In most cases,the cost of the service is 150 euros for one surname. Names that appear extensively in our database, such as, for example, Galperin, Rabinovich, Kats, Levi and similar others will cost 250 euro per family name. The search for the family name will be done for one specified area only, and we will search only for the specific people you indicate. Alternatively, you can search the entire database yourself.

The handwriting in the censuses is extremely difficult to read. In addition, names could be written in a variety of ways. Therefore, if a desired name cannot be found, we advise you to look for your family name without the first letter, use alternative vowels and/or do not using endings. For example, if the family name is Galperin, try searching for Alperin or Perin first. Search results will be shown for any family name that consists of such letters. If you family name is Gartshteyn, we advise you to try all possible variations, such as Gershteyn, Gertshten, Girsht, Gart, Garsh and so on. Census ennumerators in the Russian Empire were not so literate and they recorded what they heard orally. Very often relatives in one and the same family are recorded with different spelling in the Russian language.

It is also necessary to take into account that most names were written both with and without the Russian letter Й, which appears in our transliteration as Y. That is why the same person can be both Rosenfel and Royzenfel in different documents. The letter Y can be inserted in any surname. Also, keep in mind that vowels can both disappear and appear in surnames.

You can choose any from this options, but we are wishing you good luck anyway.

The positive news is that the database search is ABSOLUTELY FREE.

How can you know that the family you found is from the right region? Read and follow the instructions below. The first column in the search results named Document has numbers from 1 to 15. These are the numbers for the different Uezd of Kiev Gubernia

1-Radomysl uezd(second part)
2-Kiev city
3-Kiev uezd
4-Berdichev uezd
5-Vasilkov uezd
6-Zvenigorodsky uezd
7-Kanevsky uezd
8-Lipovetsky uezd
9-Radomyshl uezd
10-Skvira uezd
11-Tarashcha uezd
12-Uman uezd
13-CHerkassy uezd
14-Chigirin uezd
15-Berdichev city

Census lists for Cherkassy uezd do not exist. Apparently, they did not survive.

Use our website articles about the different uezds to check the availability of census lists for each city in the uezd. If during a search you find too many options and you do not know whom to choose, consider placing an individual search through the Contact US form. This choice may save both time and money.

If as a result of a search, you find a person whose age is not specified, most likely this data comes from the list of homeowners. If so, you will not be able to obtain any additional information about the composition of his family in addition to the information that you see on the screen. The only thing you can learn from such a document is the address of your ancestor’s house and who his neighbors were. If you are planning a Heritage trip, this information will be very valuable for you.

We remind you also that we do not have full information about your ancestor. We only know where to find it and can quickly order the information. You will receive a photocopy of the document within three week

So the procedure:

1. On the how to search page, study the search instructions here.

2. You are free to search for the name of your interest in the search form.

3.3. If you find it, create an order, pay and expect to receive a photocopy of the full document.
4. We offer two options, with a detailed English translation of the photocopy, or without a translation.
5. A translated photocopy costs 30 euros; a photocopy without a translation costs 20 euros for censuses For vital records price is 30 euro and 40 with translation
6. If you choose to pay for a photocopy only, the results will look like the pictures below:

Census Photo if only homeowners are mentioned

Our database consists of Jewish surnames from pages of census documents. As a rule, we find a whole family on a page underneath the name of the head of family, but this is not always the case. For example, if somebody with your family name appears on the result page without his or his age specified, it is likely that his data was taken from a list of homeowners. In such a case, you cannot obtain any additional information about the family of this homeowner from the photocopy. You can only learn where exactly your ancestor’s house was located.

If the age of the head of household is specified, this also does not guarantee that all the rest of his family will be listed together with him. Perhaps your ancestor simply rented a room in a house belonging to other people, or maybe he worked somewhere without his family. Nevertheless, even if he was alone, we can use his personal information to locate where his family and ancestors lived. The reason we can do this is because the most important things that we can obtain from this census is information about an individual’s place of birth and place of registration. These two things are not necessarily the same. Place of Registration was very important in the Russian Empire, but it is a concept that does not exist in most English-speaking countries.

This is an English translation of all census colomns

The search itself

1. First, the search in the database is conducted accordingly to the following transliteration (russian sounds are written in latin letters)
А = A, Б = B, В = V, Г = G, Д = D,  Е = Е , Ё = Y,  Ж = ZH  or Z ,  З = Z ,И = I.  Й = Y
К = K , Л = L, М = M, Н = N, О = O, П = P, Р = R, С = S, Т = T, У = U, Ф = F, Х = CH, Ц = TS,
Ч = CH (  Attention, the same as Х), Ш = SH, Щ = SHCH,
Ъ and Ь = no marking, Ы = Y (the same as  Й)
Э = E (the same as Е), Ю = YU , Я = YA
So, if in the original Jewish document text it was written Рабинович, it would be recorded in the database like Rabinovich

.
2. Secondly, in the search process, you must consider the following things:

The handwriting in the censuses is extremely difficult to read. In addition, names could be written in a variety of ways. Therefore, if a desired name cannot be found, we advise you to look for your family name without the first letter, use alternative vowels and/or do not using endings. For example, if the family name is Galperin, try searching for Alperin or Perin first. Search results will be shown for any family name that consists of such letters. If you family name is Gartshteyn, we advise you to try all possible variations, such as Gershteyn, Gertshten, Girsht, Gart, Garsh and so on. Census ennumerators in the Russian Empire were not so literate and they recorded what they heard orally. Very often relatives in one and the same family are recorded with different spelling in the Russian language.

It is also necessary to take into account that most names were written both with and without the Russian letter Й, which appears in our transliteration as Y. That is why the same person can be both Rosenfel and Royzenfel in different documents. The letter Y can be inserted in any surname. Also, keep in mind that vowels can both disappear and appear in surnames.

Anyways, you can always order this search for us and we will look for your direct ancestors instead of you.

In most cases,the cost of the service is 150 euros for one surname. Names that appear extensively in our database, such as, for example, Galperin, Rabinovich, Kats, Levi and similar others will cost 250 euro per family name. The search for the family name will be done for one specified area only, and we will search only for the specific people you indicate. Alternatively, you can search the entire database yourself.

Here is an example of average census page

Genealogy sourse example:

As far as we work all the last time at Zhitomir archive, the today’s example is related to Zhitomir (and all the former Volyn gubernia). And it is located at Zhitomir archive as well. I am talking about the Volyn Gubernia Court fund. Its local fund number is 16. It has around 4000 file-books (they are divided into 6 registers (opis)). And it covers the years of the Court work from 1796 till 1831.

Court History facts:

The Court of Volyn gubernia was established at the territory of the modern Ukraine at 1797, insted at some other «court chambers» worked before. It was the one branch of Ministry of Justice and was the highest point to appeal at the territory of Volyn gubernia. The court was consisted of the general office and few departments: civil court and criminal court. It was closed out at 1831, because of the restoring of «court chambers» institution.

Jewish genealogy sources:

This fund is sometimes helpful for us if we really interesting in finding some additional information regarding the ancestors. In general, we could find there the Court files regarding the relationships between Lutsk and Dubno Jewish communities; some files even have the personal signatures of the Jewish persons. It helps us to uncover in more and fresh way the Family History and overall history facts regarding your ancestors

Let’s describe the situation: probably you want to find your ancestors. And probably you even collected all the possible information (by your own knowledge or/and by asking all the possible relatives). And you even understood that you need to hire somebody to find this information for you (for example, us)) And what next? On this stage you have a small problem (even not important, on the first glance): How to provide all the information you have in a right way to the Genealogy researcher?

And below I provide some tips, which could be helpful (I guess so) for all the people who want us to hire, based on our own experience:

1.    Provide as much as possible clear and exact information. Sometimes we receive very long and hard-to-read e-mails with the detailed information about the history of the village or settlement ancestors lived or even about their habits. That is great for the book about your family history. But does not work with Genealogy. We need dates, names, places. Not the stories)
2.    Try to find really Jewish personal names. Sometimes we receive requests to search which we try to explain that the personal name of our client’s grandfather could not be Mike, John or Bill. We understand that the new immigrants had totally changed their lives and names as well by coming to the United States. But sometimes you need to find their real names for the search (Hopefully, I’ll write about how to do it little bit later))
3.    Sort information by Families. If you have more than one Family to find, it is much better to compile the information one-by-one. I mean, each Family separately. It would be much easily to determine the possibility of the research if it is clear separated
4.    Provide the proofs. Sometimes, if you tell us some information about your relatives or ancestors, it is much better if you tell us the source of this information. It is important. Because the history (especially Family history) is very strange sometimes. By our experience, around 80% of the information provided for us is not clear truth, but just a Family tales. But if you have any proof of your words, it is great to provide it for us immediately (including pictures of the grave stones, naturalization documents, Ellis Island filling forms, copies of the pictures from the Family archive etc.)
5.    Forget the points 1-4 and feel free to send us any information in any format)) We are ready to work anyways))

1.    All the Kiev’ archives are closed till the beginning of September. They have their usual Summer Vacations. We are waiting till they are open and free to research in other archives meanwhile.
2.    We have plenty of current clients. The researches for them are based on Zhitomir archives. For now, we should research so many settlements and small villages which were at Novograd-Volynsk gubernia so long time ago: Narodich, Ovruch, Kovel, Lyubar, Krasnostav, Berezdov, Korets etc… All the documentation for them is located at Zhitomir archive.
3.    Zhitomir is a part of our own very important project: Making of Overall Jewish Database. What does it mean? In short words that means that we want to collect ANY Jewish Family names which you possibly could find at the Ukrainan archives. In future we see it like this: to find any of your Jewish ancestor form Ukraine from 1795 till 1920 you’ll need just type the surname at the online database field, click on a Search button and gat the result – where and how you can find it or get the full information… Does it sound nice?

So, all the written above is for the near (I hope so) future. But for now we travel to different archives and collect the information. The working flow is simple to describe, but not so simple to make. Now we collect information for our database from such Jewish Genealogical resources (including well-known and any rare source we could find) such as:

– Any Census Tales / Revision Lists 1795-1875
– Russian Empire Population Census 1897
– Army/recruits record
– Notary books
– Tax books
– Police funds (of Russian Empire) book
– Metrical books (Births records, Deaths records, Marriages records, Divorces records)
– Pogroms materials
– and so many other documentation which could be found at all of the Ukrainian archives.

Today, at Zhitomir, we collected the Jewish Family names directly from the Opis’es/registration lists of the Notary books. Here I can provide the example of such a book:

«Fond 27 – Zhitomir Notary, Filippov Ivan Nikolaevich; Zhitomir city, Volyn gubernia; Opis 1; 1901-1903 years; 1431 records »

And in fact, among all the notary records from only this case, the HALF of the records is related to the Jews! And we collect their Family names. And this is worthless Jewish Genealogy material…

To take the truth, we wanted to be there for our first time even one year before, when it was at Boston, MA. But we started to think about it too late and did not get there. This experience (bad expirience, actually) was a lesson for us to do everything beforehand. That is why, we started to prepare for the next Jewish Genealogy conference really beforehand.

First, we did the connection with the organizators and ask about the possibility to be speakers there. We did not want just to go to the conference and listen, but we wanted to tell people about our work and what we really do at the Ukrainian archives. We had so many topics to tell, but stopped on just three ones:

1. Availability and Kinds of Jewish Genealogical Research documentation at the Ukrainian archves
2. Jewish Refugees of World War 1: Discovering the Documentation at Kiev’s archive
3. Ukrainain Pogroms: Using of the Documentations as Jewish Genealogy source

All of these 3 topics for our speeches are parts of our specialization. Actually, it is just a small part of our investigation and researches. Everything is up to our clients. But we are trying not to work with all the well-known materials (such as Metrical Books or Census Tales/Revision Lists) but to use all the other kinds of sometimes rare and hiddden documentation which could be found at the Ukrainian archives.

Anyways, I just started to tell you about the conference. In short – it was really great. Specially to see our clients personally. We’ve got great experience of giving talks (first time in English EVER!). It was exciting! And next days, I’ll try to tell more specifically about our Salt Lake City Jewish Genealogy Conference 2014 presentations.

In general, there are some general problems during the consisting of the reports. But taday I’ll try to tell about the most important one: Transliteration. Mostly it connected to the correct transliteration of the names. I mean Personal Names, Patronymic names and Family Names (Surnames). During the work we need to provide to our clients not only the correct spelling of the names of their ancestors, but we also want to understand that they can read it correctly and not to miss the sounds.

That is why, during the transliteration process, I try to find the best way of replacing Russian sounds to the English alphabet. The fact is that there are lots of the system. Some of them are good. Some of them are good, but some of ther really frustrate me)) But it is important. Specially at Genealogy.

So, in my work I use my own, but close to British system of transliteration (capital letter is Cyrillic and small letter is Latinic:

A = ?, ? = b, ? = v, ?= g, ? = d, ? = e, ? = yo, ? = zh, ? = z, ? = i, ? = y, ? = k, ? = l, ? = m, ? = n, ? = o, ? = p, ? = r, ?= s, ? = t, ? = u, ? = f, ? = ch, ? = ts, ? = ch (or tch), ? = sh, ? =,shch ? = no sign, ? = y, ? = no sign, ? = e, ? = yu, ? = ya

In that way, the simple (and common in our work ) phrase in Russian, which coud be found in some archive documentations related to Jewish Genealogy could be spelled like this:

Original: Мещанин города Овруча Берко Хаимович Зак

Transliteration: Meshchanin goroda Ovrucha, Berko Chaimovich Zak

Translation: The bourgeois (townsman) of Ovruch city, Berko Chaimovich Zak

1. We are starting to deep to our memory and trying to find there if we really met this Family name in our researches. Sometimes it is easy. Because in some regions some surnames are common-wide and they are constantly in our mind. But sometimes it is hard to remember. Because we see so many Jewish Family names day-by-day while working with documents (sometimes each of us check up to 1000 Jewish Family names by day, because of making our own database) and if any person ask us some rare Family name it is quite hard to immediately say: Yes. It is definately Jewish.

2. To determine if any Family name is really Jewish, we need to know HOW the Family names were given to Jews, especially at the territory of modern Ukraine (yes, I know, it was Russian Empire long time ago)). We have done such an article already about Jewish Family names, and their origin and meaning. And if you read it, you’ll understand that the hardest thing is to give the right determination to the term Jewish Family Name. In fact, any surname could be Jewish.

So, today, I want to provide you some example. Everybody knows Putin. What? You do not know him? OK)) This is the President and Prime Minister (in other words, Tsar) of the modern Russia. And he is definitely non-Jew. None of his family or none of his ancestors were Jewish. And we understand that the origin of the surname Putin is non-Jewish ( in other words, it does not related to Jewish origin at all)

But, the fact is, that in Chernigov gubernia (Chernigov district of Russian Empire) there were Jews who had this Family name at the beginning of 20^th century.. And the proof of it you can see on the picture, attached to this blog-post. On the picture is written:

«Putin Leyba Avramov Zelikov (son of Avram Zelik) — meshchanin (bourgeous, townsman) of Starodubov city…»

And in the next lines there is a list of a whole of his family, including wife and children.

So, in conclusion, it is worth to say, that of course, sometimes it is much more easy to understand if a person Jewish or not only because of his Family name. But this rule does not work constantly and you need to be very careful to determine this. Even because there is another problem (as it is called — from another side…) there are lots of the people with definately Jewish family names, but they are non-Jewish at all. But abotu this thing, I think, it would be better to say next time))

Well, to start doing something any researcher at the Ukrainian archives shoud wait for the next steps:

1. To recieve and work with the documents. This is understandable, I think. You can not just get into the archive and say: “Let me make a pictures))” It will not work at all. You are not at the US archives at all))

2. Determine the list of the pages which you need to photo. It should be done on a separate filling form.

3. Give the filling form for photo-copy to the archive workers. It should be signed by their boss. (sometimes it tikes up to several days))

4. After the sign is given to you – you need to PAY for making photo-copies. The price depends on the archive. In general, and in average it costs something about 15$ for DOCUMENT. But, the determination of the term “document” is really different and strage in all the archives. Sometimes it is just one page, sometimes it is a block of pages. It depends. And you need to be raedy for that.

5. After all, you can make pictures on your own camera. But, there is no any special room for that. Usually, there is not enough lite at all. And you can not use flash on your camera.