Tracing Centuries: Challenges of Archive Searches in Belarus Across Shifting Empires

Explore the complexities of finding records in Belarus, a land that has belonged to many empires over centuries—from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the Russian Empire. The Together Plan will guide you through the challenges of searching for documents that survived multiple rulers, with some records dating back to the early 1700s!

Speaker bios: 

Debra Brunner was born and lives in the UK and her ancestry is in Eastern Europe. She has lived in the USA and has travelled extensively through Belarus. Debra is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London and has been working in the field of Jewish community development and Jewish cultural heritage in Belarus for over 14 years. She is a passionate advocate for Jewish community, history, heritage and identity. Debra devised and co- created the Making History Together Holocaust Education programme. Debra works to give agency to Jewish people coming out of a traumatic past, to empower them and give them skills and self-belief to rebuild and revive. It is Debra's mantra that together we can make a real and positive difference for a better, stronger and more cohesive Jewish landscape in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and she believes that connections and connectivity are the key to social change. 

Carl Kaplan, who lives in Winchester, MA, is an amateur genealogist, and member of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston. Carl has been researching his family history for the last 6 years, starting with a hand-typed family tree from his uncle to a tree of over 2500 relatives, finding dozens of “new” cousins all over the world, along with tracing his family back almost 3 centuries. During his research, Carl has employed various research tools. Most of all, Carl has learned some amazing stories from his family. Carl is a volunteer caseworker for The Together Plan, a non-profit organization that conducts searches in the archives of Belarus. Besides his family research and volunteering with The Together Plan, Carl is also a certified historical tour guide in Boston, learning American Sign Language with his wife, and participates with his dog, Buster, as a therapy dog team, visiting hospitals and schools. 

Vasily Zaitsau, spent a number of years working within the international banking sector, managing financial projects and he used to believe that the world of commerce is highly important in our modern life. But Vasily came to understand that in actual fact this is not a high priority to him. During his time working in the financial world in Belarus, he took part in a couple of local Red Cross fundraising projects for children’s hospices. As a result, he concluded that the only real value in this world is people, those around you and all over the globe. Today, as a project manager, Vasily implements his skills in the Archive Service of The Together Plan, working out of the Minsk office in Belarus, helping people to find their roots and identify ancestors.