Tracing Names: Seven Days Built to Your Family History

This is the full scenario for Tracing Names. The genealogist begins with the minimum: surname, town, period. They search JewishGen (the largest database of Jewish family sources), the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names, USHMM, and the Polish state archives (Jewish community vital registers, notarial files, property transfer documents). Over eight to twelve weeks of work they build a preliminary tree and identify addresses. Families are often surprised by how much can be recovered from a minimum. Some details (the date of birth of a particular person, a second given name, a profession) require longer work — if the family wishes, we extend to sixteen to twenty weeks as an add-on.

This is a frequent situation — many small Polish shtetls were razed by the Germans (Lublin Podzamcze) or vanished naturally after the war (empty buildings dismantled, squares built over). The we prepare the family for this in advance — we communicate honestly the state of the site. The visit then consists of: standing at the contemporary address where the family home stood (the cadastral map shows precisely), visiting the cemetery if preserved (cemeteries usually survived in worse or better condition), visiting the local regional museum if one exists, meeting a local historian. The absence of a physical building does not invalidate the visit — the family stands at the place where the history unfolded, even if the building has long since gone.

Yes. We regularly design Tracing Names for solo clients — most often the children of survivors, aged 60-75, travelling on their own after years of preparation. The V-Class is comfortable for one passenger (six or seven empty seats), and our coordinator, the scholar, and the genealogist provide substantive and emotional company throughout the stay. The price for a solo trip is lower than for a family (a smaller hotel, fewer kosher meals), but the fixed cost structure (V-Class, chauffeur, scholar, genealogist) does not change proportionally.

Yes. The genealogists in our pool work with documents in Yiddish (the majority of Jewish community vital registers in Poland through 1939), Hebrew (some rabbinic documents, yizkor lists), German (documents from the Habsburg Galicia period 1772-1918), Russian (some Polish archives from the partitions period 1815-1918), and Polish (state files). All translations are produced during the work and attached to the dossier.

Unfortunately this happens. Polish-Jewish genealogy almost always leads to names on the deportation lists of Bełżec, Treblinka, Sobibor, or Auschwitz. Most families expect this — they arrive knowing that their relatives perished and did not return. Sometimes, however, the genealogist uncovers something unexpected: a relative the family did not know of, news of an escape, post-war trial records. The we discuss these findings with the family in advance (before departure), to allow for emotional preparation. Some families prefer to learn everything; others want only a summary — we decide with the family.

At present no — the route is geographically limited to Poland. Lithuania, Ukraine (Volhynia, eastern Galicia), and Belarus (Minsk, Brest) held vast Jewish communities before the war, and many American and Israeli families have roots specifically there. We do not operate in these countries for logistical and security reasons (Ukraine — war; Belarus — political situation; Lithuania — we have no infrastructure). We can recommend colleagues running journeys in these countries if the family has roots there alone. If the family has mixed roots (a grandfather from Poland and a grandmother from Vilnius, for example), Tracing Names covers the Polish part, and the Lithuanian part is provided as a recommendation.