Lyubar, Ukraine

The two lists that follow share a great deal of new information about Lyubar Jews. I am in the process of creating similar lists for many of the towns of Novogrod-Volinski District of Volhynia guberniya.  

The Russian government required from the 1850s through the end of the Russian Empire in 1918, almost seventy years, that all Jewish births be recorded in a birth register for the town where the birth occurred. One of the important columns in that register, reported where the father of the infant was legally resident. Infants had legal residence in the towns where their fathers were from, with the legal consequence that boy children would be put on the conscription quotas for that town. The government passed on a list to the town of residence and published two lists – one by town where conscription quota was maintained, and one for the whole guberniya by district, annually. At least I have found them in different years of the 1870s and 1880s as I make my first forays into these records of the newspaper of record.

• This means that even if your family lived in a town where no birth metrika are known to exist, you can learn: the name of the infant; the name of the father; the town where the birth occurred; the town where the father was legally registered; and the birth date on the Julian calendar as registered.
• This means that if you know that the family was not originally from a town where younger children were born, but you don’t know where they came from, that a birth record from that town will tell you. Birth records in metrika, include everything we see in the short, published pieces of the newspaper reports but also, list the mother, the father of both parents, and provide a Russian and Hebrew page so you have the names of all parties as used in Russian and Hebrew. Dates are given by both calendars, Julian and Hebrew, on the Russian page. Circumcision dates are noted. There may be more information on the mother’s maiden surname and town of origin, but that is inconsistent. There may be additional notarized annotations, but again that is an individual find, and is not consistent.
• That means that every town in the region could hold birth records on people from the town of your family’s origin, if one of the children of the family was born there.

The three kinds of lists: by town for recruits within a year of birth; by district by births within a year of birth; and full birth metrika; enhance each other.  Ideally, use all of them. Right now, as we gather the resources, help me make more of them available.

I am going to provide these Lyubar lists to the Lyubar Kehilla site which is run, managed, sweated over, and generally loved, by the hard work of Ellen Kowitt. But I have to find the resources to acquire and search for each year in Russian newspapers. Just recently I found additional information on all of the registered members of specific tax classes – i.e. guild rank members for other towns in the Novogrod-Volinski district and a full list of Jewish meshanin (tax status-townsmen) for Ostropol in 1875. I have not yet had time to do more than snap photos of lists of some court disputes by towns with Jewish parties to the proceedings. Time is needed to read and analyze, as well as to index all of these.

So, I need your help. These lists are going to be shorted on a couple of columns of information that are on the originals. I will gladly provide them to anyone who goes to my website and clicks on the search button. You will never be searching blind. You will know that the person is on the list, and that the information you are requesting is on the original.

The first is a list just of people whose father’s legal residence was Lyubar. Spelling is mostly by standard transliteration from the Russian, but I use tch to replace a single Russian letter that makes that sound, as in Tchaikovsky. Spelling was not consistent in Russian. A man might be Elya in one of his children’s records and Elio in the next.  A surname might be spelled different ways across the birth years of several children of the same family. Names were most often reported in Russian form like Movshe not Moshe, and I used whatever the original showed. Your request for more information from the metrika list, will get you additional information from the index and an image of the entry on the original page.

If you see an entry for which you would like more info, go to my website https://jewishfamiliesofostropol.com/ and then go to the page called Searching for Jews from Volhynia.  The fee for any record from a metrika is 18.00 per for each child’s complete record. Fill in the form on the website and make sure you tell me the name you want and that it is on the Lyubar list from the Chudnov metrika. I will be adding the same kind of info on folks from Lyubar in the Zhitomir metrika shortly, and I may not know which records you are looking for, if you don’t specify. Some of the same surnames also appear in nearby towns which I am trying to cover as well. So be specific. Delivery is not instantaneous. I will generally respond within a couple of business days but you are told on the website that it may take up to two weeks, becaue there is one of me and lots of requests.

The next list is of sixteen boys who were born in other towns in 1874, but all were legally registered in Lyubar. It is what happened to the information in a metrika like Chudnov’s when the child was from another town. It is a great way to find out what happened to branches of the family that moved out of Lyubar and give you new clues for directions in which to search. I hope to publish the researched, translated, indexed, materials for many more years of coverage, and for all of the surrounding towns. Right now I have all of the Novogrod-Volinski towns for 1875 and many of the Starokonstantinov towns as well. In the list that follows you will see some of the boys noted with a second name that has a question mark. The name is clear enough, but it is not sure which is a double name for the child and which is a double name for the father in a listing that might read something like “Ber Moshe Yosef then the surname.”

If you see an entry for which you would like more info, go to my website https://jewishfamiliesofostropol.com/ and then go to the page called Searching for Jews from Volhynia.  The fee for any draft list, voting list or tax list is 14.00. I will provide the missing fathers’ names, the birth towns, and the specific birth date. If you see two people with the same surname in the same record type, and you want both, let me know and I will figure out how we can do a discount for that.  Fill in the contact form on any page of the website and make sure you tell me the name you want and that it is on the Lyubar list from the Chudnov metrika.  Or that it is on the Lyubar boys list for 1875.  Just something recognizable so that I can get the answer to you quickly.

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I will be adding the same kind of info on folks from Lyubar in the Zhitomir metrika shortly (not yet on the website), and I may not know which records you are looking for if you don’t specify. Some of the same surnames also appear in nearby towns which I am trying to cover as well. So be specific. Delivery is not instantaneous. I will generally respond within a couple of business days but you are told on the website that it may take up to two weeks.

You can write to me with your questions by going to my website and filling in the form.  I always will have more towns and years, awaiting translating and indexing and I will always have more materials being ordered. So, let me know what you would most like to see and please support the research by ordering from my site.

I have a 555-name list of Lyubar’s Jewish voters from 1906 and 1907, drawn from the tax rolls, to add next. But let me know if this is material you want to see and let Ellen know as well.

Please write me, Deborah Glassman, via the form on my website https://jewishfamiliesofostropol.com/ with any questions you may have. And I hope you have lots of fun and good finds!