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Immigrant Arrival Records from Borshchagovka

The spreadsheet linked below contains over four hundred immigrant arrival records of men, women, and children from Borshchagovka, representing more than one hundred families.

The records were compiled primarily from ship manifests and naturalization documents discovered through searches on several websites, including Ancestry, Ellis Island, My Heritage, and FamilySearch. (And in the antediluvian days before the internet, far too many hours spent in the bowels of the National Archives on Houston Street in New York City, scrolling through countless reels of microfilm.) Stephen Morse’s site, https://stevemorse.org, was also an invaluable tool for searching variations of the town names Borshchagovka (Russian) and Burshivka (Yiddish).

The sheet is by no means comprehensive — there are certainly more Borshchagovka arrivals to be discovered. Many records only list the immigrant’s birthplace as the province of Kiev, the district of Skvira, or just Russia, and the handwritten renderings of Borshchagovka and Burshivka may have been so mangled on some manifests as to be beyond decipherability. Additionally, these records only include arrivals in the United States and Canada.

There are several interesting points to note:

The families in the records represent about 25% of the total 400 families living in Borshchagovka in 1919. (The estimate of 400 families was cited by the Burshivker Relief Committee in its reference letter included with Fawel Zitomersky's passport application to travel overseas and rescue the pogrom survivors.)

The earliest arrival record found is from 1898.

By 1904, there were enough Borshchagovka immigrants in New York City to form the First Burshivker Sick And Benevolent Association, a landsmanshaft.

Fawel Zitomersky’s wife, Sura, and four of their children, were on a ship that departed Libau on July 28, 1914, the same day that World War I began. No records of ships carrying Borshchagovka refugees were found until six and a half years later, when the SS Finland departed from Antwerp on February 3, 1921 with several members of Fawel's family, along with Benny Decoveny and his family.

In the years immediately following the pogroms, some immigrants listed various towns in Romania as their birthplace, likely indicating they traveled with falsified passports obtained during their time in Romania.

Click below for the spreadsheet of Borshchagovka arrivals sorted by family name:

Arrivals by Family Name

Click below for the spreadsheet of Borshchagovka arrivals sorted by arrival date:

Arrivals by Arrival Date

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Created by Benjamin D. Zitomer

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