Shtetl Links: Lyakhovichi

These records were created about people who were once resident in Lyakhovichi, after or as, they moved away. Most were created about those who were born in Lyakhovichi, on documents required to list their legal place of birth. Records created about a Belarussian citizen in Minsk, in the 1990s might name the town of birth as Lyakhovichi, though the elderly resident might not have seen our town in fifty years. A Soviet identity card carried in places as far away as Tashkent, Crim, or Omsk (in Uzbekistan, Crimea, and Siberia respectively) might have listed a Lyakhovichi birth, we know our people were in all of those places. Most of Lyakhovichi's former residents who lived in the Soviet Union did so in the largest cities - Moscow, Leningrad, and in the Belarus Soviet, in Minsk.
Emigrants of the 1920s and 1930s got to safe haven in Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina, as well as British Mandate Palestine, South Africa, and Australia. The first two decades of the Twentieth Century saw the massive transplantation of Jews of Lyakhovichi to large cities, small towns, and farms, across the United States but we also know of those who only got as far as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom, before stopping their journeys. In all of those places, the demand for information about one's birthplace, family, and dates and places of emigration, created records, some of which survive, documenting Lyakhovichi emigres.

Emigration and Immigration Records
Migration Records Related to Lyakhovichi We have added Ten New Lists/Link Pages in this Update! This now includes fifteen separate lists of Lyakhovichi emigrants, three informative articles, and a series of images showing manifests, ticket agency registers, aid society registers, and more.

Emigrant Societies
Records of Emigrant Groups You will find in this link: Cemetery Records from Lyakhovichi mutual insurance societies and from burial plots attributed to Lechovicher groups; membership materials from Lyakhovichi organizations in NYC and in Eretz Israel; and memorial information printed in Yizkor materials and newspapers. We continue to seek Membership, Organizational, Newspaper, and Burial records of Lyakhovichi groups in the United States, Israel, South America, and South Africa! See the additional material and pictures posted recently including burials in a Staten Island Cemetery.

Lyakhovichi Natives in the Primary Records of their Nations of Landing This part of our webpage has the potential to grow greatly over the next few years, as more and more records come on-line and become indexable. We have found documents that specify the Lyakhovichi birth or last residence among those created in the United States, Canada, France, England, Israel, South Africa, Argentina, Cuba, and others. World War I Draft Registrations in the US and Canada are informative and extractable for Lyakhovichi birthplaces. The French import of hundreds of thousands of Russians for inexpensive labor in the 1920s was met by French nativist policies in the 1930s that forced a huge amount of documentation to be acquired by the immigrant and recorded in with the French government. Visas, death records, passports, marriage records - are all potential sources of birthplace and last residence info that can be gathered by us as a group, in addition to those who we track down on our own, that may be less specific but still valuable to us genealogically. We have begun the massive task of moving through World War I Draft Registrations, though most commercial indices do not note the specific town of birth and 89,000 Russian-born men registered for the draft in New York State alone. The webmaster has been working off a list of surnames found in Lyakhovichi documents and then checking those who share such a surname who indicate a Russian or Polish birth. It is an arduous process and volunteers are welcome! We also have a brief listing (so far around 70 names) of men who registered for the "Old Man's Draft" of WWII citing a Lyakhovichi birth. We encourage you to find other records, such as US marriage records that include a specific town of birth doing Lyakhovichi searches in them to help us make them accessible! These pages will also include those who emigrated to Eretz Israel in the Turkish period and the British Mandate period as well as to the modern state of Israel! You can see the beginnings in Primary Records of Other Nations - Israel We have there a list of those from our community and its surrounds buried on the Mt of Olives.