Birth record gives important details on family’s WWII escape from the Soviet Union

I have been impatiently waiting for my mother’s birth record to arrive at the city archive for Kyiv. The record still hasn’t arrived at the archive but I got the record this week for free without a hassle.

Ukrainian birth, marriage and death records become public record after 75 years. I assumed that if the records weren’t at the archives, the records weren’t available to the public. Wrong.

Had I known this, I could have gotten my mother’s birth record 6 years ago. All the waiting has resulted in getting the birth record from the WWII era during another war in Ukraine.

My contact in Kyiv filled out a simple form and got the record on a photocopy the same day. I knew when my phone started dinging at 4:30 a.m. my contact was in the registry office. Thankfully, I also did the math for when my great-grandfather died to confirm 75 years had passed and his death record arrived in my email with my mother’s birth record from my contact.

My mother only just saw her original birth record. It’s a family mystery where her birth record went since she left Kyiv in 1943 as a baby and it’s a miracle the record hasn’t been destroyed during this war.

A few pieces of information on her birth record helps me complete the story of my mother’s escape out of Soviet Ukraine with her parents and maternal grandparents, aunt and uncle.

Her parents are listed as Volksdeutsche, people of German ancestry living outside of Germany. My grandfather’s parents were both Russian but my grandmother was half German from her mother and half Russian from her father. Noting both my grandparents as Volksdeutsche shows, I believe, that the Ukrainian government knew of my family’s plans to leave Ukraine or had marked them as Volksdeutsche to make them feel unwelcome in the city occupied by the Germans.

The birth record also lists the address of my grandparents, the apartment next to my maternal great-grandparents.  I thought my grandparents were registered at another address six months earlier but a search on Google led me to a Wikipedia page that shows the street also was known by another name.

My mother’s birth record also identifies my grandfather as a construction engineer employed in a sculpture’s workshop and my grandparents’ marriage record number. Seeing the notation of the marriage record shows the importance of getting all possible records when struggling to find information.

My contact wasn’t surprised my mother’s birth record and great-grandfather’s death record were still sitting in the registry office. If the city archive in Kyiv had enough room to store these records, he said, they would have been moved years ago.

This is going to be the reality for many registry offices throughout Ukraine, not just Kyiv. When the Ukrainian government built these archives, they also were not thinking of foreigners and their citizens requesting records to work on their family trees.

This latest adventure started about two months ago when I annoyingly again contacted the city archive in Kyiv, asking if it had received birth records from 1942. The archive said not yet and offered the email address of the registry office, but I knew I couldn’t get the record by email from the registry office.

I found an email address for an office that could officially clarify the process for obtaining my mother’s birth record. An employee informed me that any Ukrainian citizen (read genealogy researchers, relatives or friends) can obtain my mother’s birth record from the registry office.

Now if I attempted to get the record on my own, I would have been directed to contact a consulate general/consular office and most likely asked to pay a fee.

It’s amazing that Ukraine has opened up this much for records. It was just 10 years ago that I could only get an extraction of an 1890 marriage record sitting in a registry office in eastern Ukraine.

What’s even crazier is that my family tree from the former USSR goes back to the 1500s on some lines but I have another 12 years of waiting to see my deceased father’s birth record from Russia.

Follow this blog with the top right button to see my journey in Ukrainian and Russian genealogy unfold and learn the tips needed to find records and information for Ukrainian and Russian genealogy.

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Getting a marriage record from Ukrainian archives gives a surprising eye-opening view
Success in finding death record gives closure on lost child almost 100 years later