Genealogical searches often involve people who are nowadays confronted with the legal aspects of inheritance matters. This is not the rule, but a significant proportion of enquiries can be assumed to involve just such situations. The second, and most common, category of genealogical cases are those in which someone’s curiosity about the family’s past is simply satisfied, or at least there is no indication that the actual cause is different. Sometimes, however, we are presented with unusual cases. The kind where you first have to honestly answer the question of whether you can carry them out at all. So when we were approached by a woman who asked if we could establish the fate of her father during the Second World War, we did not immediately give her an answer.
Genealogical search – little data
The client, as is usual in this type of case, did not have much background information. Although the case concerned her father, she only had his name and surname, as well as his date and place of birth. We did not ask about the reason for this, as we know from experience that this usually stems from dramatic experiences and a reluctance to revisit the past. The woman, incidentally, confirmed that her father got emotional whenever she asked him about his family and memories of his youth, while remaining eloquently silent. The assignment she came to us with concerned a legal dispute in which she had to prove that her father had been harassed during the war. As always, the detective checked several databases to try to at least tentatively determine whether any documents survived. It became apparent very quickly that there should be a few traces preserved about the man in question.
A difficult history
The detective established that there were two men born in the Lublin voivodeship, in a known locality and a specific year, whose first and last name were identical to the commissioning officer’s father. This is a situation that is sometimes encountered and requires finding additional information to narrow down the search. In this particular case, it turned out that one of these individuals had already died before the war. Although many of the documents have not survived to the present day, it can be said that the client was lucky, as the metric books of the Jewish religious community from the area where her father came from had survived, and this meant that finding his birth certificate was a matter of time. Then came a peculiar breakthrough. It turned out that, at the time of the dramatic Reinhardt action, the wanted man held quite an important function in the local community and was therefore not an anonymous figure. He had actively resisted the Nazis on several occasions, which added to the fact that he was known in the village he came from. There is also an account that he hid with a family and lived out the war there, and then went abroad. Of course, there was a possibility that there was some mistake, in view of which the detective planned a field trip to try to get the full information. It should be made clear at this point that there were many ‘unexplained’ events during the Second World War, and what we know may have looked very different in reality. In this case, however, this was not the case. During his fieldwork, the detective established that the records he had previously accessed were true. What was the surprise, however, mainly for the client, when it turned out that her father had left behind written memoirs. Several pages of text in which he described his wartime fate in detail. It is hard to imagine better proof.
Genealogical search – following the thread to…
The beginning of the described case did not offer much hope. The limited amount of information available, especially in cases of a genealogical nature, can sometimes be an insurmountable obstacle. Invariably, in such cases it is necessary to carefully check the various databases available online. However, it is necessary to know the specifics of this type of search and how to formulate ‘queries’ and where to ask them. Where doubts remain, it is sometimes necessary to go into the field. Witnesses may know the answer, but it may be available in cemeteries or in local libraries, archives or parishes. A combination of all these methods of working can, as in the case described, have a positive effect, but it should be remembered that with this type of case, it can get to the point where it is impossible to take the next step because the documents have simply not survived.
Author: Marcin Silwanow
*Client data has been anonymised prior to publication.
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