Maybe my ancestors heard the Yiddish expression “to live like God in Odesa!” and believed Odesa was the land of opportunity. Whatever the reason, members of three branches of my family emigrated there from within the Russian Empire. Mythical in the Jewish imagination, Odesa was a polyglot, free port city founded…
How to find readable copies of English wills
If you’ve found an English will on Ancestry or the National Archives, you may struggle to read it. That’s because both sites have reduced the quality of the images substantially, presumably to save on bandwidth. Reduced from what? you may wonder. The open secret of the genealogy community is that…
“A direct contradiction of what should be”: The life of Charles Duer McCreary
“That a bright young man, honored by a fine position, favored with excellent health, and with an exceptional bright future before him, should meet death at his own hands seemed a direct contradiction of what should be.” The Inter Lake, Kalispell, Montana. January 6th 1893 I first came across Charles…
Volochisk citizens in Kremenets District
One thing we know about Jewish Volochiskers is that they weren’t afraid to travel. Kremenets was about 60 miles from Volochisk, and there are 220 entries of citizens from Volochisk making an appearance in records in the Kremenets area. The Kremenets District Research Group has spent years gathering, transcribing, and…
Volochisk update and revision list names
(Updated August, 2022 with names from the 1834 Volochisk revision list). When I first started researching my family history, I thought that my Schechowitz family who came from Volochisk, a town in the Russian Empire, (also often spelled Wolochisk, Woloczysk, Volochysk, or Voloczysk) was a dead end, because there were…
Volochisk families in the 1897 Odessa census
The following is a list of Volochisk families who were listed in the 1897 Odessa census. My own family was just one who left Volochisk for the warmer climes of Odessa, where they stayed for a generation before traveling west. There were many Jews from Volochisk in Odessa, but unfortunately…
1913 Volochisk business directory
The following is a list of Volochisk business owners from The Entire Southwestern Territory: A Reference and Address Book for Kiev, Volyn, and Podolsk Provinces published in 1913 by M.V. Dovnar-Zapolsky. The 1,158-page tome has detailed descriptions of the industrial and economic activity of the region, in addition to business…
Volochisk fathers in Starokonstantinov
The only known vital records for Volochisk are for just a handful of years. Miriam Weiner reports that there are Jewish birth records for 1906 and 1921-1939 in the Khmelnitsky archives. But, there are birth records for Starokonstantinov city (Volochisk was part of Starokonstantinov district) going back to the late…
The Volochisk Jewish cemeteries
There are three Jewish cemeteries in Volochisk. The one that is the most visible, on the top of the hill near the river and the railway tracks, is known as the “old” Volochisk Jewish cemetery, the “new” Jewish cemetery is the location of the Holocaust memorial, and there’s a third,…
First Wolochisker Benevolent Association burials
The following is a list of all of the burials at New York’s Montefiore Cemetery for the First Wolochisker Benevolent Association plots. There are three plots: Block 8, Gate 293/N; Block 10, Gate 316/N; Block 81, Gate 267/SE. I’m planning on getting photos of all of these graves the next…