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.
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| Record found via DuckArchive |
There are many places to potentially find citations for records in Ukrainian archives. One such example of Miriam Weiner's RoutesToRoots Foundation site. While this site doesn't include every Jewish-specific collection in Ukraine's (and other Eastern European archives), it's a really good start. In addition, many archives have been putting finding aids online, which give the specific location of various records within that branch's collection, although the actual records often aren't linked and may not have been digitized.
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| Location for record set (from RTRFoundation) |
So how would I know if the above record set has been digitized already and if so, where it is hosted? Duck Archive is here to help! Start by going to https://inspector.duckarchive.com/search. You can then use your browser (this words in Chrome and Firefox, at a minimum) to auto-translate if you can't read the Ukrainian.
Use the pull-down menu to choose the appropriate archive (here I want the State Archive of Volhynia Oblast) and then fill out the numbers from the archive location. You can fill out only some of the fields to get everything in a specific fond, fond/opus, or simply ask for all of the possibilities. I'll look to see if the first citation is available online in this example:
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| Sample results |
In the above example, there are actually two separate scans for the first book mentioned in the above RTR Foundation results--one on FamilySearch and one on Wikisource. You click on one (or both) links to see scans of the original record. In some cases, one scan may be higher fidelity than the other, so it's always worth checking on all instances.
So look at RTR, look at finding aids on each archive's site, and then use Duck Archive. And hopefully you'll find that the records you need are already available online. And if they're not there yet, keep checking back, as more and more records are coming online nearly daily.
Happy searching!
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Lara, thanks so much for writing about my website. In addition to archive inventories, at my website, you can search the Image Database by town name, search the Map Database & the Holocaust Database by town name; also, you can search the Surname Database via Standard Search & OCR. Please see the News Alert on Home Page for info about new collections. I love your step-by-step guidance on how to use my website -- yet another approach! Thank you again!!!! Miriam
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