(To see everything from my Ukraine trip, see
here.)
On Monday, I decided to see what I could find in Vinnitsa Archives.
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| Vinnitsa Archives by night |
First, we had to get permission to enter the archives; presenting my passport garnered me a one-day researcher pass.
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| My one-day researcher pass |
We then went up several flights to the research room. There were two people behind a desk--and tantalizingly behind them was a room filled with old record books.
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| Lots of record books! |
I already have many records from my towns of interest in the area, so I wasn't sure what else I'd find. But the archive had a Word document listing record sets that had been in the Kamenets-Podolski archive's fire but which had been restored and recently-released to the Khmelnitski archive branch. And among the records on the list were vital records for Kuna, where my Zubkis family lived. So that gave another avenue for future exploration. (No, I couldn't get a copy of the Word document, and Khmelnitski wasn't on my planned itinerary.)
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| Looking at titles of various record books |
We looked through a book that the archives had which contained a very high-level summary of some of their holdings. After Alex pointed out items that might be of interest, we used the archive's computer system to get more detail about what various fonds actually held (most of which were still pretty high-level descriptions). We put in a request for some books that looked interesting--and we were told that they'd be available for viewing in 5 business days. Alex explained the distance I had traveled, and they then said that they would have some of the books available at 3PM that day.
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| Vinnitsa Archives Reading Room |
Meanwhile, some of the books have already been digitized (but are only available on the archive's local servers). So Alex and I looked through some vital record books from Yampol, a large town in the same district as Krasnoye. (And since the records were in both Russian and Hebrew, we could divide up the work--Alex took the first half of the book and scanned through the Russian entries, and I looked through the second half at the Hebrew versions of the entries.) I did find one potential record of interest.
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| 1892 marriage of Moshe (son of Gedalia) Brantman |
I found an 1892 marriage of Moshe (son of Gedalia) Brantman. He may or may not be connected to my Krasnoye Brandmans.
After a lunch break with some city touring (which will be covered in the next trip post), we went back to the archives and found that some of our requested books had arrived.
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| Death Record Book |
The books were old and some had torn sections. We were able to handle them by hand (with no need for gloves). Of the three books that they brought, only one ended up having Jewish records. I went through about half of the book with no matches for my surnames.
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| Lots of Record Books! |
Some more modern (late 1800s) Kuna records had been scanned. While I knew my branch of the Zubkis family had left Kuna by the 1870s, I thought that perhaps I would find some relatives left in the town. I went through all of the records that they had (all death records), but there was not a Zubkis to be found. Kuna was definitely a small town; some years there were no deaths recorded.
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| Scanning through record books |
More trip posts to come! The next post will cover the city of Vinnitsa and the trip towards the Carpathian Mountains.
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Thoroughly enjoying reading about your trip. You are living my dream!
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