Here is your chance to arrange for an unique personal adventure; a journey to your Ukrainian ancestral hometown either for yourself or with friends and family or your Ukrainian Heritage group or even virtually via a webinar or social media and feel the delight of discovering your Ukrainian lineage via the State Archives and finally putting a face and physical location to the names, places and family legends you’ve heard so much about.
Our experienced staff here at Ukrainian-Ancestry can help you discover your Ukrainian lineage via Archival Research in Ukraine’s state archives; by conducting our expertly guided tours to your ancestral home villages or shtetls where you can discover family dwellings and search local cemeteries for ancestral gravesites or visit other places of historic or cultural interest, and even arrange meetings with your living relatives.
Before you can begin a search for an ancestor you should be able to answer the three basic questions for beginning any quest: Who? Where? and When?
Why? Because it is probable that the ancestor you are searching for left a paper trail that can be traced via archival records, passenger manifests, or local censuses which will help reveal your Ancestral Heritage, therefore you will need to have answers to the above three questions: your ancestor’s name, a home town or village, and a date range – preferably all three.
The name of your ancestor is key – whether a grandparent, or great aunt, or third cousin – along with a place name – a city, or village or region or oblast where he or she lived – and a date range or year when this ancestor would have either been born, was married, had died or emigrated to another country.
Birth, Marriage, or Death archives – AKA “vital” records were kept by the local churches – by denomination in a given community. In Ukraine an ancestors religious denomination largely determines their ethnicity. So if your ancestors were Greek Orthodox it is likely they would have been Ukrainian; Roman Catholic or Rite – Polish or Austrian; Hebrew – Jewish; Armenian Orthodox – Armenian.
Cadastral surveys, maps, and records help to define, mark, and provide essential information needed to accurately determine historical land ownership rights, not only for ancestral kurkuli of certain villages and shtetls located in historic Halychyna and Ukraine, but also for the municipalities and/or provinces for the country that an ancestor had migrated to.
Periodically most countries conduct a national census – likely at the beginning of each decade – whereby estimates of population density & ethnicity, education level, employment status, age grouping, and health & housing data for specific provinces, regions, municipalities, postal codes, and even voting districts for a given census year can be accessed for ancestral research.
So if your Ukrainian ancestors emigrated to say Canada or the U.S. and took part in one or more censuses in their adopted hometown, they should be listed in one or more of that country’s census archives.
Bear in mind that some census archives have created access restriction time spans – like 72 years for the National Archives and Records Administration for the U.S. – meaning the latest publicly available census records there are for the 1950 census.
Ports of Entry have kept copious immigration records among them being Passenger Manifests each featuring a list compiled by transiting ship’s name, its port of departure, and date of entry, listing its passengers indexed by emigre name, gender, age, town & country of origin, parentage, occupation, destination address, and contact person.
Naturalization Records normally kept in the national archives of any given country can provide a researcher with information such as a person’s birth date and location, occupation, immigration year, marital status and spouse information, witnesses’ names and addresses, and more.
The State Archives are located in administrative districts within Western Ukraine. Contact with State archivists requires a researcher who is fluent in Ukrainian which is why we advise leaving the scheduling of archival visits with our experienced multi-lingual staff. Archival sites include:
1) Chernivtsi Oblast. E-mail: archive_cv@arch.gov.ua
2) Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast. E-mail: archive_if@arch.gov.ua
3) Lviv Oblast. E-mail: archive_lviv@arch.gov.ua
4) Khmelnytskyi Oblast. E-mail: archive_km@arch.gov.ua
5) Rivne Oblast. E-mail: archive_rv@arch.gov.ua
6) Ternopil Oblast. E-mail: archive_te@arch.gov.ua
7) Volyn Oblast. E-mail: info@davo.voladm.gov.ua.
8) Zakarpattia Oblast. E-mail: mail.dazo@carpathia.gov.ua
The National Archives of a sovereign country can be a rich source of information for Ancestry Researchers. Typically these archives can house archival records that not only document the nation’s history, but also provide links to articles, research tools, and digitized records that pertain to immigration; naturalization – a process by which an immigrant becomes a citizen; veteran’s service records; census archives; and even family search tutorials. Some choices are:
For the United States, options include; The National Archives [NARA], Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island, FindMyPast, OurPublicRecords.org, the USA.gov’s Genealogy and Family History website, and the U.S. Census Bureau.
For the United Kingdom navigate to: The National Archives UK.
For Canada there is Library and Archives Canada (LAC).
For Australia navigate to the National Library of Australia.
In Brazil contact The National Archives of Brazil.
Ships Passenger Manifests and Registries may be available through many National Archives and independent Genealogy Research sites among them:
Voting Registers are lists of people who lived in a geographic location during a certain time span that were eligible to vote, and many of these registers are available to family historians in some form or another. Many of these registers contain full names, ages, addresses, locations of birth and even occupations. Because these registers were often laid out alphabetically, members of the same household would often be listed together affording an ancestry researcher the opportunity to explore family relationships as well. Sites to explore include: Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and MyHeritage.com as well as local archives.
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