Confirming national origin takes time, knowledge and persistence. It can be unpredictable. Three cases from our practice show that.
- 1.A client called Andrey came to us asking whether his grandparents were Jewish. They were called Maria and Nikolai and lived the standard life of mid-rank Soviet party officials, with one detail — they kept particular traditions on Saturdays. Our researcher asked a few questions and it was clear they were observing Shabbat. The Jewish origin was easy to confirm in the archive after that.
- 2.Another client, Marina, had grown up certain that her surname was Jewish. She came to us to confirm Jewish roots. Nothing survived in the family on that branch except the recollection that the grandfather had served in Tallinn. Our researcher went through the archive and found the service list of staff at the Reval port. The grandfather was there. The record said he was the son of a Saxon-born woman of the Evangelical-Lutheran faith. So Marina was not Jewish but ethnic German. Jewish roots disproved, German roots confirmed.
- 3.A client we will call Maria Petrovna came to us not for a national-origin search but for a hundred-year genealogical research on two surname branches. We start each project with a long interview, and during that interview she mentioned in passing that her son had recently married a Jewish woman. The topic came and went, completely unrelated to the work. Some time later we received the birth certificate of her grandmother. The place of birth was Gostomel, Kyiv Region. The grandmother had been born under the name Sosi-Moshki Leibovna. Maria Petrovna had spent her whole life believing the grandmother's name was Sofia. Maria Petrovna is now a citizen of Israel.
Three different stories with three different endings. You never know in advance what the line will turn out to be. Sometimes it is worth looking simply because the answer can change the options open to you. If the question is live for you, we can confirm or refute national roots with documents.
