Felix Archive's Foreigner Files--Including Photos for People From Across Europe

A blog reader (John Durkan) reached out to me to see if I'd ever used Felix Archive's site with Foreigner Files.  I had not, and since this site is out of Antwerp, I never would have thought to look at it given my family's roots being much further east.  But he pointed out how many entries there were for Polish people (40,000, mostly Jewish), so I started looking what it might have for my non-Polish family.  And based on what I've found, this is a site that all of you should look at, no matter where your family lived in Europe.  I found documents, many including photos, some of people who were later killed in the Holocaust.  The documents are rich with genealogical information.

Antwerp Alien File for Mechel Feig

FamilySearch's Full-Text Search

This is a reminder to myself to always check back on resources periodically to see if there's more that has been added--either feature-wise or the underlying data.  I'd played around with FamilySearch's Full Text Search when it first came out, but for someone who didn't have ancestors in the United States before the twentieth century, it wasn't very helpful.  But Amy Cohen recently posted on her blog about a success she'd have.  I was still skeptical given that Amy's family had come to America much earlier than mine, but I was pleasantly surprised that it found records that were not indexed and which I hadn't found before.

Adoption Record for Jacob Soupcoff, 1904.  Via FamilySearch's Full Text Search

Ukrainan Online Records - Use the Duck!

More and more records from Ukrainian archives are being scanned and made accessible online, but they are not all consolidated in one place.  This means that if you have a particular citation within a branch of an archive in Ukraine, you may not realize it's already been scanned and is easily accessible for you from home.  But there's a portal that has made finding online records much more straightforward.

Record found via DuckArchive

New Resource to Find Holocaust Survivors--Often With Family Information

Ancestry recently added two new data sets (with data from the Arolsen Archives but much more nicely indexed and user-friendly to search) that document Holocaust survivors--and sometimes their relatives who didn't survive (including mothers' maiden names).  (As that these are part of the Holocaust collection, they do not require a subscription--but do require a free Ancestry account.)  But there are also some peculiarities with the search functionality when searching for towns of origin.  So what can you potentially find--and how would you search?  And how do you make sure you're not missing critical records because the searches you're using aren't catching what you think they would?

List of "Returning Deportees from Subcarpathian Ukraine."  This list includes mother's full maiden name as well as survivors' birth years.  Searching by mother's maiden name returns this document as well.

Polish Schoolchildren's Signatures - Now Searchable!

I wrote the following back in a 2018 post:

Anyone who had family in what was Poland of 1926 (which includes parts of modern-day Ukraine and Lithuania, as well as much of modern-day Poland and parts of what used to be Russian Empire, Galicia, Czechoslovakia and East Prussia among others) needs to be aware of an incredible resource hosted by the Library of Congress.

In 1926, in honor of America's 150th anniversary of independence, Polish schoolchildren wrote their signatures in "admiration and friendship for the United States."  Children of all religions participated--Jewish names are interspersed with Ukrainian, Polish, and Czech children's names. 

At that time, you had to use a relatively manual process to find pages from a particular town and then search through that town's pages in hopes of finding relatives.  But a reader named John recently commented on that post and pointed me (and now you!) to a site that has made this resource wonderfully searchable.  I've played around with it, and here's how you can as well!

Page of signatures from schoolchildren in Horochow, Poland (now Horochiv, Ukraine), 1926

Spelling Doesn't Matter in Genealogy (Still)

People tend to get hung up on a particular spelling of an ancestral surname as being the only way a particular branch of the family would have spelled that name.  They may even disregard records for individuals who are actually relatives because of the way a name was spelled.  But while these days people have a set way in which they spell their surnames--and their given names--in prior generations this wasn't a huge concern.

I've shown with examples in a previous post that even within the same record the same surname could be spelled differently.  Here's another example of where different versions of the same record give different spellings for both surnames and given names.

1864 Jewish births for Budfalu, Hungary (now Budești, Romania) - Version 1

Yom HaShoah 2025

Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) starts this evening.  For the past eight years, I have listed the names of the family members I've found who were murdered in the Holocaust.  In 2020, I listed 454 relatives.  In 2021, I listed 515.  In 2022, I listed 642.  In 2023, I listed 916.  In 2024, I listed 990.  And this year I list 1023.

Every year, this list grows as I find new branches of my family--and then find that multiple members of those branches were killed between 1941 & 1945.  This year I found 33 more people--and many other relatives whose fates are as yet unclear.

Publishing this yearly list is my one small way to make sure they are all remembered--all 1023 of those currently on this list.

Front Row L-R: Yosef Wollich, Mendel Chechman, Devorah Chechman; Back Row L-R: Sara Fine Wollich, Moshe Wollich, Chaike Chechman.  All were murdered in the Holocaust