ONLINE NEWSLETTER (No. 1/2015–January 2015)

My visit to the Minsk archives

by Yechezkel Schatz

Last year’s trip to the Chernigov archives uncovered plenty of information about my grandfather and his family. As is always the case in family research, all this information raised new questions and made me curious to take my research one generation back, that is, to find out more about my grandfather’s father. So about a year after my trip to Chernigov, I set off to the National Historical Archives of Belarus in Minsk, to do research on my great grandfather. Here is the story of my trip to Minsk…

What we knew and the questions we had

My paternal grandfather, Yaakov Moshe (Morris) Schatz, was born in Priluky (about 150 kilometers east of Kiev, now in Ukraine) in 1890, and he immigrated to the USA in 1913. Until recently we knew very little about his parents, but several documents that I discovered at the Chernigov archives provided us with the following important bits of information about his parents:

• My grandfather’s mother, Risja nee Shepsenvol, was probably also born in Priluky, but her father came from Haradok, about 70 kilometers northwest of Minsk (and about 20 kilometers south of Maladzyechna).
• My grandfather’s father, Eliyahu Schatz, grew up in Mogilev, about 200 kilometers east of Minsk. His marriage record says that he was a released soldier, so it seems that after he was released from the Czar’s army he wandered some 450 kilometers southward, met my great grandmother in Priluky, and settled in her home town (or perhaps first settled there and then met her…)

There are, in fact, two places named Mogilev -- one is Mahilyow about 200 kilometers east of Minsk, Belarus, and the other is Mohyliv-Podil's'kyi in southern Ukraine, along the border with Moldavia. Both had large Jewish communities, and both are listed in Miriam Weiner’s invaluable website, Routes to Roots. My brother Yaakov and I decided to first take a gamble on the Belarusian Mogilov, for the following reasons:

• We noticed that the southern Mogilov is usually referred to using the full name, including the “Podolsky” suffix.
• Eliyahu’s wife, Risja, also had roots in that area in the north, as her father was also from the Minsk area. That might have been a consideration in the matchmaking process that brought them together.
• Our family has a tradition, passed on from father to son over multiple generations, to put on tefillin (phylacteries) according to the custom named after the Ari (Isaac Lurya Ashkenazi) and practiced by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. My grandfather was not a Lubavitcher Hasid, and he never said anything about his father being one, either. However, the Mogilov area was famous for its strong Lubavitch influences.

So here were the objectives that I set for myself this time -- questions to be answered and information that I’d like to discover:

• Were we correct in our assumption that Eliyahu Schatz was from Mogilev in the north, in the Minsk area?
• What might have prompted him to wander southward to Priluky?
• Did my great grandfather have brothers and sisters? If so, I would like to find their descendants (my third cousins).
• We have been in touch with several researchers who put together trees for various Shepsenvol families. I would like to find documents that would enable us to connect the various Shepsenvol trees.

General travel logistics - planning versus reality

Having gone through the process of preparing for a similar trip just recently (that is, to a Ukrainian archive one year ago), the preparations this time were quite straightforward, and mostly similar to last time. That isn’t to say that I didn’t encounter certain snags and mishaps during my week of traveling, although (luckily!) nothing too serious that I can’t laugh about now… So for those of you who care to learn from my experience, I include here details that might help you avoid a few pitfalls.

Note that this section discusses general travel preparations and, where relevant, goes on to describe the eventual outcome of events. For a discussion of research-related preparations, see “Research-related preparations and coordination with the archive.”

My preparations for the trip to Minsk included planning and organizing the following aspects of my trip:

Research-related preparations and coordination with the archive

One of the very first things that my brother Yaakov and I did after I returned from Chernigov last year with the newly discovered information that our great grandfather was from Mogilov was to check what documents are available for Mogilov and where they are stored. A quick search through the Routes to Roots website revealed that most of the documents from Mogilov are stored at the National Historical Archives of Belarus in Minsk.

As my plans for the trip to Minsk began to materialize, I contacted the archive, first by email and then by phone. In my email I stated my objectives and notified them of the approximate dates of my arrival. I also wrote that I’d be following up with a phone call to finalize the date of my visit and to hear more about their policies and requirements.

I made sure to call the archive more than a month before my planned trip, as I remembered that the Chernigov archives expect you to register at least a month in advance, and thought that perhaps the Minsk archives follow the same policy. A Russian-speaking friend at the office helped me with this phone call, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that various bureaucratic policies that I encountered in Ukraine are not practiced in Belarus (but fear not, other policies take their place… See Table 1).

I continued staying in touch with the archive through a couple more emails and an additional follow-up phone call. In one of my emails I included a neat table that lists all the documents that exist for Mogilov at the Minsk archive, as reported by the Routes to Roots website, and I even indicated which fond/opis/delo combinations are my top priority. This turned out to be a very wise move, because in the final follow-up call that I had with the archive, the archivist that we spoke to told us excitedly that they had prepared the first set of books for my first day at the archive.

The next important matter to attend to was finding someone local to accompany me to the archive. This person, who would be expected to speak Russian and some English, would help me communicate with the personnel at the archive and would also help me browse through the files and decipher the Russian cursive. I contacted a good friend of the family who is originally from Minsk, and she suggested her mother, Irina, who lives in Minsk. So I got in touch with Irina by email and we exchanged contact information and made up to meet at the archive on Monday morning.

Conducting the research at the archive

On Monday morning, Irina and I met at the entrance to the archive. Irina brought along her friend Dina for extra help, and I explained to them what I’d be looking for. I had anticipated a lot of paperwork on my first day at the archive, but this was not the case. In fact, the website of the National Historical Archives of Belarus in Minsk seems to indicate that although the archive is open on Monday, the reading room opens only on Tuesday -- this is not true, and not only was the reading room open on Monday, but I also had my first set of books waiting for me (which, as I explained above, the archivists prepared for me based on the lists that I had sent them by email). So Monday was not wasted at all.

We quickly got acclimated and started browsing through the first set of books. Within 20 minutes or so, Dina had already discovered our most important finding -- a census record from the household of my 2nd great grandfather, in which my great grandfather Eliyahu appears, and from which I learned the names of Eliyahu’s immediate family -- mother, father, grandfathers, brothers, and a married cousin who was living with them. For the next few days we were continuously finding lots of census records and vital records for a whole clan of Schatz families; but more about that in “Findings and accomplishments.”

The women working at the archive were very nice. They were helpful and courteous and always willing to answer questions. My Russian was good enough for the really simple questions (sometimes with the help of Google Translate), and I relied on Irina for the tougher questions.

Over the course of the next few days, Irina and Dina joined me for only about 2 or 3 hours each day, and for the rest of the time I managed on my own. I quickly realized that I have no problem identifying my name in Russian cursive; the string of letters that forms my surname simply jumps out of the page and catches my eye. (In fact, if you woke me up in the middle of the night and showed me my last name in Russian cursive -- then spelled Шацъ, nowadays spelled Шац -- I’d recognize it instantaneously.) Besides that, although the census records are only in Russian, almost all vital records are in both Russian and Hebrew (which I obviously have no problem reading). So I simply got used to accumulating my tougher questions and saving them for when Irina was around and could help me communicate with the archivists.

Here are a few challenges that I had and would urge you to learn from:

• On my first day at the archive I was still a bit disoriented and did not keep good enough notes. By the next day I was more focused and was careful to copy down all findings neatly into my own notepad. I ordered many scans of the records that I discovered, so I didn’t lose out on any information from that first day, but the scans took a while to arrive, so the lesson I learned is to always keep clean and orderly notes of all your findings.
• It took me a while to get used to the main two policies at the archive: you are entitled to only 5 books (a book is usually a fond/opis/delo combination) per day, and you have to order them 24 hours in advance. If on a certain day I got distracted and submitted my order late in the day (for example, at 1 PM), then on the next day I’d receive my books only in the middle of the day, and would have very little to do for the first few hours of the day. The archivists weren’t always totally strict about this rule; sometimes they were willing to bring out the books a few hours early, especially in a case where a certain book in my original order wasn’t available and I ordered a different book instead of it. I found it all a bit confusing and sometimes frustrating, and I recommend being very organized and keeping notes of exactly when and what you ordered, received, or returned.
• Scans seem to take a long time at this archive. It takes them a day or two just to prepare the bill that you need to pay at the bank, and then after that it might take another few weeks for the scans to be ready (depending on the number of scans that you ordered). I paid two bills while I was there, one for two scans and one for four scans, but for all the rest of my scans I ended up leaving money with Irina. I am so very grateful to her for staying in touch with the archive, paying that last bill for me, collecting the disk with the scans, and emailing all of the scans to me. Be sure to be prepared for this possibility.

Table 1 Comparison of policies between the archives that I visited in Chernigov and Minsk

Findings and accomplishments

Our gamble on the northern Mogilov proved right within less than an hour from the beginning of my first day at the Minsk archive. The census record that we found -- an 1879 supplement to the 1858 revision list -- listed all members of my 2nd great grandfather’s household. My great grandfather Eliyahu was the youngest of 5 brothers, and this information opens up possibilities for connecting with my third cousins. In addition, a married first cousin lived with them -- potential for fourth cousins to me.

In addition to this census record, I also found census records for several other Schatz families in Mogilov from the same time period. Searches through books of vital records were just as fruitful, and I found altogether about 40 records for various members of the Schatz clan. I later found additional records in the JewishGen Belarus database. Over the following weeks I spent some time analyzing all the records and putting together family trees. My current theory is that the Schatz family in Mogilov dates back at least two more generations (prior to my great grandfather Eliyahu) and stemmed from two brothers -- David and Eliyahu Schatz -- who were born at the very end of the 18th century. This means that my great grandfather had many 2nd cousins in Mogilov -- potential for finding fifth cousins to me.

My general impression was that the Schatz family was a large, well-known, and distinguished family in Mogilov and its surrounding villages. Schatz family members appeared not only in records for their own births, weddings, and deaths, but also as official witnesses in a very large number of births and weddings of other members of the Mogilov Jewish community. In addition, Schatz daughters were commonly identified by their maiden name even after they were married.

Although we already have several leads on fifth cousins (just a phone call away…), it seems that connecting with my third cousins will be harder than connecting with my fourth or fifth cousins. There simply was a lot less information about my great grandfather’s brothers and their descendants, as compared to all the information about his second cousins and their descendants. This is probably due to the fact that my great grandfather’s immediate family lived in a village named Tetavka (if I deciphered the name correctly; I have not yet managed to find this place), and not in downtown Mogilov. Besides that, perhaps some of the brothers moved away, just as my great grandfather did.

One very interesting finding was that my great grandfather Eliyahu’s mother, Dina, passed away when Eliyahu was about 16 years old. His father Moshe then remarried about 4 months later. At the risk of spinning a yarn, I would guess that there’s a definite connection between the sudden appearance of a stepmother in teenaged Eliyahu’s life, his subsequent draft into the Czar’s army and, later, his move to Priluky, where he married my great grandmother Risja.

I searched also for my great grandmother Risja’s roots at the Minsk archive, but did not find any Shepsenvol families in any of the books that I browsed through. I was told that the Maladzyechna area was, at that time, part of the Vilnius Gubernia (Governorate), and all documents are stored in the Lithuanian State Historical Archives. So perhaps I see another trip to Vilnius in my future…

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