Tracing my buried bloodlines

With the war, genealogy has become popular among Ukrainians as a way to reclaim their historical heritage. Mariana travels to her home region to find lost family roots.

Editor’s Note: We often talk about how Ukraine resists occupation.

Yet we often forget that we stand on the shoulders of giants, especially those who fought for independence. Want to gain a deeper look into humanity’s fight against authoritarianism? Subscribe to support our work!

“Hurry up, a wall of rain is coming at us.”

My father’s words are cut off by the creak of the cemetery gate.

The living are not frequent visitors here — the overgrown grass and a fallen tree blocking the path make it clear that those beneath the ground spend most of their time in solitude.

I haven’t liked coming here since I saw shovelfuls of earth thrown onto my grandfather’s coffin. But today the graves will tell me something valuable.

I will finally learn the names of relatives I never knew.

The cemetery area where my grandfather’s grandparents, born in the 1890s, are buried, along with other relatives. Dorotyshche village, Volyn region, north-west of Ukraine.

Genealogy has been gaining popularity across the world. For some, the search for roots is a unique hobby, while for others it becomes a lifelong pursuit. People everywhere take DNA tests, compile family trees, and explore online archives to learn about relatives abroad, ancestors lost in war, and their true origins.

In Ukraine, the exploration of one’s lineage carries profound meaning. It is a way to restore a history that others tried to tear out page by page.

It is also a way to grasp what Ukraine might have been were it not for countless occupations, and to understand the price that was paid for us to be born.

Researching one’s family line is a chance to reclaim the names erased by different regimes and to feel a stronger foundation beneath their identity — one that helps them find new strength for resistance.

After all, behind nearly every Ukrainian family, some ancestors fought for freedom.

Since his school years, my grandfather had been fascinated by researching the history of everything around him: our family line, the village where he grew up, and even the objects he found under his feet.

I still remember how the cabinets in his room sagged under newspaper clippings, coins, stamps, medals, badges, and simply curious historical artifacts.

My father always joked that he had Google before it was invented — because grandpa had the answer to any of his questions.

Reader question:
Does this remind you of anyone in your life? Let us know in the comments, and bear witness to their memory!

And it was precisely this curiosity that helped trace our family history back seven generations — if you count me.

“He’s been sitting there for days with a voice recorder,” my grandmother tells me as she greets me in the yard.

Shortly after, I hear for the tenth time the stories of our family history: how one of our ancestors, once among the wealthiest merchants of the Russian Empire, lost his entire fortune at billiards in just two days; how another fell asleep and woke up during his own funeral; and how yet another kidnapped a princess from the Caucasus, forcing him to flee and eventually settle in the northwestern oblast of Volyn.

I came across roughly the same stories on the creaking tape recorder that my grandfather now uses to preserve this knowledge. There were over 120 recordings at one point — and I’m sure there are even more now. At times, his stories sound like fiction, but who am I to argue with someone who has spent his whole life searching for truth?

What I wanted was to follow a similar path myself — to learn something about my mother’s side of the family. I had heard almost nothing about it.

My grandfather’s regular kit: magnifying glass, remote control, and voice recorder.

The first step is to ask the oldest members of the family, since they are usually the ones who know the most. The more I can get from them, the less time I need to spend in the archives. Still, I remain critical because names and events can often become distorted in memory.

“Researching a family tree requires a long-term effort. You start with your parents and grandparents. If there are great-grandparents still alive, you interview them too — anyone along the direct line. Then you move on to talking with the siblings of your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on,” explained genealogist Serhii Fazulianov.

Older relatives sometimes refuse to speak about their past or their family’s past, still burdened by the fear of life under repressive regimes. For example, some families decide to keep silent regarding a relative fleeing the Holodomor, an artificial famine engineered by the USSR in 1932-1933.

Yet this is precisely the information that helps you understand what your lineage has endured. Preparing my grandmother for a conversation about her ancestors, I set out to collect as many names, birth and death dates as possible.

I also wanted to find out whether anyone in the family had been involved in World War II, survived the Holodomor, exile, or repression. These are the key moments that help establish the geography of the family’s migration and provide additional leads.

A part of my mother’s family line in the family tree via My Heritage.

Firstly, my grandmother was reluctant to talk, insisting she knew nothing about our family line. But two hours later, we had managed to track down more than 70 relatives on my mother’s side. At times, the memories were confused or contradictory, but it was a solid start.

“Your great-grandfather came to Volyn, fleeing hunger in the Dnipropetrovsk region. He was just a little boy, traveling alone without a ticket. The famine there was terrible — all they had to eat were roots from the grass. His family was just trying to survive, to keep from dying,” my grandmother said.

And indeed, I found archival records of people with the same surname who had perished during the Holodomor in the district he came from. I still need to find out whether this was just a namesake or a distant relative whose blood now flows in me.

People with the surname ‘Lebid’ who died in the Dnipropetrovsk region in 1933, during the man-made famine orchestrated by the Soviet Union as an act of genocide against Ukrainians. Source: State Archive of Dnipropetrovsk Region.

My grandmother still recalls stories of how our ancestors hid in the forests, passing letters or other supplies to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, who fought for Ukrainian independence during the 1940s to 1960s.

One of my great-grandmothers, according to my grandmother, was even exiled to Magadan in the Far East Russia, and all of her husbands were repressed for their pro-Ukrainian stance.

Her stories also include some collective farmers who worked in Soviet rural households. And occasionally even committed communists, like my great-grandfather Panteleimon, who forbade my grandma from voting in elections and smoked a pack of cigarettes in record time.

Still, these stories are full of gaps. My grandmother does not remember the exact names of most distant relatives, nor when they were born. The fact that my lineage stretches across only a few villages works in my favor: local cemeteries can tell a story that even the oldest family members no longer remember.

Through local cemeteries, I can uncover the names of family members, their date of birth and death, missing from the family tree. Still, it is not that simple.

Living under different regimes, or simply due to clerical mistakes in the records, names and surnames often appeared differently from the ones we knew within the family. For example, it was thanks to a grave marker that I discovered one of my great-great-grandfathers was officially registered as Kiryk, even though everyone had always believed his name was Kyrylo.

Many families faced the problem of Russified surnames — authentic Ukrainian surnames altered with suffixes like -ov, -in, or -ev. That’s how the Kravets lineage turned into the Kravtsov family.

People with Ukrainian last names were considered of lower status, and in Soviet times, this could even become an obstacle to career advancement.

Photos of my ancestors, saved by my grandmother.

Old family photographs hold a unique value, not just because they show us what our ancestors looked like, but because they hold a story.

“On the backs of photos, there are often notes: who the photo was for, who it’s from, or even who exactly is pictured. That alone can help fill in the gaps in your family history,” explained genealogist Fazulianov.

Remember how I was told that my great-grandmother had been exiled to the Russian far east? In reality, she lived in Karaganda, in northern Kazakhstan.

One of the photos is inscribed: “A lasting memory for my dear brother Petia. Karaganda. January 1955. Prystupa M.K.”

Today, several vital archives in Ukraine have been digitized: in particular victims of political repression, the Holodomor, and the executions at Babyn Yar, the ravine in Kyiv where the Nazis killed over 100,000 civilians.

Ukraine is currently one of the leading former Soviet republics in the declassification of Soviet-era documents. Back in the USSR, tracing your family tree was nearly impossible; ordinary citizens were denied access to the archives. Even now, the declassified materials are far from complete. The Soviet regime repeatedly tried to destroy any evidence of its crimes.

Another invaluable resource includes church records, which were kept by the clergy in official registers. These documents recorded births and baptisms, marriages, deaths, and more.

Metric book of the village of Serakhovychi, Volyn region, Ukraine. 1871–1881. Photo by Ihor Slobozhan.

To make things even more complicated, until the 18th or 19th century most peasants didn’t even have surnames. People were known simply by their first name and father’s name, or a nickname.

Western Ukrainian lands, which were then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, began officially recording names and family ties in the 1780s. But in the territories ruled by the Russian Empire, that didn’t happen until after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Before that, even people from the same family could end up with different surnames.

And even if your relatives did somehow end up in the historical records, there’s no guarantee you’ll ever find out. Both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union routinely relocated archives to Moscow or St. Petersburg or destroyed them outright.

Since the invasion of 2014, Ukraine has lost access to the archives in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. During the full-scale invasion, more archives have been damaged in fighting or fallen under occupation.

Russian archives, where you might also uncover records of your relatives, have always been difficult to access. Since the full-scale war, they’ve become even more closed off. In 2021, for instance, the Russian Ministry of Defense classified World War II-era Red Army documents once again.

I tried to locate the original document that proved my great-grandfather, Savva Prystupa, was awarded a medal for his service in World War II. However, the Russian online archive requested that I apply directly to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense.

From the beginning, I knew this would be a long shot with little guarantee of big success. Any traces of my family’s past may have been lost, destroyed, or relocated thousands of kilometers from Ukraine.

A weary sigh is inevitable.

I’m yet another generation forced to gather historical memory grain by grain, like trying to lift sand with a fork.

But we have no other choice: this was the life’s work of my grandfather. Letting it remain trapped in a creaky old voice recorder would be a crime.

By restoring the memory of my past, I can finally understand who I truly am.

Editor’s Note: Hit our tip jar if you enjoyed this story!

NEWS OF THE DAY:

By: Aidan Stretch

Good morning to readers; Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.

RUSSIAN DRONE KILLS FRENCH JOURNALIST: A Russian drone attack killed a French photojournalist on Friday in eastern Ukraine, according to Reuters.

The drone struck Antoni Lallican near the eastern Ukrainian town of Druzhkivka, killing him and injuring an accompanying Ukrainian photographer, Hryhory Ivanchenko. This was the first time a journalist has been killed by a drone in the war.

The head of the Ukrainian Union of Journalists, Serhiy Tomilenko, says that “by targeting journalists, the Russian army is deliberately hunting those trying to document war crimes.”

CZECH ELECTIONS COULD JEOPARDIZE UKRAINE AID: On October 3/4, Czechs are voting in parliamentary elections which will likely bring right-wing populist party ANO to power. Czech Prime minister Petr Fiala’s current pro-Ukraine coalition has the lowest public support of any administration since 2013. Pre-election polls suggest a coalition less friendly to Ukraine will likely take power with ANO’s leader, billionaire Andrej Babis, as prime minister.

According to Politico, Babis’s victory is especially concerning for a Prague-led ammunition initiative that has delivered millions of rounds to Ukraine — which Babis has pledged to cancel.

UKRAINE’S DAMAGE TO RUSSIAN OIL LIKELY OVERSTATED: According to Carnegie Politika, Ukraine’s strike campaign on Russian oil refineries has inflicted less damage than previously reported.

While the Washington Post has reported that Russia has lost 38 percent of its oil refining capacity, the real percentage is likely lower, says Sergey Vakulenko, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

“Russia’s oil refineries are facing a lot of problems—but things are far from catastrophic,” he wrote. “How the situation develops in the coming months depends on whether Ukraine is able to maintain the pace of its strike campaign, or even ramp up attacks.

Dog of War:

Zoriana met this dog during her morning walk today. It’s getting colder every day, but he didn’t seem to care about it, just looking at the autumn leaves while his owner was typing something on her phone.

Stay safe out there.

Best,
Mariana