Western Volhynia (Ukraine) Ancestors? Check This Out?

The United States Holocaust Museum Memorial (USHMM) has a great new research resource for those with ancestors from the part of Volynia that was intra-war Poland, particularly the area around Lutsk, Volhynia, Ukraine (then Łuck, Wołyń, Poland).  There are records for both Jews and non-Jews, and many of the records are pre-WWII.  And because this area was Poland at the time, names are written in Polish, so it is relatively easy for English speakers to navigate.

List of owners of private houses in the city of Łuck, 1930--Including my great-great Uncle Chaim Leib Diamant

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.

A Second Cousin Found - How DNA Helped a Holocaust Survivor Connect to My Family

My Diamond (formerly Diment) grandparents were Holocaust survivors.  My grandfather came to America with his two surviving siblings after his parents and two other siblings were killed in the Holocaust.  I've since managed to connect with descendants of two of his father's siblings--one because of a DNA match in which we learned that my grandfather's Aunt Shaindel had emigrated to Michigan rather than dying in the Holocaust like we'd thought, and then because of intensive paper-trail research where I found descendants of my grandfather's Uncle Leibish.  But now I have found descendants of one of my grandfather's half siblings, halfway across the world!  My father has a new-to-us half-second cousin, and a Holocaust survivor who lived most of her life in Ukraine (now living in Germany) who thought she had no relatives on her father's side has found out that she has a large family.

Email from MyHeritage about a new--and intriguing--match

Yom HaShoah 2024

Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) starts this evening.  For the past seven 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.  And this year I list 990.

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 74 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 990 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

Researching in the USHMM's Shappell Center

I recently spent time at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Shappell Center (located in Bowie, Maryland), finding documents relating to my relatives.  Before going, it's important to have done your homework, reserving materials and logging what you hope to find in each record set.  You'll have a set amount of time to do your research, so advance planning is critical to make sure you can get everything you want while there.

Remember, there are many record sets that are Holocaust-related, but there are also many record sets related to pre-war European Jewry (and some non-Jewish communities as well).

The Last Jewish Birth in Dulfalva

I've indexed records for many towns for JewishGen.  I feel like I get to know families, as I see their joyful events (marriages and births records) and sorrowful ones (death records) unfold over decades.  Now that records in Ukraine (which has a 75-year privacy law after which records are accessible) include vital events through 1945, I also see when Jewish life abruptly ended in some of these towns.

Last week, I was indexing records from the villages of Dulfalva, Hungary (now Dulovo, Ukraine) and Talaborfalva, Hungary (now Tereblya, Ukraine).  These two adjacent small villages' vital events were recorded in the same books.

The 1940s were tumultuous in the area, with some of the population's Jews being deported to Kamenets-Podolsk in 1941, and the area changed hands many times--from Czechoslovakia to Hungary to local rule to Hungary and then Germany's invasion.  This is reflected in the number of Jewish births each year:  1938 (10 births), 1939 (11 births), 1940 (10 births), 1941 (4 births), 1942 (1 birth), 1943 (2 births).  And then no Jewish births in 1944 or 1945 or thereafter.

Frida Laksz Birth, Dulfalva, July 1943

Yom Hashoah 2023

Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) starts this evening.  For the past six 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.  And this year I list 916.

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 274 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 916 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

Amazing Subcarpathian Records, Available Online

If you have family from what is now Zakarpattya Oblast, Ukraine, or from the areas immediately bordering (including towns in Romania, Slovakia and Hungary), there is an incredible newly-online resource available.  There are records for both Jews and non-Jews in this collection.  The predominant languages in the records are Hungarian and Slovakian, but there are also documents in Ukrainian, Yiddish, German, Romanian, and possibly more.  I'll talk about where these are from, the types of documents I've found so far, how to best navigate these records to find your family members' documents, as well as how to deal with records in foreign (to you) languages below.

Statement for Mendel Rutner (my 1C3R), as an industrialist, 1939 (page 2).  This second page asks for the paternal and maternal grandparents for both himself and his spouse. It also asks for their children's dates of birth

Hungarian Holocaust Survivors (And Other Yad Vashem Additions)

Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial, has been digitizing and indexing many Holocaust-related records and making them searchable by the public.  Their Pages of Testimony, where people memorialized relatives who were murdered during the war, have been searchable for a while and are an invaluable resource.  But even if you've looked at Yad Vashem's database of records in the past, it's definitely worth re-looking every so often because of the scope of record sets they've added.

One of their recent additions has been information about Hungarian Holocaust Survivors--including many that were from what is now Subcarpathian Ukraine (where my mother's mother's family originated)--which can help you identify relatives who survived the war.

Survivor Card for my 2nd cousin twice removed Samuel Ruttner/Fuchs

Ancestry's Concentration Camp Collection - Town Searches

Ancestry has a collection of records from concentration camps.  These records can help you learn the fate of relatives, or at least where they were for a period of time during WWII.  Some also have significant genealogical information--parents' names, spouses names (with maiden names for the mother and spouse, when applicable), and at times there are photos.  Not everyone who was in a concentration camp has records included in this collection (especially those who were murdered upon arrival), but many are.

While searching just for surnames can help you locate relatives, I've found that searching for town names--with some caveats--can often be even more powerful.

Concentration Camp Intake Form; David Ruttner (my 4th cousin twice removed)

80th Yahrtzeit of Senkevichivka Ghetto's Destruction--Details per my grandmother

Tonight into tomorrow (18th of Tishrei) marks the 80th anniversary of the destruction of the Senkevychivka Ghetto.  On that day, thousands of my paternal grandparents' relatives, friends and neighbors were murdered.  Among those were three of my great grandparents, a great-great grandfather, great aunts and uncles, and many other relatives.  My teenaged grandfather was out of the ghetto on that day on a work detail, but my grandmother was there.  I've transcribed her life story before (you can read her nine-part story here covering her life before and during the Holocaust).  But today I'm going to repeat the chapter about the ghetto's destruction, from her perspective. 

My grandmother is on the right, with her arm on her grandmother's shoulder.  Her younger sister Malia is to the right.  And her parents are in the center.  Her grandmother had died before the war.

Giving Them Names - Finding Names of Holocaust Victims

My grandmother was able to tell me about her mother's first cousin, Chaim Fine.  Chaim was killed in the Holocaust--as were his wife and their daughters.  But my grandmother couldn't remember the names of Chaim's wife and girls.  And after watching the Shoah Foundation video of one of her other cousins, he also just mentioned "Uncle Chaim and his children."  For more than three decades, Chaim's wife and daughters have been listed on my family tree as "Wife of Chaim Fine" and "Daughter1 of Chaim Fine," etc.  I've been able to identify and memorialize more distant relatives who were killed in the Holocaust, but these Fine cousins' names were just a huge gap.  But now I am able to give them names.

Fajn Family, 1932

Yom Hashoah 2022

Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) starts this evening.  For the past six 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.  And this year I list 642.

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 127 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 642 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

Family Reunited, 75+ Years After the Holocaust

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that I've done quite a bit of research on my Zubkis/Supkoff family.  The various branches of the Zubkis family moved quite a bit, generation by generation, and my particular branch ended up in what's now Shpikov, Ukraine, before coming to America.  In 1908, my great-great grandparents came to America, but I knew both from oral tradition and from records that my great-great grandfather had a brother Yosef/Yossel who had stayed in Shpikov.  Yossel had three sons who came to America in the 1920s, but we knew there were sisters who stayed behind in Russia and were killed in the Holocaust.  In fact, I mention in a post that I did in 2019 after discovering a 1902 Households List that the daughter Rivka that was mentioned was killed in the Holocaust.  Except I recently discovered that she wasn't.  And that I have living relatives in Ukraine (and England and America) who are her descendants.  So how did this happen?

The First Hint

My Grandmother's Holocaust Testimony - Via JewishGen

When I was in college, my grandmother was interviewed by Steven Spielberg's project (hosted by the USC Shoah Foundation) talking about her life and Holocaust experiences.  She got copies of the 11 VHS tapes that her story filled, and I summarized her life based on that testimony here.  And now I can easily find her testimony--and others who were related or lived in the same towns, and learn about their experiences via JewishGen.

Snippet from JewishGen's Summary of Sonia Diamond's Shoah Foundation Interview

Yom Hashoah 2020

Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) starts tomorrow evening.  For the past four years, I have listed the names of the family members I've found who were murdered in the Holocaust.  In 2019, I listed 367 relatives.  In 2020, I am listing 454.

Every year, this list grows as I find new branches of my family--and then find that multiple members of those branches were killed somewhere between 1941 & 1945.  This year I found nearly 90 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 454 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

How Quickly the Holocaust Happened

My mother's parents were born in America, so I didn't hear about the Holocaust like I did from my father's parents, who both had survived the war in Poland (now Ukraine).  But my mother's parents had many relatives who had remained in Europe and who were Jews swept into World War II.  Until the war happened, they were living their everyday lives.  But this is a story of how quickly their lives changed--and ended.

From the Pesti Hírlap, February 1, 1944

Visualizing the Holocaust's Impact

My great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Avraham Rutner, had a lot of descendants.  I've used the incredibly useful and easy-to-use tool at http://learnforeverlearn.com/ancestors/ to visualize his family, as I've reconstructed it so far.  And what is incredibly visible--and emotionally difficult to see--is how the Holocaust decimated this extended family.

Descendants of Avraham Rutner, per http://learnforeverlearn.com/ancestors/

Buchenwald Records - Some With Photos

When I was in DC at the FGS Conference last week, I was able to spend a few hours in the Holocaust Museum.  I printed out hundreds of pages (literally) of documents that I discovered, and I'm finally having a chance to actually read some of what I found.

My fourth cousin twice removed, Yitzchak/Izsak Rutner, was killed in Buchenwald.  But before that point, the Nazis collected information on him--including the only known photo of him.

Inmate Personal Card - Izsak Ruttner

TWO New WWII-Related Databases

Last week I wrote about a "hidden" database on Ancestry along with tips to search it, since it didn't have a typical Ancestry search page.  Well, it turns out that it wasn't hidden, it just wasn't ready for release, but Vera discovered it too soon!  And there are actually two new databases, and Vera and I only wrote about one of them.

So what are these databases and what could you find?

My Grandparents Coming to America!