Receiving the reports

Belarus trip: Day 1
Fri 20 May

Straight from the airport to Minsk, and the office of the Jewish Heritage Research Group, where we met Yuri, who has been leading the research and organising the visit for us.

He handed us the reports on the Iliatovitch and Levin families, which had only just been given to him by the genealogist. He had not even had a chance to glance through them before we arrived, so all five of us - Ralph, Mark, Dan, myself and Yuri - were looking at them for the first time, trying to make sense of them.

Yuri has just received the reports from his researchers.

A number of things struck us as we worked our way through the material. First - they definitely have found the right people! Second, not all our direct ancestors appear in the records. This can be quite disconcerting - where's my Granny? - but is understandable when you consider that this area has been through a never-ending succession of wars and revolutions over the last 150 years, and has been ruled or occupied by the Tsarist Empire, Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union, before becoming an independent state in 1992. And of course most of the Jewish communities were wiped out in the Holocaust. So to hear that many records are missing is not such a surprise.

Nevertheless the reports are indeed full of surprises. My Great-grandfather, for instance - also of many of you - is named throughout as 'Shlema-Dovid' Iliatovitch. He appears to have had 5 brothers and sisters, but there is no record, here at least, of any descendants for any of them.

Mikhlya Levin, my Great-grandmother, was also one of 6 siblings, of whom two are recorded with children. Their son Shmuil Iliatovitch and his wife 'Goda' (Hodel to us) had a further 2 children whose names were previously unknown to us, and who must have died young.

The family trees reconstructed for both the Iliatovitch and Levin families go back to just before the turn of the 19th century. So there's quite a bit of history to explore!