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My partner is interested in tracking down information on her family's history, but we've come up against a huge block and I'm hoping that one of you fine folk might know of a resource or a database that we do not.

The long and the short of it is that her maternal grandfather was born in 1915, in Western Ukraine and her maternal grandmother was born in Belarus in 1919. They met in a work camp, which we suspect was German. We also strongly suspect that he was a member of the Galician Regiment and/or the Ukrainian National/Liberation Army.

So my question is, do you know of any resources that might help us track down any information?

We speak about eight different languages between us, so nyet problem if it's not in English.

Sadly you would be looking for records that, if they exist at all, would be somewhere in a Russian and/or Ukranian government library somewhere. The Soviet's did not keep good records, and what was kept is pretty much inaccessible due to still only existing in paper form as well as not being well organized.

Your best, if not only bet, would be to actually go to Russia and Ukraine poke around their libraries.

When my family was adopting my sister from Kazakistan, we tried to track down any family history she might have. But we were told that without physically going to various libraries and manually combing through the paperwork ourselves it would be impossible, if the paperwork even existed at all. And thats before you consider any resettlement that might have happened.

 Excommunicatus wrote:

My partner is interested in tracking down information on her family's history, but we've come up against a huge block and I'm hoping that one of you fine folk might know of a resource or a database that we do not.

The long and the short of it is that her maternal grandfather was born in 1915, in Western Ukraine and her maternal grandmother was born in Belarus in 1919. They met in a work camp, which we suspect was German. We also strongly suspect that he was a member of the Galician Regiment and/or the Ukrainian National/Liberation Army.

So my question is, do you know of any resources that might help us track down any information?

We speak about eight different languages between us, so nyet problem if it's not in English.

There's also the fact that members of the ukraininan national army either got resettled or purged.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
The long and the short of it is that her maternal grandfather was born in 1915, in Western Ukraine and her maternal grandmother was born in Belarus in 1919. They met in a work camp, which we suspect was German. We also strongly suspect that he was a member of the Galician Regiment and/or the Ukrainian National/Liberation Army.

So my question is, do you know of any resources that might help us track down any information?

We speak about eight different languages between us, so nyet problem if it's not in English.

I preface this by saying I'm not an expert in researching this particular subject, but I do have some experience with WWII era records and who holds what. EDIT: I would add to what Grey says above, that the records you want probably do exist somewhere. Whether or not they're accessible? That's a toss-up. Lots of records from this period are poorly organized, loosely cataloged, or just shoved in corners in various places and forgotten. That said, that's how a lot of archival records are until someone dedicates time and effort to finding something.

The first place you want to go to is the State Archival Service of Ukraine: https://archives.gov.ua/Eng/

If they're originally from Ukraine than they probably fell under the purview of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which was the German occupation government of Ukraine and a lot of those records are still in Ukraine and that's where I'd start. I'd poke around the website above to see what is digitized (probably not the records you want), but ultimately you might have to call/email them with a query. Say you want to research family members who you think were "Ostarbeiter." This was the term used by Germany for foreigners who were detained for the purposes of forced labor. This is likely a subject they deal with a lot since lots of people want to research their family in WWII and what happened to them so they can probably help point you to offices that will have the records you want and direct your search better than I can.

It's also possible however that the records you want ended up somewhere else, which means they could be in another country, maybe Russia or Belarus. Belarus' situation I know nothing about. For records now held by Russia you'd want to contact the State Archive of the Russian Federation and make the same inquiry: http://statearchive.ru/.

Thanks for suggestions thus far. I've been trying to talk her into a month-long trip up and down the 'eastern' front after my exams, maybe this will help.

I reckon I'll start with the digital resources first, though.