20^th Century Records

Documents Created about Lyakhovichi Inhabitants
while Resident in the Town
by Deborah G. Glassman, copyright 2005

These records were created about people who were living in Lyakhovichi in the Twentieth Century when the records were made. If the person lived in or was a registered resident of Lyakhovichi when a Voter's list was compiled for local or national Duma elections, then look for them here in the records of the Russian Empire before 1918. If they conducted business in the Lyakhovichi area between the World Wars, then see if they might show up in the Business Directories of the area, which data extracts we posted here. Perhaps they will be in the records that we hope to someday acquire from the Polish Censuses of 1921 and 1931, those would also be linked to this page. If they were murdered by the Nazis, either in Lyakhovichi or in a place in which they tried to find safety, we remember them in these pages. Please find our Holocaust related lists under the Complete Lyakhovichi Records Catalog. Records created about those who emigrated, at any time in the Twentieth Century to countries abroad, to other nations in Europe, or to the Soviet Union before or during WWII, are described and listed in the following paragraphs and subsequent links on this page.

The image found in the following link is part of a wonderful 1926 document where every school child in Poland signed a "birthday" greeting to the United States of America on the US's 150th anniversary, called The Polish Declarations of Admiration and Friendship for the United States. The many-volume set of pages from each school in Poland is at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The index to the towns can be found at the Library of Congress, European Reading Room. Lachowicze can be found within Baranovichi in Volume 99, Page 149.

Lyakhovichi Jews in the Soviet Army - We begin our page on Soviet records created after 1939 with information that can be found in published lists of Jewish Soviet Soldiers of WWII. We also look at the records of the millions of Stalin deportees to the Russian interior, Russian Siberia, and the Asiatic Soviet republics. We start the process of learning about resources in the Soviet Military Archives, in the record creating process of Soviet Marriage and Death certificates, and about indexes to records of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that regulated the judiciary, the prosecution, the police, and penal systems of the Soviet Union. But we continue to seek and need your help locating specific records, reference materials, scholarly articles, memoirs, and other relevant data. Vistit Soviet Records Related to those born in Lyakhovichi to learn more.

Lyakhovichi Jews in the Holocaust - There were over four thousand Lechovichers murdered in Lyakhovichi itself in the Holocaust. We can show that many more who were born in Lyakhovichi or who had previously resided there, were murdered in other Russian and European towns. As we learn more about individuals who died we will publish them so that they are remembered. You will find information on those we still mourn on the Holocaust - Memorial page.

Lyakhovichi Jews in Polish Records created 1920-1939

We have information and extracted material on Jews as students and teachers in schools on Polish territory; Jews in the Polish Army's Military District #9 which included Lyakhovichi; the few and scanty details we have of the availability of the censuses of 1921 and 1931, voter lists, and civil registration of births, marriages and deaths.

Imperial Russian Records of the Twentieth Century 1900-1918/19

While we are still actively seeking out many records not yet found, these records include details of registered voters eligible to vote for the national Dumas of 1906 and 1907; Lyakhovichi property owners who were registered in the records of the city of Lyakhovichi; and information on other records that we know were created between the year 1900 and the dissolution of the Russian Imperial State. The records of Lechovichers abroad filed in Russian Consular offices are also recorded here. See the affidavits and witness statements of those who resided in the Philadelphia area filed during World War I with the Russian Consul of that city. We are searching for additional records in the consular materials of Montreal, New York City, and San Francisco.

Business, Trade, and Telephone, Directories of Poland 1920-1939
and Imperial Russia 1900-1918

We have five consecutive years of Lyakhovichi listings in Polish Business Directories from 1926-1930; we have the listings for Lyakhovichi and Baranovichi and their dependent towns (covering a number of nearby communities) for the year 1929; we look at the telephone directories that might become available; and we examine the Imperial Russia directories for Lyakhovichi, Novy Mush, and Gorodishche for 1903 and 1911. Then we look at an entirely different kind of source, a memoir that figuratively walks up and down the streets of Lyakhovichi citing the hundreds of businesses in the town around 1912.

Documents Created about Lyakhovichi:
Former Residents as or after they Moved Away
By Deborah G. Glassman copyright, 2005

These records were created about people who were once resident in Lyakhovichi, after or as they moved away. Most were created about those who were born in Lyakhovichi, on documents required to list their legal place of birth. Records created about a Belarussian citizen in Minsk, in the 1990s might name the town of birth as Lyakhovichi, though the elderly resident might not have seen our town in fifty years. A Soviet identity card carried in places as far away as Tashkent, Crim, or Omsk (in Uzbekistan, Crimea, and Siberia respectively) might have listed a Lyakhovichi birth, we know our people were in all of those places. Most of Lyakhovichi's former residents who lived in the Soviet Union did so in the largest cities - Moscow, Leningrad, and in the Belarus Soviet, in Minsk.

Emigrants of the 1920s and 1930s got to safe haven in Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina, as well as British Mandate Palestine, South Africa, and Australia. The first two decades of the Twentieth Century saw the massive transplantation of Jews of Lyakhovichi to large cities, small towns, and farms, across the United States but we also know of those who only got as far as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom, before stopping their journeys. In all of those places, the demand for information about one's birthplace, family, and dates and places of emigration, created records, some of which survive, documenting Lyakhovichi emigres.

For all the records see the Migration Records (Compiled) tab in the Complete Lyakhovichi Records Catalog.

See Emigrant Associations for a comprehensive list of associations.

Cemetery Records

For all these records see the Cemeteries Lyakhovichi Plots tab in the Complete Lyakhovichi Records Catalog.

You can see the letters translated into English from relatives back home used to get permission for the Lechovicher Emigrant Relief Association's representative to travel to Poland in 1919. We will continue adding: Cemetery Records from Lyakhovichi mutual insurance societies and from burial plots attributed to Lechovicher groups; membership materials from Lyakhovichi organizations in NYC and in Eretz Israel; and memorial information printed in Yizkor materials and newspapers. We seek Membership, Organizational, Newspaper, and Burial records of Lyakhovichi groups in the United States, Israel, South America, and South Africa! We have included newspaper reports, membership ephemera, and expanded coverage of organizational records.

Lechovicher Emigrant Associations is a set of Records of Lechovicher Settlements around the World. Lyakhovichi's Jews settled in nearby Russian towns (Baranovichi, Kletsk, and Nesvizh, for example). They formed little communities of landsleit in bigger Czarist communities and cities like Minsk, Slutsk, Bialystok, Grodno, and Vilna. They moved on and settled in New York City's Lower East Side, Buenos Aires Parque Chas, and in rural "Litvak" communities around South Africa. We hope to eventually include dozens of towns and cities where such relocation was common but so far can offer: Lechovichers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan NYC. Research is being done on Lechovichers in Slutsk and Minsk; Lechovichers in Slonim, and Pinsk; Lechovichers in Brest-Litovsk, Grodno, Vilna, and Bialystok; and Lechovichers in St Petersburg, and Moscow.

Lyakhovichi Natives in the Primary Records of their Nations of Landing

The following types of records are readily availabe through genealogy search engines.

• US Federal Records - Military
• US Federal Records - Naturalizations
• US Federal Records - Passports, Visas
• US Federal Records - Census
• US Local Records - Vital Records
• US Local Records - Court Records
• Canadian Federal Records - Military; Citizenship; Census
• Latin American Records
• Eretz Israel

This part of our webpage has the potential to grow greatly over the next few years, as more and more records come on-line and become indexable. We have found documents that specify the Lyakhovichi birth or last residence among those created in the United States, Canada, France, England, Israel, South Africa, Argentina, Cuba, and others. World War I Draft Registrations in the US and Canada are informative and extractable for Lyakhovichi birthplaces. The French import of hundreds of thousands of Russians for inexpensive labor in the 1920s was met by French nativist policies in the 1930s that forced a huge amount of documentation to be acquired by the immigrant and recorded with the French government. Visas, death records, passports, marriage records - are all potential sources of birthplace and last residence. This is information that can be gathered by us as a group, or that we track down on our own. This information may be less specific but still valuable to us genealogically. We have begun the massive task of moving through World War I Draft Registrations, though most commercial indices do not note the specific town of birth and 89,000 Russian-born men registered for the draft in New York State alone. The webmaster has been working off a list of surnames found in Lyakhovichi documents and then checking those who share such a surname who indicate a Russian or Polish birth. It is an arduous process and volunteers are welcome! We also have a brief listing (so far around 70 names) of men who registered for the "Old Man's Draft" of WWII citing a Lyakhovichi birth. We encourage you to find other records, such as US marriage records that include a specific town of birth. You can help by both doing Lyakhovichi searches in them and informing us so we can help make them accessible! These pages will also include those who emigrated to Eretz Israel in the Turkish period and the British Mandate period as well as to the modern state of Israel! We have a list of those from our community and its surrounds buried on the Mt of Olives. Visa Records and Alien Registration records are now available from the US government - help us build a collection for Lyakhovichi people and we will build a new page to hold it!