Seeking information on overland travel routes and modes of transportation to reach ports of Rotterdam, Liverpool and Antwerp from Minsk, Russia in early 1900s.

A common route was from the Baltic to Hull or later Grimsby on the English East Coast, and then by rail to Liverpool from Hull. 
Dr Nick Evans will be talking about this at the IAJGS conference in London 30th July to 3rd August 2023.  

Jill Whitehead, Surrey, UK

Learn with us from home!

Join on February 7th at 2:30 p.m. ET for the first part of a three part series!   "Preparing to Leave Europe" The Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center and the Northeast Indiana Jewish Genealogy Society are excited to welcome Dr. Nicholas J. Evans, a Senior Lecturer in diaspora history at the University of Hull, for a series of free virtual programs on the first three Tuesdays in February, beginning at 2:30 p.m. “The Making of a Mosaic: European Migrant Journeys During the Age of Steam” will be presented in three parts. These lectures are in conjunction with the Genealogy Center’s Tuesday afternoon virtual programs. Dr. Evans, a migrant historian, will explore questions such as ‘why did so many Europeans leave?’ ‘What was the journey really like?’ Why when an ancestor arrived at Ellis Island did they settle in the mid-west?’ He will illustrate how one can piece together the gathering of ancestors from their village/town of birth to the moment they commenced their journey west. Register in advance for this program! After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the program.

Irv Adler
Fort Wayne, Indiana
irv@...

Hi.

In the early 1900s, Europe was already widely criss-crossed by numerous railroad lines. That would have been the only long-distance mode of travel (excluding on foot, of course).

Passenger lines companies had representatives all over Europe.
There is no overland routes from Continental Europe to Liverpool.
Starting from Minsk, it is safe to presume that railroad tracks went to North Sea ports through Warsaw, then Berlin and Hanover in Northern Germany. As a matter of fact, since railroad lines have not moved, tiday's trains run the same routes, according to Google Maps.

Don't forget that Baltic ports, such as Hamburg, Gdansk, Koenigsberg (present Kaliningrad), Klaipeda/Memel or Riga, to name only a few, would have been closer, and presumably much cheaper to reach than those you mention.

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Jean Lachaud (Westchester County, NY)

I agree with Jean Lachaud's reply regarding the cost-effectiveness and practicality of overland travel options from the Minsk area to the ports of Europe, and would like to add the following:  Agents who represented the steamship companies traveled to the shtetls and offered package deals for aspiring migrants.  It seems odd that those agents would try to sell longer and presumably more expensive overland travel components, when many migrants from this part of Europe were poor and scrounged money just to afford a steerage-class ticket on the boats.  I have the travel records of a dozen of so family members, including two passports that leave no doubt.  These ancestors represented different ancestral lines, with one common theme...they were all from Minsk gubernia (the same starting point in the original query from Judy Cohen).  They arrived alone or in groups over a 30 year span.  In every instance, the European departure port was either Hamburg or Gdansk.

Hamburg was the more common option.  That probably reflected the brutal conditions of the North Sea from Gdansk during the winter months.  Gdansk/North Sea was generally not open for passenger travel in the winter.  Hamburg was open for passenger travel most if not all year, reflecting better conditions at the port and on the Baltic Sea.

Thinking out loud...I wonder how much the time of the year affected our ancestors' decisions.  Did winter port/ocean conditions in the Baltic and North Seas prompt some eastern European migrants to undertake longer overland travel to western European departure ports like Rotterdam and Amsterdam (Atlantic Ocean), as queried by Judy Cohen? 

Ken Domeshek
Houston
researching Damesek and Braverman from Nesvizh.  Kartorzynski and Sinienski from Nowogrudek, Korelitz, Negnewicze, Lyubcha, and Wsielub.

In the early 1900s,  horse-drawn vehicles might also have been used for overland travel particularly in rural areas. Until the 1950s,  lorries  drawn by carthorses were a common sight even on London roads.

Eva Lawrence

St Albans, UK.  

 

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Eva Lawrence
St Albans, UK.

Here is a picture from my 1911 atlas which may help
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Ric Cooper
Midhurst, UK

In response to Mr. Kaplan, my grandfather, originally from Starodub, Russia (then part of Chernigov guberniya) traveled from the year-round, ice-free port of Libau (now Liepaja, Latvia) to Hull, UK, then by train to Liverpool, and finally boarded the SS Lusitania on July 29, 1911 for the transAtlantic crossing to New York, arriving in the US on Aug. 4, 1911.  I also have a digitized copy of his ship’s manifest for this package journey. 

Barbara (Elk) Hemmendinger 

Good to confirm with a specific journey.

My great great grandparents from Lithuania travelled to Hamburg in 1902, then by ship to Grimsby, then to Glasgow, where they joined family members.

My grandmother and relatives from Kaminets-Podolsk in Ukraine travelled to Rotterdam in 1906 - not sure where they sailed to in Britain, but they came to Glasgow to join my grandfather.

Harvey Kaplan
Glasgow

All four sets of my great grandparents (and one great great grandparent) came from the Suwalki Lomza gubernias in NE Poland between 1865 and 1875 via either the ports of Konigsberg in East Prussia (most likely) or possibly Libau in Lavtia to Hull in Yorkshire or Leith the port for Edinburgh on the British East coast (one or two may have come via a stop in Sweden).

One set travelled overland to Warsaw and thence onto a Baltic port (Gdansk/Danzig?) to Leith. Two sets travelled west by trains from Hull  to Liverpool and Manchester. 

Jill Whitehead, Surrey, UK

Elliot

Unfortunately, few immigrants spoke in detail about the journey or wrote down these details - and probably their children or grandchildren didn't ever ask them.  I wish I could ask
my ancestors the direct routes they took.

I would imagine that they had to go by horse and cart to a railway station. I just Googled and found that there was/is a railway station in Keidan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C4%97dainiai_railway_station . Don't know if they went from there by
train to Libau - or somewhere they could get a connection to Hamburg (or another of the Baltic or North Sea ports). Maybe you could go by train from Kovno. There will be
information on line, I think, about train routes at this time.  Maybe they went by horse and cart to the border and someone had to bribe a border guard.  From there, I suppose
horse and cart to a railway station, then to the port.

Hope this helps,

Harvey Kaplan
Glasgow


 

I can tell you unequivocally that my great grandfather who was a pharmacist in Ekaterinoslav, Russia (before Ukraine became an independent country) and his family (wife and 3 sons) took a train from Ekaterinoslav to Hamburg in 1904 in order to take their ship to New York. I don't know how many stops that they made or if they changed trains anywhere, but that was the preferred method of transportation to the Port if one could afford it.

Phil Goldfarb
Tulsa, Oklahoma USA
phil.goldfarb@... 

It seems every couple of months, similar questions are asked about how immigrants ever made it from Russia to European ports and then onto America (or other western countries).

They would have taken trains to the Northern European ports. If they didn't live close to a train station, they could hire what was known as a 'cab man' or 'cart man' or 'draught man', who had a horse and wagon for hire, who would take people or goods to wherever they needed to go. I have two great great grandfathers who made a living doing this, in both Zagare and Dotnuva, Lithuania. [Nowadays we do something similar, using what is call a taxi or Uber or Lyft].

The one reason I can see for an immigrant staying off of the trains within Russia, was for young men of military age, who might spend more of their journey walking, until they made it out of Russia.

There is one eye-witness account that I know of, written by Mary Antin, who came to Boston with her family in 1893, from the town of Plotsk, now in Belarus. The book she wrote is available online at the following site; it is the chapter called 'Exodus' that covers their journey. She says they took a train to Vilnius, then onto the Russian/German border, where they got on a special immigrant train, that only stopped to take on more immigrants. The train went all the way to Hamburg, and the immigrants were not allowed to get off until arriving at the port.
https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/antin/land/land.html

My Lock grandmother came to the US in 1913, from Joniskis, Lithuania to New York, via Antwerp. I had always wondered how she made her way by herself all the way across Europe. It's pretty clear to me that she was on one of these immigrant trains; she was most likely told by the shipping company when and where to get herself to the German/Russia border, so she could be picked up by one of these trains.
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Michele Lock

Lak/Lok/Liak/Lock and Kalon/Kolon in Zagare/Joniskis/Gruzdziai, Lithuania
Lak/Lok/Liak/Lock in Plunge/Telsiai in Lithuania
Rabinowitz in Papile, Lithuania and Riga, Latvia
Trisinsky/Trushinsky/Sturisky and Leybman in Dotnuva, Lithuania
Olitsky in Alytus, Suwalki, Poland/Lithuania
Gutman/Goodman in Czestochowa, Poland
Lavine/Lev/Lew in Trenton, New Jersey and Lida/Vilna gub., Belarus

There was a lot of smuggling in the 1860s and 1870s between the  Polish and Lithuanian lands that bordered East Prussia, into East Prussia/Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) as escapees from both the draft and the ten years of extreme Baltic famine tried to get away.  Many had families who lived on both sides of the border that helped this. This was the case with my family. When they left there were few or no railway trains in this area (as they had not yet been built) and sailing ships were only just giving way to steam ships, which made the Baltic trips hazardous. 

But a lot of British shipping companies started offering migration services in the mid 19th century to  take emigrants to Hull, Leith or other ports on the East Coast of England or Scotland. Some later offered transmigration services from Liverpool and Glasgow on the West Coast of the British Isles to go to the East Coast of North America, mainly Quebec, Boston and New York (in 1870s approx).  

As Britain was an early railway pioneer, it already had railways going from Hull to Liverpool and Leith to Glasgow to pick up transmigration services when the Baltic journeys started.  

Many Baltic ports were involved including not only Hamburg and Libau, but also Konigsberg in East Prussia (as in my family's case), Riga in Latvia, Gdansk/Danzig now in Poland, and Rotterdam to name but a few. A number of services stopped en route via Swedish ports to Britain. 

Jill Whitehead, Surrey, UK

I'm not sure I have ever linked to my blog about my ongoing research into  my mother's family from the Slutsk area, but in it I mention with gratitude Michael Steinmore's Mestechki of Minsk Gubernia. He extracted this from a gazetteer published in 1909 and its beauty is that not only does it specify the size of  the many small villages (my grandmother came from Semezhevo which I'm not sure could be considered  much of a shtetl since it only had about 25 Jewish families in a town of several thousand) but also lists the nearest railway station and which line it was on. In this way I could determine that my grandmother, who came alone to the US as a 17 of 18 year old only had a 46 km trip to the nearest train station Lyakhovichi for the  Polesskiya railway line  Her eventual husband, from nearby Vyzna, had a journey of 63 km to the same station.  She sailed from Rotterdam.  My grandfather (and his eldest brother)  sailed from Hamburg.

Ronni Kern
Melnick, Blistein, Kern, Derechinsky

See https://avotaynuonline.com/2008/04/coming-to-america-through-hamburg-and-liverpool-part-ii-crossing-the-atlantic-by-harry-d-boonin/ 
for Part 2 of Harry Boonin’s article about how his relatives left Slutsk. Part 1 focuses on the overland part of their journey, but this seems to be available only in print: AVOTAYNU, Vol. XXII, No. 4, (Winter 2006), pp. 15–22
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You pose an interesting question about overland routes to sail to America. My grandfather left Koretz, Russia (now in Ukraine) in 1905 and went to New York via Glasgow, Scotland, sailing on the S.S. Furnessia. However, I do not know how he traveled overland from Russia to Scotland.

Barbara Balaj
Washington, DC