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       Date Last Updated: 18-May-2012

Vitebsk Families Stories and Pictures

 
  VITEBSK FAMILIES STORIES AND PICTURES  
 


The Roskin, Kanaskov, Mirkin, Shalyt, and Barbanel Families

This information was donated by DZK.

My maternal grandparents were born in Velizh, Vitebsk Gubernia. My cousins in Russia tell me that the previous generation of my grandmother's and grandfather's family were from Liozno.

An old map * was found among my grandmother's papers. It is a map of the town of Velizh as it was in 1910 (it was then in Vitebsk district, now in Smolensk district), hand drawn from memory by some Velizhers in New York in 1938. The map was scanned full size (approximately 64 by 38 cm) at a resolution of 300 dpi, and saved as a pdf file which is 10MB in size.

The street layout in Velizh today is much the same today, except for the location of the bridge over the Dvina River. I visited there twice: in 1997 with my sister and in 2007 with one of my Moscow cousins. Some of the family names of ancestors in this line include Roskin, Kanaskov, Mirkin, Shalyt, and Barbanel. The Russian relatives say that one of these families had some sort of connection to Spain, and that someone several generations back was peripherally involved with the assassination of Czar Alexander. That's about as much as I know.

*This map is shown in: Vitebsk Districts and Towns- Velizh