Location of Archives concerning Odessa population

Miriam Weiner from rtrfoundation.org has done a great job by compiling the different locations of archives concerning the Odessa Population.
You'll find the detail of the different locations and their contents at the Routes to Roots Foundation (write Odessa in the Town Name textbox and press Search)

Jewish Records on the Odessa State Archives

Fond 39: Odessa Rabbinate Records

Note: These documents are located on this page of the Odessa Archives Website

State Archives of Odessa Region

Contact information

Contents of the Odessa State Archives (from 1748 to 1998)

Note : some digitized funds are available under the archives section of the Odessa State Archives website.

Among the funds period XVIII - early XX century
Documents of the Office of Novorossiysk and Bessarabskogo Governor General, Office of the Mayor of Odessa, Odessa Office of the sheriff, the Prosecutor of the Odessa Regional Court Balta district court, county of Odessa city council, Odessa customs, etc.:
• Funds Management and Novorossiysk Bessarabskogo Governor General, Office of Chief Chief southern settlements, Popechytelnoho committee for foreign settlers of the Southern region of Russia. There is information about the German, Bulgarian, Greek, Polish, Jewish and other immigrants, the farming and construction, opening schools and churches in the colonies, the history of Black, Bug, Azov and Danube (Novorossiysk) Cossack troops;
• Funds Odessa City Council and the Board, Office of the Mayor of Odessa, Odessa Construction Committee of the Odessa Branch of the Russian Technical Society, the Odessa port management, central office of the Russian Society of shipping and trade in Odessa, containing documents from the construction and beautification of the city and port. There is evidence of merchants and townspeople, the First All-Russian census in Odessa (1897);
• Fund documents Society of Agriculture of the Southern region of Russia, the Odessa branch of the Russian Technical Society, the Office of Novorossiysk and Bessarabskogo Governor-General, township and village boards contain information on agriculture, to conduct experiments on different varieties of crops, their cultivation and acclimatization, documents from the agricultural and industrial exhibitions;
• Funds of the Office of the Odessa school district trustee, Richelieu Lyceum, University of Novorossiysk, Odessa senior women's courses and other educational institutions provide information about the system of higher and secondary education, including special, the development of school affairs, the opening of national education and training and educational work, on the activities of famous scientists: MF Gamal, Zabolotny, Mendeleyev, Mechnikov, IM Sechenov, Pirogov, EM Shchepkin, S. P . Yaroshenko et al.
• Funds Kherson Spiritual Consistory, Balta spiritual leader, Rabbi of Odessa city, The Evangelical Lutheran St. coming. Paul in Odessa contain documents about church in Odessa and other cities and villages of Novorossiysk region, church parish register, formulary lists of ministers of religious institutions;
• Funds provincial, county, township, village revkomiv and executive committees reflect the establishment of Soviet power in the province (1918-1934);
• Funds Odessa Regional and municipal councils, their departments and offices contain documents about the development of industry and agriculture, transport, culture, education (1923-1992).
• Funds Odessa hubrady national economy, local industry okrviddilu Odessa, Odessa Oblast Department of Light Industry, district energy management, inter canning trust, plants, factories and other organizations and institutions of the economy kept documents about the nationalization of industry, recovery of the economy after the war, construction, reconstruction and functioning of industrial enterprises, the development of metal, wood, leather, textile, garment, chemical, food industries (1919-1938, 1944-1965).
• Committee Foundation of poor peasants, provincial and district land administration, the county land department, Odessa Union of agricultural cooperatives and credit associations, collective farms and agricultural gang, institutions and organizations of agriculture contain documents of forced collectivization and its consequences, the state of agriculture in 20-50 -years (1920-1934, 1944-1956).
• Funds Black Sea Shipping Company, Odessa merchant fleet, of Odessa-Kishinev railroad are instruments of transportation, freight, construction vehicle and others. (1920-1975).
• funds institutions of education, science, culture, health, higher and secondary education (1920-1931).

The period of World:
• Funds of the occupation regime of Romanian-German occupation (1941-1944) - governorate directorates Transnistria, the ghosts of the Odessa municipality, county, prefectural, county pretur, district ghosts and rural labor communities.
• information about prisoners of ghettos in cities Bershad, Balti, Mogilev-Podolsky, Chechelnyk, Domanevka, Kopaigorod (of 138 ghetto).
• Documents on the underground guerrilla movement, the Odessa region in 1941-1944 was allocated to a separate fund.

Soviet period:
• Documents of the CP (B), attributable to the Communist Party and Komsomol bodies and organizations. This fund Odessa sponge party, county and district party committee, of Odessa and Izmail party regional committees, party committees Soviet Black Sea-Danube Shipping Company, Odessa and Illichivsk Commercial Port CHPORP "Antarctica" korableremontnoho plant (1920-1925, 1932-1991);
• Documents political departments of Odessa-Kishinev railway MTS, Odessa and Izmail oblvoyenkomativ, industrial and rural production partkomitetiv (1946-1965). There are documents of a personal nature: the case of admission to the party and the personality and personal case reports of purges of the party (1921, 1923);
• Fund istpartviddilu Odessa sponge CP (B) contains documents on the activities of various political parties in Odessa and the province in the late nineteenth - early twentieth century., the members of the Bolshevik underground in 1918-1919, the Red, is contemporaneous recollections of participants of events in the Odessa region;
• funds of other political parties and organizations of the Odessa Committee RSDLP (Mensheviks), Odessa sponge left-wing Social Revolutionaries, the Regional Committee and the urban Jewish Communist Party (Poalei-Zion), the Odessa regional committee of Komsomol Jewish.

State Archives of Kherson Oblast

Contact information

Central State Archives of Ukraine

Contact information

Obtaining documents from the Archives

1. to go personally: of course, this is not an option for most of the researchers.
2. to contact the Odessa archives (see the contact information above): it's not always easy to obtain an answer but it's always worth trying. When contacting the Archives, you will need to provide full name and event date for the record. It's unlikely that they perform any research without that information.
3. to hire a researcher in Odessa to retrive the documents for you: it's what most genealogists do. It's more expensive but you can expect results. Most available researchers propose a "full research" (retrieve all the documents with your family name on the Archives) for a fixed fee. A list of recommended researchers for hire is available at https://www.jewishgen.org/infofiles/researchers.htm.
4. to contact the nearest Ukrainian consulate: I've never tried that with Ukraine but it has worked with other countries. Depending on the case, they will either request the certificate for you or will explain you how to get it from the Archives. In any case, as for contacting the archives directly, you will need to provide accurate information about the name and date of the record.