The ancient history of Jewish settlement in the Crimea (in Russian, “Krym”) dates back over 2,000 years to the time of the Bosporan Kingdom, a Roman client state (438 BC-370 AD). From the eighth to the tenth centuries, the Crimea fell […]
Resources to Find Any Location in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Similar Resources for Imperial Russia and Imperial Germany
The three large 19th-century European empires—Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia—all collapsed either during, or as a result of, World War I. New countries and altered boundaries emerged, often with different names or different spellings of geographical locations. Fortunately, finding aids for […]
Book Review: Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, by Benjamin Nathans
Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, by Benjamin Nathans, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xvii + 424 pp. $26.95. At a recent genealogy society meeting, someone commented that her ancestor had lived in St. Petersburg […]
Bibliography for Records of the Former Soviet Union
At the IAJGS conference in Los Angeles, July 2010, Professor Benjamin Nathans presented a report on the archives of the former Soviet Union. As part of his talk, Professor Nathans distributed the following list of sources. His book, Beyond the […]
Odessa Dreams
I dream of Odessa, not the modern city, but the way it was just over a century ago, when my mother Florence Granofsky Arkin’s family still lived there. In his novel, The Five, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky poured out his feelings […]
How the Virtual Shtetl Project’s Website Can Help Genealogists
Much has been written about the Virtual Shtetl Project, but no detailed discussion of what this project can do for genealogy researchers has appeared until now.1 The website www.shtetl.org.pl/ has many resources for genealogists interested in researching the Jews of […]
Wine Goblets Reunite Cousins
About ten years ago, I noticed on an early 1900’s birth record from Ukraine a notation in the margin indicating that a copy of the document had been issued in 1963. I still remember the significance and excitement of this […]
Book Review: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. 2 vols, by Alexander Beider.
Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. 2 vols, by Alexander Beider. Avotaynu, 2008. $118.00. To order: http://www.avotaynu.com/books/DJSRE2.htm When the first edition of Alexander Beider’s massive Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire came out in […]
The 1897 All-Empire Russian Census
The 1897 All-Empire Russian Census was the first and only census conducted in the Russian Empire prior to World War II. Its major interest and value both for personal genealogy and for the history of Jewish communities is that the […]
Jewish Surnames Adopted in Various Regions of the Russian Empire
This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the IAJG Conference in Chicago, August 18, 2008—Ed. Generally speaking, it is relatively easy to distinguish Sephardic surnames from Ashkenazic surnames. For example, if one sees two lists, the […]
Bringing the “Great Terror” Home
Family stories had Mowshe (Morris) Rosenfeld coming from “Minsk, Pinsk, Russia.” As my research progressed, I learned from Morris’ ship’s passenger list that he had, in fact, come from a place called Turovo. Slownik Geograficzny Krolestwo Poliskich, the multi-volume, standard […]
From Russia and Back—Full Circle in 99 Years
Unlike most of those who emigrated from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century, my grandfather did speak quite a bit about the family he left behind. My father and his brother tended to roll their eyes when […]
Jewish History as Reflected in the Documents of the State Archives of Odessa Region
A variant of this article appears on the Internet at http://www.rtrfoundation.org/Odessa.html. The State Archives of the Odessa Region (GAOO), one of the large-scale archives in southern Ukraine, holds 13,110 fonds (collections) with 2.2 million files, the majority in […]