IA collaboration across the family’s two halves
Much of the recent progress on the Volhynian branch comes from the independent research of Olya Chernyhovych in Ukraine. From the Polish side it comes from Helena Czerniachowicz, a living cousin who got in touch.
Through her work with local archives and family documents, it has been possible to match names, places and dates between the Soviet side of the family and the diaspora side. Earlier generations could never do. Where this site refers to Teofila’s full list of children, to the Krasna Słoboda household, or to village-level detail about Katiukha, it builds directly on that work. Joining the British and Ukrainian sides of the story back together is, in many ways, what this project is for.
Helena wrote in July 2026 from the Polish side of the family, and shared letters and documents that the archives alone could not have given us. She sent scanned parish extracts confirming Franciszek’s birth date as 1862, not 1867. She confirmed Marianna Bąkowska as Erazm’s wife. She shared Antoni’s own letter to Bolesław and, later, the full set of eighteen letters. She also pointed out errors that had crept into earlier working notes. Several corrections on this site, including dates, names, and the link between the British and Polish branches, are owed to her.
IIWhere the records are
For anyone researching this name, or a similar Kresy family, these are the resources that have proven most useful.
Polish archives and indexes
- Geneteka (geneteka.genealodzy.pl): indexed parish records; the single richest source for this surname’s variants.
- Szukaj w Archiwach: the Polish State Archives search portal.
- AGAD: older Commonwealth-era nobility files and some Volhynian material.
- Polona: the Polish National Digital Library.
Ukrainian and Belarusian archives
- Zhytomyr State Archives: vital records, parish registers and nobility files for the region that includes Krasna Słoboda and Katiukha. The priority destination for the 1802 nobility record and the village renaming.
- NIAB (Belarus): nobility and vital records.
Repression databases
- ofiaryterroru.pl (Mieroszewski Dialogue Centre): victims of the NKVD Polish Operation, searchable in Polish and Cyrillic forms.
- Memorial (base.memo.ru): victims of Soviet political terror across the USSR.
- Открытый список / Open List (ru.openlist.wiki): a crowd-sourced union index of victims of Soviet political repression, currently over 3.3 million records, aggregating many separate martyrologies. Its database “Polish special settlers in Arkhangelsk Oblast” holds Antoni’s own deportation record — the entry naming Nizhnyaya Striga, and the one for Antonina Ivanovna deported on the same transport. It publishes transcriptions rather than document scans, so the underlying archival reference is still to be traced.
- Rehabilitated by History / National Bank of the Repressed (reabit.org.ua): a surname-searchable national database of Soviet repression records across all Ukrainian oblasts, with the regional volumes — including the Zhytomyr series and the Crimean Book of Memory — downloadable in full.
- zbrodniawolynska.pl: victims of the Volhynian massacres, a separate category from the NKVD terror.
Diaspora, refugee and military sources
- The National Archives, Kew: naturalisation papers, alien registration, and Polish Resettlement Corps records.
- The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, London: testimonies and records of exiles and soldiers.
- Arolsen Archives: international displaced-persons and refugee records, the source of several of this family’s certificates.
- Records of the Polish resettlement camps and cemeteries, including Koja in Uganda and the Polish cemeteries in Africa project.
- FamilySearch: free digitised immigration, parish and civil records.
Family letters and papers
- The Trowbridge letters (1971–1979): eighteen surviving letters from Antoni to his cousin Bolesław in Poland, preserved as thirty-seven scanned pages, kept by the Polish side of the family and shared by Helena Czerniachowicz. They are the primary source for Antoni’s own account of his WWI service, the 1931 near-arrest, the Arkhangelsk deportation, and the family’s English years.
Heraldry and nobility
- Classic armorials: Boniecki’s Herbarz Polski, Niesiecki’s Herbarz, and the modern Herby Szlachty Rzeczypospolitej by Tadeusz Gajl.
- szlachtarp.pl and related indexes of Commonwealth noble surnames.
Always try the spelling variants: Cherniakhovich, Chernyakhovych, Czerniachovicz, Czernichowicz, and the Cyrillic Черняхович. And because the name is so rare, Y-DNA testing among living male descendants may be the best way to find out whether geographically separate branches really share a common ancestor.
IIIWhat’s still open
The most valuable things still to find, roughly in order of how much each would settle.
- A high-resolution transcription of the 1914–1916 confession-list source. The family trees identify Teofila's seven children, but the earlier claim that a specific FamilySearch image directly records them as one household is contested and could not be reproduced from the preserved images. A human reading at full resolution is needed before the source can be cited again.
- The full case files for the executed brothers, to turn the strong database matches for Józef and Jan into confirmed identifications.
- The 1860 legitimisation file (decree No. 2724) and/or the 1802 file from the Zhytomyr/Volyn archive — would confirm the family's formal noble recognition and the Oksza attribution.
- Franciszek's 1867 birth record — would settle his mother's identity (Marianna vs. Helena Bąkowska) and his birthplace (Krasnystaw vs. Krasna Słoboda).
- Confirmation of the Krasna Słoboda to Katiukha renaming from the Zhytomyr archive.
As each of these is resolved, the relevant page will be updated. Where a likelihood becomes a documented fact, I will mark the change.
IVAn AI-generated overview
As an experiment, I fed the research underlying this site into Google’s NotebookLM, which produced a short video overview of the material. It is a useful introduction if you prefer to watch rather than read, but it is a paraphrase, not a primary source: it smooths over the evidence tiers, occasionally states inferred details as fact, and was not written by me. The written pages on this site remain the canonical record.
VGet in touch
If you carry the surname Czerniachowicz or Черняхович, or are connected to someone who does, I would be glad to hear from you. New documents, photographs, and family memories are exactly what move this project on.