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Sources & Research

How this was put together, what is still open, and how to help. A living research project built on one idea: that a parish baptism, a story passed down, and a guess that simply fits the history each deserve a different level of trust.

Method
Three-tier evidence tagging
Languages
Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, English
Open questions
Four priority files
Last revised
May 2026

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.

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.

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.
  • Ukrainian martyrology and “Rehabilitated by History” projects for the Zhytomyr region.
  • 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.

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.
A note for fellow searchers

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.

  1. The 1802 Zhytomyr nobility file (Record No. 2925). It would confirm the family’s formal noble recognition, settle the Oksza-versus-Śreniawa question, and test the Nemirichi theory all at once.
  2. The full case files for the executed brothers, to turn the strong database matches for Józef and Jan into confirmed identifications.
  3. Reconciling the 1914 list with the family tree, where Bolesław fits, and what became of Stanisław, Jadwiga, Anna and the sister Helena.
  4. 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.

Watch the overview on YouTube

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.

Write to me

Andrew Czerniachowicz, the person putting this site together, with the notebook the research lives in. SourceFamily collection.