[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Volhynian villages

[Dave Obee]

Further to what Guenther said earlier:

> I just found an Ukrainian listing (RTF file, 316 KB) of all Volhynian
> villages with their actual administrative assignments under
> www.rada.gov.ua/zakon/new/ADM/d33.rtf .
>

I have looked at the lists, and they will be a tremendous asset to us. They
show the modern villages listed by rayon and administrative district.

So, why should we care? Here's one reason.

Civil registration was started in Russia in 1920. As with everywhere else on
the planet, compliance was slow to start, so there weren' t many
registrations until about 1923. In 1924 and 1925, a lot of people got the
message (for one reason or another) and started to register -- in some
cases, years after the event took place. (I found birth registrations for
Nelson Itterman, who is on this mailing list, and for his father -- in the
same year. His father's registration, of course, gave a birth date from the
1800s.)

These documents are generally available through local civil registration
offices, or ZAGS. After 75 years, however, they can be released to the local
archives -- which means we are now able to get unrestricted access to books
from up to 1927 just by going to the archives.

The registrations were done by each administrative district within each
rayon. So to track down which book will have your people, you need to
determine which district your village was in -- and that's where the lists
mentioned above will come in very, very handy.

There are a couple of catches. One is that the list doesn't include all of
the villages, since some have disappeared. So you might need to use a map to
determine which one is right for you. And in some cases, the modern
administrative district has changed; the colony of Ivanovichi is listed
today in the Novopol district, but the district was named Okilok in the
1920s.

Personally, the only downside to Guenther's discovery is that in Zhitomir in
April, I paid $10 US to a guy who gave me in return a 30-year-old book that
contains a copy of the list that is now available for free. Easy come, easy
go, I guess.

Dave Obee