In this mid-point fourth episode of Season Eleven, host Andrew Martin meets Polish professional genealogist Eliza Karpińska. He hears how Eliza’s surname intrigued her enough to get her hooked on researching her family history, and how she turned professional, and the challenges that she’s experienced when researching family history in neighbouring Ukraine and Lithuania.
Listen to the episode
S11EP04 – 'The Escapee' with Eliza Karpińska – The Family Histories Podcast
Also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, and others…
The Life Story – Wladyslaw Siemionow / Siemionowska
Eliza has chosen to tell the life story of her grandfather Wladyslaw Siemionow, who was born in Lithuania.
When he was a young man, during the Nazi Occupation in World War Two, he was put on a train that would take him to German forced labour. Despite his parents’ efforts in bribing the German guard at the railway station in an attempt to let him go free, Wladyslaw chose to stay with his friends on the train as he wanted to travel… but unfortunately, it was not quite as he’d imagined.
After being shot at whilst escaping, he fell into the hands of the Soviet Red Army where he was forced to serve in the East Pomeranian offensive. After sustaining a head and leg injury he was sent through a chain of hospitals, ending up in Moscow, Russia. Having regained some strength, he escaped from the hospital and headed for home – the long way round.
The Brick Wall – Anna Siemionow
It’s a brick wall in Vilnius, Lithuania that has Eliza asking for help.
Eliza knows that her Great Grandfather was called Aleksander Siemionow, and after a great deal of researching, she found that he appears in the records of the Church of St. Nicholas in Vilnius.
However, whilst Eliza has been able to find Aleksander was illegitimate, and that his mother’s name was Anna Siemionow. Further research has led Eliza to find that Anna was from the village of Dubki near Pskov (a place we’ve previously heard about in Season Four) which is now just inside modern Russia.
Eliza has discovered that Anna is classed as a peasant, and therefore she doesn’t have a reliable ancestral surname – as these were given to peasants at a later date.
- Can you help Eliza to find out more about Anna?
If you think that you can offer Eliza a research clue or idea that can help her solve her brick wall, then you can send her a message via the email she gives in the episode or via her Genealogia Polonica website. Alternatively you can send us a message and we’ll pass that on to her.
In the meantime, Andrew offers Eliza some help but… it seems she’s ready to fight for answers…
Episode Credits
- Andrew Martin – Host and Producer
- Eliza Karpińska – Guest