Many Jews moved to Odesa in the nineteenth century--including Jews from quite a distance away from Odesa itself. Jews came to Odesa not only from all over the Russian Empire, but also from Austria-Hungary (including many from Galicia), Romania and the Ottoman Empire. That means that even if you have no known ancestry from Odesa, it's quite possible that you have other branches of your family that moved there. And these days it's easier than ever to find these branches.
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| Birth of Yosef Sanshuck, Odesa, 1916--his father was registered in Krasne, now Krasnoye, Ukraine |
But just because a family with a common surname lives in Odesa, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're related to you. As an example, I've identified multiple independent Dimant familes in Odesa in the late 1800s, but only one of those families is related to my Dimants.
JewishGen has recently indexed Jewish Odesa metrical (vital) records, which means that you don't need to read through thousands of pages manually in hopes of finding a relative. However, only names have been indexed from the original records, not other information that may be in the original, including the individuals' town of registration. This is the information that could help you determine if a Dimant (or you research equivalent) is one of your Dimants or from an entirely unrelated family.
Use JewishGen's Unified Search (or the Ukraine-specific search if you have Value Added Services) and search for your surname of interest in the town of Odesa. If you get results, first look at the birth/marriage/death results, and from there, you can click on each result to see the original image.
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| Subset of results for searching for Diamants in Odesa. Note where you can click to see each image. |
Above are two of many results I get when searching for potential Diamant relatives in Odesa. But how to know if either of these (or both or neither) is related to me?
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| Births of Moshe (left) and Leizer Volf (right) Diamant. Odesa, 1906 |
In the above images, Moshe (on the left) was born to a father registered in the town of Makhnovka (now Makhnivka), near Vinnitsa. Leizer-Volf (on the right) was born to a father registered in the town of Kiselin, near Lutsk. Well, my Diamant family was also registered in Kiselin! So this is one that would be worth investigating. (I actually was initially tipped off to this record because of a DNA match which connected me to my father's half second cousin from a branch we hadn't realized survived the Holocaust, but I used this technique to go through all of the indexed Diamants in Odesa and found several other relatives' vital events recorded as well.)
I've also found relatives from my Zubkis family (registered in Kuna, near Vinnitsa), my Sanshuck family (as seen in the first image above, registered in Krasnoye, near Vinnitsa), and my Marienhoff family (registered all the way up in Goldingen, now Kuldīga, Latvia). Some of the branches not related to me were from what was then Galicia or the Ottoman Empire.
If you have a less common name (like Zubkis or Sanshuck, for example), I'd encourage you to look at all of the results, not just those from Odesa, and see if each family in the results was registered in the same town as your branch. But if you have a common name like Diamant (or Goldberg or Cohen, or....), try narrowing your search down to large cities such as Odesa and you may find a new-to-you branch. And those towns of registration can help tip you off to whether there's possibly an Odesa connection.
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