Finding Your Family's Ancestral Towns I

One of the most perplexing questions people face when they begin genealogy research is identifying where their family came from.   I have been working with a friend to determine the answer to that for her family and am reflecting on how I first learned of the ancestral towns of my family.  I’ve known them for so long now that I forget there was a time I didn’t.

In the case of my Kishlansky branch, I had a three page history written by my grandfather that told me of Kamenetz-Podolsk as his town of origin.  My mother also told me that she remembered her mother talking of Kamenetz.  She thought she was saying Communist and it was not until much later that she realized it was actually the name of the town of origin.

My Belarussian ancestors are all buried in the cemetery section in New York for people from Dunilowitz.  Many Eastern European towns had burial societies in the US, especially in places like NY.  People from the same shtetl often ended up buried together, recreating their original community beneath the ground.  A cousin of my father’s clued me in to this detail which was later confirmed by immigration records.

My other town is Radom, Poland and I believe family was aware of this town of origin.  I know that my aunt told me of it when I did an oral history with her 25 years ago.  Obviously asking family members is the best place to start with this research.


Having the town made my search for immigration records more focused.  Any family name from those towns was a possible relative.  Even with this advantage, it still took me several months to find all of the immigration records.  Names were spelled a variety of ways and often transcribed incorrectly.  Town names also varied significantly.  When in doubt I input the town name into stevemorse.org and went through every person who came from that town.

I was fortunate in some respects in that many family members came over after 1906 when the immigration records began to offer greater information.  After that time they tell you who the nearest relative was in Europe and who the nearest relative was where they were going.  For my more unusual names I built a database of every person who came to the US with that name.  Then I started playing the match game looking for relationships between those two data points of European family and American family.

When I build the database, I use filters so I can sort it easily by different details.  I have a column by year and I code the family names and towns so I can sort them even if they are recorded by a variety of spellings.   I then sort by immigration date and relationships become much more apparent. Often it is a game of tag.  My first intrepid ancestor was my grandmother’s uncle Morris Kishlansky.  He went first to the UK with his wife where they had two children.  In 1898 he came to the US as Morris Kislianski indicating he had no relative at the other end to greet him.  I wonder what that experience was like.  He’d had a few years in London with his family to learn the language, but his mission was to establish a solid foundation for his family in a new country.

He must have succeeded as his wife followed a year later with her two children indicating they were going to her husband.  The record noted they were from Russia and were coming from London, still no ancestral town was recorded.  In 1902 I see a record of a different last name going to the original stalwart immigrant.  Srul Baron was going to his brother-in-law Morris Kislynsky and he gives his home as Kamenik, the first mention of the ancestral town in immigration records.  I knew from my grandfather’s written history that my grandmother had an aunt Sarah Baron.  In 1903 my grandmother’s oldest brother Itzek makes his way to America to none other than Srul Baron, his uncle, followed in 1904 by Srul’s wife and children.  Now Itzek is tagged and his brother Benjamin comes to him in 1906.  It is late in 1906 that the laws change requiring more information in the manifest. Through this point there is no record of the nearest relative in Eastern Europe, but the town of origin is noted as Kamenetz.    But wait, Benjamin is coming from Chotyn.  What’s that about?  I map it relative to Kamenetz and learn that it is 30 miles away.  There was a time when Jews could not live close to the border of the Pale and were displaced from their homes.  Kamenetz Podolsk was close to the border. Perhaps this accounts for the periodic movement I see between Kamenetz and Chotyn. 

In 1911 my grandfather comes to his brother-in-law Itzek giving an address that I can look up in the 1910 census.  He too notes his town of birth as Kamenetz, but most recently was in Czortkow, Austria, a town not far from Kamenetz, perhaps a way station on his path to Rotterdam.   Interestingly he indicates he has no relative in Europe, despite the fact that his wife was still there.  My hunch was that he hoped to start a new unencumbered life.  When I painted this gentleman I called him The Enigma as he remains a puzzle.

In 1912 my grandmother’s brother Frank or Frajina makes his way to Itzek, noting both Kamenetz and his nearest relative in Europe, his father Avriam Kislanski.  A long period passes before further branches of this family immigrate.  There is a war to settle in Europe and a series of pogroms that break out in the region post-war.  In 1921 within a week of each other, my grandmother and her brother and sister-in-law, come to the US.  My grandmother is going to her husband giving his original name, not the one which he later assumed.  The family is back in Chotyn (Hotin) now where her nearest relative is given as an aunt.   I’m wondering if my great-grandfather is still alive.  Yes, I conclude when I find the records of her youngest brother and his wife, also from Chotyn (Hotin).  Her brother has indicated Abram, his father, as the nearest relative in Europe and Frank as the nearest relative in the US.  I’m curious about this aunt who took the place of the father as nearest relative in my grandmother's manifest.  That move to Chotyn, did it come about because of the pograms? All mysteries to which I may never know the answers.

I had an advantage in my research that many others don’t have.  If family came to the US in the early 1900s it is both easier to trace due to more information in records and family members are often more likely to know of the original town. What do you do if family came in the 1800s when records seldom indicated the origin?  Stay tuned and I’ll clue you in on some approaches.

Juxtaposing History and Family: Cause and Effect

In yesterday’s blog entry I wrote about the Pale of Jewish Settlement and the repressive laws that led to a major mass migration.  Today I had an opportunity to access the Jewish Chronicle, a very useful UK publication I discovered at last year's conference.  I decided to drill down and see how the political climate had affected the community in which my grandparents lived.   I took a look at Kamenetz Podolsk in the Ukraine, home of my maternal grandparents as it was a large enough area to be recorded in the publication. 

One of the earliest entries I found was in 1898.  Here it noted that the director of the Gymnasium (school) had been instructed to expel seven Jewish students from the school.  The reason – their parents did not possess the right to live in the town which is less than 50 kilometers from the frontier.   Jews had been expelled from border areas to assure they wouldn't easily escape the Pale.  Was my eleven year old grandfather among them?  I think about the street I visited on which he had lived at the time of the Russian census just a year earlier.  Perhaps these expulsions account for the movement of my family between Kamenetz and the nearby Chotin area, something that had always puzzled me.

The Chronicle goes on to say that Jewish merchants of the first Guild outside the Pale may employ Jewish clerks.  The police interpret this to mean that only the clerk, not his family may live outside the Pale and have been known to send his wife and children back to the Pale.  The merchants of the first Guild are those merchants who met the requirements to live outside the Pale.

The oppressive laws had their effect.  By approximately 1895 my grandmother’s uncle was the first to immigrate to London.  There he had two children and then went on to New York in 1898 followed by his family.  A procession soon began.  His brother-in-law joined him in NY in 1902 naming the uncle as his closest relative in the US. Soon 1903,1904 and 1906 saw the arrival of the uncle’s sister and my grandmother’s brothers.  In 1911 my grandfather came to avoid the draft leaving behind his new wife and child.

Continuing through the Jewish Chronicle I found that in 1913 in response to the anti-religious legislation in Russia the Jewish school teachers had decided to keep the schools open on Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath) and close them on Sunday.  The laws required businesses to close on Sunday and that in conjunction with closing on Saturday adversely affected their businesses.  Presumably it drove other practices such as adjusting school hours.

In 1914 the Austrians entered Kamenetz-Podolsk and imposed heavy “contributions” on the town. They took the mayor and several prominent residents hostage, many of whom were Jewish.  As there were insufficient funds, both Jews and Christians brought articles from the churches and synagogues.  It then notes that after Austrian atrocities, the return of the Russian Army was “hailed by the Jews with delight”.

By 1920 there were reports on the pogroms that had occurred over a two year period.  A prominent Ukrainian Jew noted that these were beyond the pogrom excesses with which Jews were so familiar.  He states that “during the last two years the Jewish population of the Ukraine is being systematically, persistently exterminated.”  The Kieff  (Kiev) Red Cross reported that “the general surrounding circumstances have given to the pogrom wave an unheard of range of cruelty, bloodshed, tragic doom and no escape. This wave has for its objective the entire annihilation of Ukrainian Jewry and in several instances whole communities, men, women and children have been put to death”.   Jews were deprived of all means of locomotion and thus communication with the outside world.  It went on to talk of Jewish passengers on trains that went through Kamenetz Podolsk being taken from the train by soldiers and shot.

Family folklore is that my grandmother’s first child died in a pogrom.  In any case she was on a boat by 1921 being brought to America by her brothers, presumably to escape the dangers of Eastern Europe.

Understanding the historical events as they are juxtaposed with my family events begins to paint a picture of cause and effect.  It allows me to understand the environment that influenced the lives of my family.

Hiding in Caves

Sometimes it seems like there are connections between everything I encounter. On Sunday we went to the Yom HaShoah Holocaust Commemoration in Minneapolis. The speaker at the event was Christos Nicola, co-author with Peter Lane Taylor of the Secret of Priest’s Grotto: A Holocaust Survival Story.

Nicola related the story of 38 people who survived the Holocaust hidden in a network of caves in the Borshchiv Raion within western Ukraine. Priest’s Grotto is actually one of the longest caves in the world with 77 miles of passages that have been explored. He put up a map of the region and there was Kamenetz-Podolsk, just 25 miles away. Last month when we drove to Kamenetz, the ancestral town of one set of my grandparents, our guide had pointed out Borshchiv as we passed and mentioned the story.

Nicola, a cave explorer, first discovered the cave and heard stories from local residents about Jews hiding in the caves. After ten years of searching he finally found a member of the family who had survived in the caves now living just blocks from him in New York. Relying on a memoir written by the matriarch of the family in 1960 as well as recollections from family members, he went back to the cave to document the existence of the family within the cave. His efforts were underwritten and reported by National Geographic. Some of the family members, from toddlers to a woman over 70, had resided there for 344 continuous days, the longest instance on record of uninterrupted cave living.

Nicola talked of their survival without any of the equipment and clothing that is commonly used by cavers today. They basically learned how to survive in this new environment. They tunneled to create an escape route which they had to use when they were discovered in the first cave. In the second cave they found a natural lake, learned how to dry the moisture on the walls and adapted to living in darkness.

Several family members who survived were killed by Ukrainians after the war had ended. Most of the family immigrated to the US and Canada.

To learn more you can find an interview on NPR and read the article in National Geographic’s Adventure magazine.

Communing With the Ancestors

Yesterday was a very full day as we began our explorations of Kamenetz Podolsk in earnest. Much of the day was spent in cemeteries, three of them to be precise. Cemetery information can be a very important resource when researching family history. Having discovered the tombstone of my great-great grandfather in Belarus, I am always hopeful when visiting the cemetery of an ancestral town. I also know how challenging most Eastern European Jewish cemeteries are to navigate. There is often no person or funds to maintain them and they quickly become overgrown and largely inaccessible.  Until I experienced  an "overgrown" cemetery, I did not fully appreciate the meaning of the word.

We began our day at the Kamenetz Podolsk cemetery. The keeper of the cemetery had a list of the names of the graves for more recent burials. He provided us with four pages of surnames handwritten in Cyrillic which I photographed and Alex offered to translate. Alex read through the names aloud as I listened for family names. A few were similar to some of my family names so I took photographs, unsure yet if they will connect to anything in my family.

The more recent tombstones were interesting as many of them had photographs, some that appeared to be photo engravings that covered a large portion of the tombstone. Writing was usually in Russian, but sometimes with Hebrew as well. Alex indicated that the older tombstones were to the right of the newer ones. I have found that it is often just as easy to photograph all of the tombstones rather than just look for my own family members. The time it takes to decipher the names in Hebrew can just as easily be spent on photographing each one allowing me to figure them out at my leisure and providing information for other researchers in the bargain.

I thought I’d begin with the tombstones at the back as those would presumably be older, but as I worked my way to the back I noticed a wooded area behind the cemetery and saw a tombstone in the woods. Thinking it was just a stray tombstone, I went to photograph it. I quickly realized that the woods were full of tombstones with small trees filling the spaces between them and many knocked over or unreadable under moss or behind thick saplings. Those which were readable however, were remarkably clear. They appeared to be preserved from the sun by the very woods which made it difficult to move between them. Now a woman on a mission, I began to work my way from one thicket to another tripping over branches and breaking off deadwood that obstructed my view. Not exactly an idyllic wooded setting, the ground was strewn with garbage and appeared to have been the site of numerous drinking parties. A swastika was painted on one of the tombstones which lay on its side.

Originally I had thought it would take just a short time, but as I proceeded I found that the section extended the width of the cemetery. Never one to stop halfway I continued for several hours until I had completed all of the old section and then proceeded to photograph those which were legible up through the war years, about 200 in total. It was often a logistical feat as I held branches back with one hand and photographed with the other. Did I mention that those bushes had thorns? My translation skills are limited to deciphering the name of the deceased and the father’s name. I attempted some translation this evening and oddly the first one I translated was Abram son of Srul (an abbreviation for Israel). My great-grandfather was Abram son of Meir-Srul. I couldn’t yet determine the date which should identify whether this is relevant to my family.

From the cemetery we did a brief stop at the memorial for those who were murdered by the Nazis in an open area in the town and then went to Karvansary, the area where Jews first lived in Kamenetz. Karvansary lies just below the castle wall. We began with a stop at the original cemetery. From the cemetery the view is quite scenic with the castle in the distance and goats grazing on the hill in the middle ground. Nestled in the hills are the houses of Karvansary. The cemetery was small and only about 30 tombstones were at all legible and some barely, but I went ahead and photographed them hoping someone can make more sense of them than I can.

We then drove through the area of Karvansary and Alex identified houses that would have dated to earlier times. On the way back I saw my favorite image of this trip. Up in the hills on a bicycle, a young man was herding the goats. Some ran ahead while some stragglers followed the bicycle. 

From Karavansary we headed out to Zhavnets, a town across the Dinster River from Khotin. A researcher had told me that my grandfather’s family originated in Zahvnets. First we drove through the city and identified older homes in the area where the Jews had lived, then we headed for the cemetery. The cemetery is located across the river from the fortress/castle in Khotin so we had very scenic views of the fortress. I was delighted to hear that the cemetery had already been photographed as I could not imagine tackling yet another one. Two cemeteries were buried in the woods, once again tombstones hid behind trees and moss covered many of them, but the setting was rather idyllic with only forest surrounding it. It had a very different feeling than maneuvering around the garbage dump in Kamentz.

Our cemetery search is not yet over. Tomorrow we go to Khotin where my grandmother’s family originated where we will find yet another cemetery, fortunately one which has been documented. Thus ended our day communing with the ancestors.

On a Very Bad Road to Kamenetz-Podolsk

Yesterday morning we met our guide, Alex Dunai, and began our journey to Kamenetz-Podolsk in the Ukraine.  Kamenetz is the ancestral home of my maternal grandparents and the last ancestral town I needed to visit.  Previously I’ve traveled to my other towns in Belarus and Poland.  I had met Alex at the International Jewish Genealogy Conference and heard him speak, but this was our first opportunity to have an extended interaction.  Alex arrived at our hotel with his new vehicle with a “strong engine” which I would come to appreciate as we navigated roads filled with deep potholes by moving rapidly between lanes while avoiding oncoming traffic. I was grateful to have Alex at the wheel as well as serving as our linguistic aide.  This was clearly not a journey we would have wanted to attempt ourselves.

Once out of Lviv we came to small towns where houses lined the road behind low fences, much as I had seen in Lithuania and Belarus, but the homes were less homogenous in color and style.  Some sported tile work that seemed to mimic Ukrainian needlework.  Farm land surrounds the towns and tall trees have spheres high in their boughs which gives it a very ornamental feel.  Alex told us the spheres were mistletoe.  It was a warm, sunny day and landscape formed interesting silhouettes against the sun. We passed a cemetery of crosses set amongst the trees with their mistletoe ornaments.  Across the road, truncated trees mimicked the form of the crosses. Storks nested high above the houses having just returned from Africa.  As we drove, people walked along the side of the road, many were older women with babushkas on their heads and canes in hand.  Roosters and chickens and the occasional turkey wandered by the roadside.   

After a four and a half hour drive we arrived in Kamenetz Podolsk, clearly the most visually striking town of my ancestral heritage.
An enormous castle/fortress stands in the city like something out of Disneyland, but this is the real

deal. I had seen pictures of it, but one soon realizes that a picture does not do justice to this town.  Below the castle is the area of Karvasary, where the Jews lived in earlier times. 

The  Smotrich River surrounds the city on three sides and flows into the Dinster River.       Two bridges cross the river.  Below are high bluffs and a canyon-like topography which was clearly visible as greenery had not yet filled in the trees.  The bare trees were quite beautiful in their starkness.  We walked across both bridges taking countless pictures as each vantage point offered a new vista.  As we crossed one of the bridges we noticed something we had seen in Lithuania, locks attached to the bridge with names of young couples and a date engraved.  In Lithuania it is a tradition to attach the lock and throw away the key upon marriage.  Apparently this is also done in the Ukraine.

I had the name of the street on which my grandfather lived with his family at the time of the 1897 census.  Alex had determined that the name had changed, but found the location.  The street ended at a large park and the area closest to the park was the older section.  I walked along the first few blocks and took photos of the older buildings, imagining how the family lived in the homes in this area.

In the course of our day we tried a few Ukrainian foods that were new to us.  As my husband is a ‘pescetarian” ( a vegetarian who eats seafood) we had to think about foods that might work in a country of meat eaters.  I was introduced to “green borscht” which is made of sorrel leaves with rice and potatoes.  At dinner we tried “mamaleyga” which is like polenta with cheese with some meat atop.  My pescetarian husband found potato pancakes and mushroom soup to be good meatless alternatives.  He'll be eating a lot of that.