If you can not find your ancestors
Every person who tried to search his ancestors at Ukraine know that sometimes it is very complicated to find something at Ukrainian archives. So, why it is so difficult to find something regarding Jewish Genealogy at Ukraine? Now we will try to answer.
There several difficulties with the Ukrainean archives:
1. Every 50 years Ukraine has changed its border. Some areas were added, some of them were cut off. And each time these processes begin the archives started to transfer documents from one archive to another and in the process they are either lost or documents in one locality could be in three different archives at the same time.
2. But that’s not all – Jews often hid from audits for various reasons and so even if your family tradition has preserved information about the original settlement, not the fact that your ancestors definitely are in this census.
3. Among other things, the Jews frequently change their names. And in the process of emigration abroad, and just in the process of migration to the Russian Empire. It can also be that during the citizenship of another country indicates the place to which they were assigned, and in which they received foreign passport. And in fact, the family could live for many years in the other place.
In particular, on the photo of the Rakita family population census you can see that despite the fact that the head of the family Leib Rakita 54 years of age was born in Pokatilov he is still a philistine of Belaya Tserkov. As well as your relatives could accidentally during the population census process be in another town as seen at the next photo. And despite the fact that in their locality census did not survive, they, however, left their trace in history.
So you need to be very careful about the questionnaire and read them in full, and not just look at the name of the house owner. And if you analyze all the information in it, you can get a lot of indirect information. That is why when you order research it is desirable to look to the nearby towns too.
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About the author
Professional Jewish Genealogy researcher at Ukraine. Works together with his wife Nadia Lipes. More than 5 years of experience. Executive director, SEO and founder of www.jewua.info
