Although Armenian settlement in this region historically dates back many hundreds of years, the current population of the small towns and villages in Javakhk generally descends from Armenians displaced from Ottoman Turkey circa 1829/30. Many came from Erzurum province, with a minority from other districts such as Ardahan, Kars and Van. As Erzurum was also the source of many emigrants around the turn of the 19th/20th century, this means that many Armenians both in the Republic and in the diaspora may well have kin residing in Georgia.

The footnotes of periodical articles are often worth looking at carefully, as they give suggestions for further reading and may indicate sources unknown to you. This article is no exception. For example, the Jewish genealogical record collection of the Gesamtarchiv der Deutsche Juden, mentioned in my blog as being appropriated by the Nazi genealogical authorities, was microfilmed by the Nazis. A copy of that film of over 3,400 German Jewish registers, Fogg notes, was obtained by what is now the Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. You can read more on the Gatermann Collection, as it is known, on the Israel Genealogical Society’s webpage.

Firstly, Belgian genealogist Marie Cappert had a little space offering professional research services in France and the Low Countries – she can be contacted at hist.defamilles@gmail.com.  

Although one should never underestimate the diaspora communities, such as the long-standing Polish and Russian ones, in France and Belgium, of more immediate relevance to those with Eastern European roots is Kresy-Siberia, which seemed to be attracting definite interest. The organisation endeavours to increase awareness of the Polish role in the British armed forces (especially the air force) during WW2 and the subsequent resettlement of tens of thousands of Polish ex-servicemen in the British Isles, as well as the story of the earlier military and civilian evacuation of Poles from the Soviet Union via Iran and East Africa. Polish genealogy is booming in post-Communist Poland as well as in diaspora and the availability of online information is increasing, although it remains the case that it is essential to know, or to be able to discover, the exact place of origin of an ancestor before one can research meaningfully in Poland or in the pre-WW2 Polish territories now in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. 

While at Who Do You Think You Are? Live, I also had the opportunity to speak with the always helpful volunteers at the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain stand, and with the Sephardic expert Schelly Talalay Dardashti, who was both speaking at the event and helping to staff the My Heritage stand. One of Schelly’s special interests is Sephardic Jewry from the former Ottoman and Persian Empires. Much of the former community in modern Iran and Iraq has of course left and now lives in diaspora. Getting Jewish genealogical records or information out of Iran in particular is a literally hazardous business – the Iranian state regards world Jewry as an extension of Israel and any Jewish genealogical research in Iran as a political act. This makes any research within Iran tantamount to subversion, and therefore too contentious and risky to be engaged in by anyone resident within the country on behalf of foreigners. There are, however, possibilities for Armenian research in Iran, at least through the Armenian Apostolic Church authorities (not through the Iranian civil registration or state archive system), which Bluebird Research has been investigating in recent months. However, it remains the case that any genealogical research in Iran will be slow-moving, protracted, and carry only limited prospects of success.

Yezidis also live in the main town Afrin (also known as Efrîn) and in other Kurdish settlements in the area.

I have just finished reading Henry Fanshawe Tozer’s Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor, which was published originally in 1881 but is now widely available as a scanned print-on-demand volume (my own copy is from Elibron Classics, which has a nice range of historic travel writings). Tozer’s name alone is surely enough to identify him as a Victorian gent with an interest in the classics and antiquities. More specifically, he was a graduate of Oxford, a clerk in holy orders, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His main intellectual sphere of interest was Greece and the decaying Ottoman Empire. 

Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor was the fruit of Tozer’s travels from July to September 1879, in other words very shortly after the famine of 1874 and the Russo-Turkish war of 1877/78. His book is interesting from a number of different perspectives – as a testament to a type of 19th century English gentleman, now all but extinct, and their manners abroad; as a record of the distressed state of the region in the late 1870s; for its descriptions of places and peoples met along the way, including typical habitations and features of agriculture; and for oddities such as manna and fat-tailed sheep. 

To me it is also interesting for its definition of Armenia. I have tended to use fairly interchangeably the terms “Anatolia” and “Asia Minor” (which may be regarded respectively as Turkish and Greek concepts) to represent the entire geographical area of modern Turkey. Not so Tozer. For him, Asia Minor or Anatolia has a clear meaning; at a certain point travelling west to east, it gives way to Armenia; just as the latter segues into Kurdistan to the south and what might be called Pontus running along the southern seaboard of the Black Sea. More specifically, what separates Asia Minor from Armenia is the mountain range called the Anti-Taurus, or Aladağlar in Turkish. On the western side lie towns such as Kaiserieh (Turkish Kayseri) and Sivas which, although having an Armenian population as well as Turkish and Greek, are not in Armenia. Once you cross the Anti-Taurus you reach Armenia – ergo, the towns of Kharput (Turkish Elâzığ), Mush (Muş) and Erzeroum (Erzurum) are in Armenia. This is not to say that the towns are exclusively Armenian, for they were not – indeed, in Kharput, for example, Tozer estimates that there were only 500 Armenian households against up to 4,500 Turkish households. Rather, the towns were the outposts and centres of Ottoman rule; while the countryside was predominantly Armenian (Tozer writes that “the villages in the plain are almost entirely occupied by Armenians”) and here as everywhere it is the country which defines the national character of a region. Incidentally, many American-Armenians have immigrant ancestors who give “Kharput” (or a variant such as Harput, Kharberd, Kharpert etc) as their place of origin on passenger lists and manifests, petitions for naturalisation etc – it is important to exercise caution and not to assume that the ancestor was from the town itself rather than one of the multitude of Armenian villages in its catchment area. 

Even in Armenia by Tozer’s definition, the Armenians “do not form an absolute majority of the population”. As Tozer states, “bad government” has led to much emigration, amplified by the recent war which drove Turkish Armenians into Russian Armenia. Moreover, Circassians had settled in Armenia after fleeing the Russian Empire during and following the Russo-Circassian Wars, and Kurds were pushing north and occupying former Armenian villages, further affecting the balance of population. Nevertheless, by rights the Republic of Armenia today should extend west, a third of the way across eastern Turkey, to Kharput. That it does not is the fault of multiple factors, principle among them the 1915 Genocide but also including the successive abandonment of the Armenian people by all the victorious Allies and Soviet Russia after WW1.

Imagine if, more than 65 years after the fact, the German or Austrian state denied the Holocaust. It’s unthinkable. Although in neither case was the state apparatus entirely cleansed of Nazis and their sympathisers, responsibility for the Shoah was accepted, reparation was made, and laws enacted which make Holocaust denial a criminal offence (as the pea-brained British historian David Irving found out during his 13 months in an Austrian gaol).

Yet nearly 100 years have passed since the Turkish state, in its then guise of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, perpetrated the 1915 Genocide of the Armenians, and still the Turkish state, academia and society generally refuse not just to accept responsibility but even to acknowledge the historic fact of the Genocide.

The Ottoman Empire was corrupt and incompetent but at least it was multinational and, for the most part, despite systemic discrimination embodied in law, in practice it was not always intolerant of minorities and other races and religions within its borders. The modern Republic of Turkey, on the other hand, was built upon Turkish nationalist and supremacist foundations. Turkey has tried to cleanse its territory of other peoples, through violence, expulsion and coercion. After the Armenians and Greeks were neutralised in Turkey, the only really large minority group remaining on its territory are the Kurds, who retain their identity despite more than eight decades of Turkish state persecution. The Kurds do not yet have a state of their own, nor do they have influential friends in USA or elsewhere prepared to support their rights. However, one can expect this to happen in time and Turkey’s reaction then will be interesting. In the meantime, the centenary of the Armenian genocide approaches in 2015 and one can expect further and ever more strident denials emanating from Ankara.

* Unfortunately, a few weeks after the publication of the above blog post, it was reported that the French Constitutional Council refused to ratify the Bill to criminalise Armenian Genocide denial (28 February 2012).

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.

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.

Sites of destroyed villages will be added where they can be ascertained. These will be evident when the map is viewed at higher magnification – the settlement will often appear as if rubbed out and few if any traces may be visible on the satellite image.

In addition, the map shows some of the modern collective villages into which Yezidis (and others) were forced during the Baathist rule. Generally, the population of four or more villages were deported from their centuries-old traditional settlements in the mountains and rehoused in planned but usually poorly executed collectives on the plains. Sometimes the collective would be named after one of the source villages; alternatively, different quarters of the collective might be named after the razed mountain villages, with the former inhabitants of each living in the eponymous neighbourhoods.

Old and new names of the Yezidi settlements are given. Armenian script can be and is transliterated into the Latin alphabet in a number of different ways, and the map legend gives some variants as well the standard modern name form.

If a village is shown without comment, it means that it is understood to be a wholly Yezidi village, as is the case especially with the two clusters of villages in Aragatsotn province, respectively west of Talin and around Alagyaz.

Some of the ancient Yezidi places of habitation in Aragotsotn, especially those NE of Mount Aragats, have been claimed to date back to the 11th century (and certainly they date back to at least the 16th century). Others are of much more recent origin, having been settled during or after the second decade of the 20th century, when Yezidis fled oppression in Turkish lands in eastern Anatolia.

One old Yezidi village in the Marmarik valley has not been located exactly, nor its modern name ascertained. This is Soukh-Bulakh (or -Bulagh, the Turkic word for a spring), which appears in a 19th century Russian gazetteer as a small Yezidi settlement of 16 “hearths”. It is possible that the site has been abandoned.  Please contact us if you know the location of this village.

Bluebird Research would be pleased to hear from any family historians researching Yezidi ancestry.