Gather your names and places. If you only know your ancestors’ names after they emigrated from Ukraine, the JewishGen’s Jewish Given Names Database can help you think of possibilities for their Hebrew and/or Russian given names. If you don’t know their surnames while they lived in Ukraine, it’s unlikely you will be able to find their records. Look at immigration and citizenship records in the country they moved to and try your best to find their surnames. Recognize that due to transliteration from a Cyrillic alphabet to a Roman alphabet, the same name can be spelled in a variety of ways—this is why JewishGen has phonetic and “sounds like” options for search.
Search the JewishGen Ukraine Database. JewishGen is constantly adding newly-translated and indexed records from Ukraine. These include decades of Metrical Books from Yekaterinoslav that show births, marriages, divorces, and deaths for the Jewish people of the city and its environs. Try searching the JewishGen Ukraine Database for your ancestors’ surname(s) in a few ways. Try the name phonetically, try “sounds like,” and try “fuzzy match.”
Search all JewishGen records, beyond Ukraine, for your family’s surnames and given names. If the surname is a common name, put in the town as “Ekaterinoslav” and/or “Dnipropetrovsk.” You never know what you might find… perhaps they were among the refugees who evacuated to Tashkent during WWII, or they moved or married in another part of the Russian Pale of Settlement and the record in the other locality mentions Ekaterinoslav.
Look at the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF) results that show up in your JewishGen record search, and contact researchers who are looking for information on the same surnames as you are in Yekaterinoslav. (A free JewishGen account is required.) When you write to the researchers, provide as much information as you can about who your ancestors are, including names, approximate dates of birth, and names of any of their siblings, parents, or children that you know. You may gain some valuable information or clues!
Learn your family’s surnames and given names in the Cyrillic alphabet, and determine how they could look in Russian cursive script. This is easier than it sounds: Steve Morse provides one-step tools to transliterate and to show cursive characters, and JewishGen's webinar on Translating Russian Records (YouTube, 2021) provide guidance. Once you learn the shape of your family’s names, you can skim and search through images of untranslated, unindexed records.
Find the relevant unindexed records, and skim them. As of this website’s launch, several metrical books for Yekaterinoslav were posted free online at Alex Krakovsky’s Ukrainian “Jewish Town” Wiki, but not all of them had been translated. (Check this list of which records have been translated and indexed on Jewish Gen.) You can download and view all of Krakovsky and team’s scanned archives for Yekaterinoslav here:
Jewish births, deaths, marriages, divorces, etc. from Ekaterinoslav Gubernia (Ukrainian language website, Russian language records)
Metric Books of the Ekaterinoslav province (Ukrainian language website, Russian language records)
To learn more about this archives project you can watch Krakovsky in a JewishGen webinar (YouTube, March 2023).
Do a JewishGen site search for your family’s surname and the city’s name. Some records are embedded in books on the site and don’t show up in record searches, such as two history books of the Yekaterinoslav agricultural colonies that include family names. If the surname is not that common, you may be able to find some helpful materials. I found mention of my great-great grandfather’s brothers in unindexed books on JewishGen.
Look at Miriam Weiner’s Routes to Roots Foundation website for a list of records related to “Dnepropetrovsk.” This is a list of all the archival resources for the Jewish population of the city. The site does not indicate which of these archives have been scanned, translated, and/or indexed, which is a drawback. However, Routes to Roots can help you know whether you have looked in all available places for records for your ancestors.
Why and how did our ancestors come to live in Yekaterinoslav? Why did they leave? Perhaps your family stories give you a clue, but most often, we don’t know exactly why. Learning more about the Jewish History of Yekaterinoslav can help us build an understanding of what their likely motivations were.
Because of the timing of Russian regulations on surnames, most Jewish inhabitants of Yekaterinoslav took on surnames in the places they lived before Yekaterinoslav. The different naming conventions in different localities may offer a family researcher some clues about where their ancestors came from before they settled in Yekaterinoslav. (See Alexander Bieder’s work including this article and webinar (YouTube) for guidance.)
Might your ancestors have come to the Yekaterinoslav Gubernia’s Jewish Agricultural Colonies before settling in the city? An excellent overview of these colonies comes from the early 20th century Jewish Encyclopedia entry, Agricultural Colonies in Russia. Written and published between 1901 and 1906, the article can offer some clues about your ancestors’ possible paths. Two 19th-century books about the Jewish Agricultural Colonies contain lists of the names of the resident farmer families. You can search L. Uleinikov, Jewish Agricultural Colonies in Ekaterinoslav Province in 1890 (St Petersburg, 1891) and I. Kankrin, Jewish Agricultural Colonies of Aleksandrov Uyezd Ekaterinoslav Province (Ekaterinoslav, 1893) to see if your ancestors’ surnames shows up.
Additionally, you can find evidence of Agricultural Colony residence in your family’s birth, marriage, or death records on JewishGen. The index may say the record is from the city of Yekaterinoslav, but that was also the city of registration for people who resided in the colonies. Once you find a record in the index on JewishGen, you can look more deeply by clicking on the “Image” link in the record. This will lead you to a PDF of the original record written in Russian cursive. The entry in cursive will name the towns of registration for the individuals listed, and/or their fathers. If you can decipher the Russian, or ask someone to translate it for you, you may be surprised to find the name of an agricultural colony there.
Search The JewishGen Family Finder for all researchers interested in Dnipro (requires login to JewishGen.)
Search the JewishGen Database for all records pertaining to Dnipro/Yekaterinoslav. Please note that the search is using the Russian spelling which is the most prevalent in the database. If you want to search under other spellings, re-do the search with those spellings.
(Requires login to JewishGen.)