Abstracts of the report at the International Scientific and Practical Conference "Cultural Heritage: Innovative Approaches and Sustainable Development". Lviv, September 9-10, 2022.
The popularity of genealogy in Ukraine is growing from year to year. This applies not only to the field of scientific studies of genealogical topics, but also to the broader interest of the average Ukrainian in the history of his family. This is evident at least from the fact that in recent decades the field of commercial genealogical research has been actively developing in Ukraine. Even a cursory review of Google search results for the queries "order genealogy" or "research the family tree" as of 2022 reveals about a dozen companies offering relevant services. Lively discussions of topics related to genealogical studies take place in specialized groups on social networks. For example, the largest Ukrainian group of genealogy researchers, UAGenealogy, has more than 16 thousand participants. Group members share their experience in genealogy research, as well as actively ask questions and discuss practical cases regarding the search for sources for family history, their reading, and share links to scientific, memoir, and local history literature. All this indicates that many Ukrainians today have developed a demand for information about their ancestors and the past of their family.
The growing interest in family history is associated with various factors. At the level of historiography, since the middle of the 20th century, there has been a growing interest in the role of the average person in history. In the context of Ukrainian society, the achievement of independence by Ukraine was a turning point, which gave impetus to cultural, spiritual and national revival, rethinking of the past [1, p. 127]. Since the 1990s, Ukrainian families have begun to talk freely about the fate of relatives in the 20th century, their social origin, and about those family members who, due to life circumstances, once ended up in Western countries. The study of family history has been facilitated by open Ukrainian archives, the declassification of the cases of the repressed, the digitization and availability of online birth records and other documents. Specialized online platforms (MyHeritage, Ancestry), DNA testing, are very popularizing the study of genealogy.
One of the common features of the culture of the people is its historical memory. Unfortunately, Ukraine's long stay as part of the Soviet Union erased, distorted and leveled the meaning of the historical roots of the family. As a result, the historical memory of most Ukrainians rarely reaches more than three generations. That is, most Ukrainians still remember or know something about their great-grandfathers, but their knowledge of their ancestors is limited to this. On the other hand, studying the family tree through the processing of relevant archival documents allows us to take a fresh look at the familiar history of Ukraine. For many researchers of the family's past, information about the class and social affiliation of their ancestors becomes a real discovery. After all, many modern Ukrainians are descendants of the nobility - Ukrainian or Polish (for example, people with such common surnames as Dobryanski, Yavorski, Kulchytski or Terletski), the nobility, the Cossacks. The histories of many peasant families can be traced without much difficulty to the middle of the 18th century.
Genealogy research allows us to personalize the history of Ukraine, transforming it from something abstract into a living experience that ancestors experienced in the context of certain events. The attitude towards the modern historical and socio-political context can be formed through the prism of those historical events that ancestors experienced - the First and Second World Wars, the socialist experiments of the Soviet government - these events are usually still preserved in oral family memory. In turn, archival sources can show how the family was affected by the abolition of serfdom in 1861 in sub-Russian Ukraine, what was the property situation of the average Galician family according to the Josephine metric of 1787 and the Franciscan metric of 1820. Such details give a sense of mental connection with the territory where ancestors lived, form a sense of continuity, belonging to a certain clan, regional, ethnic or national community.
Researching the family tree helps to debunk a number of myths and stereotypical ideas about past eras and historical periods. The first knowledge about the past that we receive is the stories of our parents, grandparents. They are often mythologized, have a subjective shade due to the experiences they have experienced. Thus, research into the fate of an average family from the Dnieper region in the 1930s, information about the famine or repressions experienced can be the complete opposite of oral stories about the well-fed and secure life of a grandfather who was a factory worker during the Khrushchev era. Especially when it turns out that he became a factory worker after he avoided starvation, because he was on compulsory military service at the time, unlike his parents, brothers and sisters who did not survive the famine.
Also, genealogy research helps to get rid of myths about the past, which are present even in popular culture. For example, the myth of "good grandmother Austria". Through genealogical research, one can see a typical poor Galician family with many children of the 19th century, in which three or four out of ten children survive, and the husband marries twice, or even three times, because the first wife did not receive qualified assistance during childbirth and died. These are people who, as a rule, at the beginning of the 20th century were illiterate and could not personally sign permission for the marriage of children in the church registry.
Today, interest in genealogy is formed not only because of the desire to research family history. It often has a practical direction - people try to find out the Jewish, Polish, German or some other foreign origin of their ancestors in order to get the opportunity to leave or repatriate to a foreign country. Even in such cases, it is necessary to delve into the history of ancestors, find out where and in what realities they lived, what they did, look for documents where they mark their national affiliation, understand and ask questions about why this affiliation could be hidden, changed or distorted.
Thus, the genealogy of an average Ukrainian family is a tool through which society can be introduced to the history and culture of the country, as well as to individual national or social groups and communities that lived here. How this tool affects the formation of national identity depends on which historical sources for the history of the family will be processed, with the help of whom, and how they are interpreted.
YAROSLAV LYSEIKO
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of History,
museology and cultural heritage
Lviv Polytechnic National University«
Literature
1. Tomazov V. Historical Genealogy. Special Historical Disciplines. K., 2008. Pp. 123-131.