Online Record Availability of Ochakov

Aggregated by Ethan Parmet

Records Available on JewishGen

JewishGen, in the past 2 years, has indexed thousands of records from Ochakov and the surrounding towns in the UkraineSIG's new effort to index Jewish Ukrainian records. It is hard to keep a completely updated list of all the records available, but here is a list of what is currently available for the shtetl as of April 2024 totaling 1,297 entries:

Census Lists

1853-1854 Jewish Religious Personnel in the Russian Empire: This index is not searchable under years, but contains the names of religious personnel in the Russian Empire.
- There are a total of 3 entries from Ochakov that you can check for here.

1858 Census: The 1858 Census for Ochakov contains the names of all the registered Jews that the authorities could collect at the time. It is listed as "Ochakova" for the record set.
- You can view all 1,162 entries for the Ochakov census here.
- Additionally, you can check this index for a list of surnames that appear on Ochakov's 1858 census.

Metric Books & Vital Records

JewishGen does not currently possess any indexed birth registers from the town of Ochakiv itself. For birth and death records, lots of families registered in Ochakiv had children and moved to Nikolayev or Bessarabia, so you may find records for your family under that town if they moved around or did not update their registration. Among those who were registered or from Ochakov and registered in Nikolayev or other towns include

Births: 98 in Nikolayev; 13 in Bessarabia; 4 in Shargorod; 1 in Starokonstantinov
Marriages: 8 in Nikolayev; 2 in Bessarabia
Deaths: 15 in Nikolayev; 4 in Bessarabia

Records Available On- & Off-line Outside of JewishGen

Metric Books & Tax Polls

Although I am unsure if the records are just for the city proper of Odessa, or for the whole district of Odessa (including Ochakov), it may be worthwhile to check out Alex Krakovsky's Digitized Metric Books of the Odessa Rabbinate , as well as the Handwritten indexes of metric books of the Odessa Rabbinate . These records may be particularly useful if any branches of your family moved to the main city, or lived and did business there, although these records are entirely in Cyrillic cursive.

The Departmental Archives of the Mykolaiv Oblast, under the EJAP, claims to hold the physical books for the metric records of metric records of 1862-1865 for the Rabbinate of Ochakyv under Fond 395, Opus 1. It has not been posted to Krakovsky's database and paying researchers to photograph pages in the archives is extraordinarily expensive.
They also claim to have records regarding various taxes surrounding Jews in the 1840s and the 1850s under Fond 279, Opus 1, although these records are also not available online.

Holocaust

Available records for the town of Ochakov during the time of the Holocaust include:

The Yad Vashem Names Database is a searchable index that contains information on those during the Holocaust who were born, who lived, and who died in Ochakiv (450 Entries)

The European Jewish Archives Portal holds offline records relating to the internment of Jews from Ochakov at the Slivino Camp and their coercion into forced labor.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum holds offline records pertaining to aid received by Jews in Ochakov who were in the Slivino Camp (These are indexed on JewishGen under New Romanian Lists, but do not have much information in the index).

The Center for Jewish History has materials online in written and typed Russian and Yiddish relating to the pogroms from 1919 to 1921 in Ochakov, and lists more at the YIVO institute that must be obtained from a YIVO archivist.

Modern & Soviet-era Records

Upon searching "Очаков" at Genealogy Indexer , one can find address, business, and telephone directories (in printed Russian) from the Odessa & Kherson Governorates that contain mentions of Ochakiv and its residents from the 1900s up until the 1940s, although these records apply to all residents of the area and not exclusively its Jewish citizens.

Anyone who wishes to request a civil registry record (such as birth, marriage, or death) from the Soviet Period (around 1921ish-onwards) can do so through the Ministry of Justice's branch in the Odessa Oblast, which provides an email for contact (I would recommend using a translator to format an email in Ukrainian rather than in English). To my knowledge, you are able to request records without a court order that are older than 75 years (which would be up to 1949 in 2024), regardless of whether or not a judge has signed off on it for legal purposes. This is according to Clauses 19 & 20 of Section IV of the Rules regarding the civil registry.