Other Records

Latin American Records
related to those originating in Lyakhovichi
by Deborah G. Glassman, copyright 2009

When Mitch Kessler wrote his great online travelogue Baranovichi Travelogue part 1 and part 2 about his trip to Baranovichi, the town from which his grandfather emigrated to South America, he was surprised by the number of people writing that their grandparents had also emigrated from Baranovichi to Argentina, to Chile, to Venezuela, or Brazil. I started making a list of those who mentioned that connection hoping that I would find someone who would be able to do the collaborative research that is our site’s hallmark. I needed to find someone who was investigating their own family history who would share their findings with the Lyakhovichi site. And to be of reasonable value to the site, the family member should be from a nearby community in Belarus.

Albert Guido Chester has long posted his interests on the Family Tree of the Jewish People and on the Jewish Gen Family Finder. When I wrote to him because of his interest in the Baranovichi birthplace of his grandfather, I asked the same question I ask everyone researching Baranovichi. “Because the railroad town of Baranovichi was founded so late, and almost all of the adults living there in 1900 were born elsewhere, did he know of any previous ties to Lyakhovichi?” Mr Chester wrote me back a great letter. He had been fortunate to have begun his interest in his family’s history while elderly aunts and uncles were still alive and so he had the names of the family members who had emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina, early in the twentieth century. But he did not know anything about their life in Europe before emigration except that his grandfather Bernardo Nun, was born in Baranovichi. His surname was very rare and he was unsure if the few others that he had seen listed in the newly accessed records made available by JRI-Poland, were likely or unlikely to be kinsmen. He asked for suggestions and help finding out just where his Baranovichi-born grandfather might have claimed his own roots. Alberto still lives in Buenos Aires and we wrote back and forth with him asking me about records from Russia and me asking him about his experiences with Argentinian records. My emphasis on documentation and jurisdictional records was a different direction than he had traveled researching his own family, so he undertook to find out just what was available knowing that I would use his findings on this website.

We talked first about the great amount of work that has been done to index the Argentinian Jewish cemeteries, but his great-grandparents do not appear in the list. I asked if it was very different in Argentina’s Jewish cemeteries than in the United States – if you called and asked if a specific person was buried in that cemetery that had no online records – they would have you wait, check a card file, and confirm if someone by that name was buried in the cemetery. Alberto didn’t know but he didn’t hesitate to find out – he called the next day after we wrote, and soon found where his great-grandparents were buried. He got their names, as they appeared on the burial registers, and their death dates. Armed with that information, he was ready to go to the Buenos Aires Vital Records department to put in a search request. There is no charge for a search of the records and they will do five searches for you at a time. Family report had told him that his great-grandmother’s maiden name was Kaplan. The records of the cemetery had shown that she was Fannie Kravetz y Nun. The death certificate showed that nevertheless the family had been right about the family name Kaplan, but it was misplaced a generation. Fanny’s maiden name was Kaplan y Kravetz, in the Spanish form the Kaplan was the surname of her mother.

Even though we are at the very beginning of the process of examining records in Argentina, we have already made an important discovery for anyone researching immigrants from the Russian Empire to Argentina. You can’t afford to ignore these records if a relative of an ancestor went to Argentina. Clara Kaplan Kravetz’s two part name quickly provides the maiden name of her mother. The death certificate lists the names of each of her parents. The marriage certificate of her children gives her husband’s occupation. The marriage book of her children gives a document of inestimable value to family researchers. Argentina’s immigration records are partially indexed but we still await the day they appear in a computer database. The only Argentinian census currently available is 1895 which predates the largest influx of Russian-Jews.

Primary Records of
Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa
by Deborah G. Glassman, copyright 2009

New Zealand Naturalization Records

I have more images and data for this section, but have not had time to work on it. Joseph Beder has shared images and historical materials on Annie Beder Deckston of Wellington New Zealand - one of the earlier settlers of the community. I have found travel documents for Lechovichers heading in and out of British colonies in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, in the pre World War I period, in the Between the Wars period (1920s-1930s) and just after WWII.