselves primarily as fighting against Soviet communism and its expansionism, and for an independent Ukraine, not for the Nazis. The same could be said of the Latvians, for example, who were justifiably fearful of the Soviet Union destroying their short-lived pre-War independence (as, of course, was to happen): veterans, their families and supporters marched last week in Riga to commemorate the Latvian Legion, sparking the annual controversy as to whether they were nationalist freedom fighters or Nazi sympathisers. Among the men in the two Russische Divisions, joining may have been an alternative to languishing in prison camps, or a matter of compulsion.
In these circumstances, it is best not to rush to make value judgements if, during the course of your family history research, you discover that a grandfather, or an uncle, fought in one of these Divisions, as it is not possible to know with any confidence what his underlying motivations may have been at the time.
Up to six million civilians are thought to have been displaced within the Russian Empire between 1914 and 1917. Up to 30% of the inhabitants of Russian cities in wartime were refugees: places like Ekaterinoslav, Kharkiv, Kiev, Nizhny Novgorod, Pskov, Rostov and Samara, received tens of thousands of displaced persons. Refugees flooded into central, black earth and Volga basin gubernia, while many others crossed the Urals into Siberia, or found themselves deposited in Tashkent or elsewhere in Central Asia.
There were three broad types of refugee.
Firstly, there were refugees who fled the advancing German army as it threatened and occupied the Russian territory on which they lived.
Secondly, the Russian military authorities evacuated the population in the path of advancing German forces and as the Russian army was forced to retreat, usually operating a scorched earth policy to prevent resources (manpower, settlements, farms, crops) falling into enemy hands and transporting livestock and machinery behind their own lines to assist the war effort. This pattern also applied to Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, which the Russian army occupied in 1914 but was then forced to withdraw from: Austrian subjects either fled or were evacuated to the Russian interior.
Given the rapid advance of the Germans through the lands of what are today Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine, these first two types of refugee merge one into the other: if the population did not flee the Prussian military machine, they were evacuated by the Russians. Neither type can be said to have migrated voluntarily; both were displaced in response to irresistible forces. Nearly all found themselves with limited or no means of support by the time they arrived at their destinations in Russia.
As men of fighting age had often been conscripted into the Russian army already, the refugees of these two types were overwhelmingly the women, children and elderly.
The third type of refugee formed a tiny minority. This was the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie who were able to escape to the Russian interior in a more pre-planned way, making their own private transport arrangements and reaching the relative safety and comfort of a major city such as Moscow or St Petersburg. Even those who started out with money might find themselves in reduced circumstances as the war wore on for years without resolution.
Given their origin, most of the refugees were non-Russian. they were, for example, Jews (never trusted by the Russian army command), Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and Ukrainians (not to mention German subjects of Russia, who were deported as soon as possible to the interior, often to Siberia or Central Asia, for reasons of national security). Where possible, the different peoples tended to form their own refugee communities in Russia and this was one of the various factors which crystallised national consciousness and precipitated demands for independence in their homelands in the wake of the War.
In all likelihood, any genealogist whose family history lies in the borderlands of the Russian Empire either occupied by the German army or regarded as a military zone by the Russian army during the years 1914 to 1917 is likely to find their family history research disrupted. Black holes in the documentary evidence are probable; family timelines will appear obscure. Births, marriages and deaths may not have taken place in the expected village or town of origin but somewhere along the long route that the refugees travelled into Russia, or at one or more of the places at which they were temporarily stationed or settled. In conditions of wartime poverty, hunger and disease, untold numbers of refugees died great distances from home and the family historian may never be able to identify when or where such deaths took place and were registered (if, indeed, they were registered at all). Instead, you will find no trace of a death which you know must have taken place, or of the birth or baptism of a child you know to have been born, in these years. The war was also a period of family rupture: even when a nuclear family unit did not become separated during the chaos, the more extended family is likely to have become dispersed to different locations and there cannot have been many families where one or men of fighting age were not conscripted and separated from the families for years.
So this is one of the frequent challenges of Eastern European family history research. You cannot apply without reservation what you know from your experience of undertaking genealogical research in Australia, or Canada, or New Zealand, or UK, or USA. You should expect discontinuities in the family timeline and gaps in the surviving documentary record. You may never know where key family members were at certain dates. But the challenges are one of the many reasons why family history research in Eastern Europe is so interesting and rewarding, as each breakthrough does not come with the relative ease and certainty with which you may be accustomed from undertaking your research in the English-speaking world.
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.
In 1989, the writer Gregor von Rezzori returned to the place of his birth for the first time since 1936.
He had been born into the elite caste of the pre-WW1 Austro-Hungarian civil service, in which his father served as a supervisor and administrator of the Romanian Orthodox Church estates and monasteries in Bukovina. In the remodelled post-War world, Romania acquired Bukovina and the former Austrian governing class there became déclassé. The von Rezzori family was among the minority which stayed on, residing in Czernowitz (now officially Cernăuţi), the capital of Bukovina, where Gregor himself had been born in 1914 and lived as a boy. Although he attended a boarding school in Braşov (Kronstadt) in Transylvania, and dwelt subsequently in Vienna, Bucharest, Berlin and Firenze, he continued to think of himself as a Czernowitzer.
Of course, much had happened in the intervening 50 years before von Rezzori returned to his birthplace, now called Chernivtsi. Bukovina had been bisected in 1940. Its top half, including Cernăuţi, was ceded by Romania to the Soviet Union and the transfer of territory was confirmed after the War. From that date, Chernivtsi ceased to be a provincial capital and became a town of little moment on the periphery of Ukraine.
To his surprise, upon his return von Rezzori finds the city largely intact – of major landmarks, only the synagogue had been destroyed, inevitably razed by the Nazis during their occupation in 1941 – and in good repair. There was the inevitable and ubiquitous urban sprawl of high-rise apartment blocks where once the city had almost imperceptibly merged into the surrounding countryside. What appeared to von Rezzori to have changed was the character of the city:
“My hometown gained world fame as the melting pot for dozens of ethnic groups, languages, creeds, temperaments and customs… Nothing could be detected now of the restlessly vivacious, cynically bold and melancholically sceptical spirit that had distinguished the children of this town and made them known and famous throughout the world as Czernowitzers… the spirit of Czernowitz was due to the unique propinquity and juxtaposition of the Bukovina’s multiplicity of populations” (The Snows of Yesteryear, trans HF Broch de Rothermann, New York Review Books, 2009).
Czernowitz has been “cleansed of its hodgepodge of Swabian Germans, Romanians, Poles, Jews, Prussians, Slovaks and Armenians… The motley ethnic variegation had been replaced by a homogeneous breed of people…. These were Ukrainians. In the old days we called them Ruthenians, one of the many minorities in a place where there was no majority”.
Of course, von Rezzori views Chernivtsi through eyes that might not distinguish between a local Ukrainian with deep Bukovina roots and a modern Hutsul, or between western Ukrainians and the Soviet era immigrants from central and eastern Ukraine foreign to Bukovina. However, the great diversity of the city, the outcome of centuries of organic growth and the occasional jolts of conflict, has gone. Like L’viv, like Vilnius, like other cities of the borders and contact zones of Eastern Europe, Chernivtsi lost something irreplaceable during the history of the 20th century.
Novorossiya, New Russia, was the name given to the southern steppe region of the Russian Empire which comprised the gubernia of Kherson, Taurida and Ekaterinoslav and, where colonists were invited to settle and develop the land in the 18th and 19th centuries. Settlers came from across Russia and Ukraine, of course, but there were also significant numbers of Germans, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Moldavians and Swiss, among others.
The Greeks of New Russia were concentrated on the western side of the Sea of Azov, in a cluster of 24 large villages in the Mariupol district, and were granted citizenship in 1779. Here they grew tobacco and cabbages, raised livestock, kept taverns and ran shops. As traders in a multi-ethnic environment, many Greeks spoke one or more of Russian, Turkish and Tatar as well as Greek. Marriages were contracted young (grooms were typically 17 or 18, brides often 14 or even younger) and families large.
In other towns on the northern Black Sea coast such as Anapa, and around the Crimea, they were also successful merchants, builders and ship-owners. The numbers of Greeks in the Russian Empire increased steadily throughout the 19th century, partly because of the creeping territorial expansion of the Empire and especially due to the conflicts between Russia and Turkey in 1828/29, 1853-56 and 1877/78: many Pontic Greeks living in the Ottoman Empire withdrew with the Russian forces to avoid reprisals at the hands of Turkish forces.
However, under the Soviet Union, the multi-national character of New Russia, which now fell largely within the Ukrainian SSR, was systematically destroyed by Stalin. The Greeks came to be regarded as counter-revolutionary: they were capitalists, they were too attached to their own culture, and many were suspect as they held Greek identity papers which the Greek government had made available to Greeks living in the diaspora after WW1. From 1936, and again after WW2, deportations led to virtually the entire Greek community of the former New Russia region, up to 240,000, eventually being forcibly removed to Siberia and Central Asia.
There was some movement back after the death of Stalin in 1953 but the process did not gather momentum until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when many of the Greek villages formed by the deportees were abandoned. There are still sizeable Greek communities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and in towns such as Anapa in Russia and the now Ukrainian Mariupol (which recorded 21,923 in 2002), but most of those able to leave the former USSR headed to mainland Greece.
Pontic Greek family history research in Russia and Ukraine is inevitably complicated by this history, as it is also by the often parlous state of some regional state archives and the difficulty of accessing such records as survive. However, if you would like an opinion on the prospects of success, please write to Bluebird Research with an outline of the information you have and we will respond as soon as we can.
There were scarcely 19 years of peace in interwar Lwów, between September 1920 and September 1939. Ironically, the city which had been at the forefront of Polish national and cultural activism during the long years of partitioned Poland became somewhat peripheral now that the country was united and independent. Its prestige declined. From having been Lemberg, the capital of the self-governing Austro-Hungarian crownland of Galicia and the fifth largest city of the Empire (behind Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Trieste), it became Lwów, one of many satellite cities within the orbit of the Polish capital Warsaw. And of course the ambitious and the unemployed, students and professional elites, now gravitated towards Warsaw.
There were three national communities in the city. During the Austrian era, from 1772 to the Great War, the authorities counted the population by religion rather than nationality, as, to a greater or lesser extent, an empire exists by denial of nationality or at least of national expression.
Between 51% and 53% of the city’s inhabitants were Roman Catholic. These were overwhelmingly Poles, with a very small minority of Austrians and assimilated Germans and Armenians (although a separate Armenian Catholic Church still functioned in Lwów).
18% or 19% were Greek Catholics, who were rusyny or Ruthenians, and increasingly identified themselves as Ukrainians as the 19th century advanced and the community’s national consciousness awakened.
27% or 28% were Jewish. The Jews of Lwów had traditionally resided in two designated areas and continued to do so even after regulations were relaxed in 1867. The first area comprised a largely affluent and assimilated community in the neighbourhood of three streets in the old town: ul Żdowska, Ruska and Zarwańska. The second area was a more working class and religiously Orthodox Jewish community in the Krakowskie and Żółkiewskie suburbs.
These three large national communities interacted and shared certain common aspirations during the era of Austrian rule, despite the irreconcilable incompatibility of Polish and Ukrainian national claims to the city and despite a wide range of internal differences. For instance, the Jewish community included assimilationists and Polish nationalists; Zionists; Bundists and communists; and largely apolitical Orthodox Jews. The Jews appear to have least frequently intermarried with the other two communities: it seems probable that intermarriage was restricted to those who not only assimilated but also converted to Catholicism. However, marriage between the Polish Roman Catholics and Ukrainian Greek Catholics was not unusual.
It has been calculated that 16% of pre-WW1 marriages were mixed*. This needs to be placed in context of the respective sizes of the two communities. For instance, in 1900 there were 82,590 Roman Catholics and 29,327 Greek Catholics in Lwów. When this numerical imbalance is factored in, it means that one in three Poles may have been marrying a Ukrainian. Mixed marriages declined after Galicia became part of independent Poland and tensions between Poles and Ukrainians increased, but even in the 1920s mixed marriages are estimated at 8%.
These figures are salutary. History is necessarily written in generalisations with only occasional references to individuals by way of exemplification. The reality for individuals is granular and subject to infinite degrees and gradations of experience. In pre-Soviet era Lwów, there may well have been some “pure” Polish and Ukrainian families but it would not be surprising for family history research to demonstrate or suggest otherwise.
*Estimates of intermarriage are by Lidia Zyblikiewicz, cited in Philipp Ther’s “War Versus Peace” (Harvard Ukrainian Studies XXIV (1/4) 2000).
Records for the different communities in Lemberg / Lwów / L’viv are today found in L’viv and Warsaw. Bluebird Research offers professional family history research services in L’viv, across Ukraine and Poland, and would be delighted to undertake genealogical research on behalf of anyone with Jewish, Polish or Ukrainian – or mixed! – ancestry from the region.
The first and largest wave of Ukrainian emigrants to North America took place between 1891 and the outbreak of War in 1914. These were almost exclusively economic migrants and, of course, chain migrants: both pioneers and those friends and family who followed them learning of their success. To generalise, these Ukrainians emigrated to rural regions of Canada (an estimated 171,000 to the lands of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan) and urban centres of USA (maybe 250,000 in number).
It is important to understand that these early Ukrainian Canadians came from the most distant provinces of Austro-Hungary – from Galicia and Bukovina. On contemporary records – pre-War passenger lists, immigration records, land settlement records and censuses – they are therefore likely to be described as Ruthenians from Austria. Galicia is now split west-east between Poland and Ukraine, while Bukovina is now divided north-south between Ukraine and Romania. Almost without exception, therefore, these Canadian immigrants hailed from what is today western Ukraine, not from the central Kyiv area or eastern (so-called Left-Bank) Ukraine. They were unRussian.
Ruthenians from Galicia were invariably Greek Catholics and, where literate, wrote using the Latin rather than the Cyrillic alphabet found in eastern Ukraine and Russia. There was no tradition of the use of patronymics now common throughout Ukraine. Their names may have been recorded in parish registers in Latin or Polish spellings: you can safely assume that Latin Joannes and Polish Jan was known to his nearest and dearest as Ivan. Of course, he may also show up as Iwan, reflecting Polish orthography, and once arrived in North America is likely to have become John.
For Canadian descendants of this first wave of immigrants (which had started as early as the 1870s but gained real momentum in the closing decade of the century), there are some tremendous ready-made resources available. Among these are the compendiums of Vladimir Kaye known as Dictionary of Ukrainian Canadian Biography. Mr Kaye produced three of these: Alberta and Manitoba were published, while (as far as I am aware) the volume for Saskatchewan remains in manuscript only. There are 941 entries in the Manitoba book. Here is an abbreviated extract from one:
YASKIW, Maksym, born 1853 in Rostayna, district Yaslo, Galicia, Austria, died 7 September 1911 in Rossburn. Wife Eudokia (Dora) born 1856 died 6 February 1942 at Rossburn. Children on landing: Vladimir 10, Yurko 16, Petro 8, Hanka 14. Arrived in Canada on SS Phoenicia, landing at Halifax 21 May 1899.
Rostayna and Yaslo are respectively Rostajne and Jasło in Polish and are situated in the far SE of the country. In 1900, the year after Makysm sailed to Canada, Rostajne comprised 63 houses and an almost exclusively Greek Catholic population of 366, according to the official Austrian gazetteer for Galizien.
Another excellent resource for Canadians beginning their Ukrainian family history is Ukrainians In Alberta, published in 1975 by the Ukrainian Pioneers’ Association of Alberta, which gives fuller biographies, often one or two pages’ long and with accompanying family photographs.
Bluebird Research is happy to offer assistance with family history research in both Poland and Ukraine and would be delighted to help and advise you investigate your family’s Galicia roots.