Getting Records Out of an Active War Zone: What Ukrainian Archive Retrieval Actually Involves

My great-grandfather on my father's side was born in a village that's part of Ukraine today. My great-grandfather on my mother's side was Romanian. So how did I discover, a full year after successfully filing for Romanian citizenship, that I was also eligible for Polish citizenship by descent, through that same Ukrainian-born great-grandfather?

An AncestryDNA test. The answer had been in front of me the whole time, and I laughed and felt frustrated with myself in the same breath, because I could have been building the Polish case at the same time as the Romanian one, which is notoriously the more complicated of the two.

The Discovery

Here’s what happened. The DNA test surfaced a distant relative on my father's side born somewhere in Poland, not a great-grandparent or anyone close enough to make me eligible on its own. But it sent me looking, and I found the small village my great-grandfather was actually born in: Smidyn, in what's now Ukraine.

The deeper I looked, the more I understood why this mattered. Smidyn was part of the Polish Second Republic between 1918 and 1939, before borders shifted again after World War II and the region became part of Ukraine. Because my great-grandfather resided there during that period, he was recognized as a citizen of the Polish Second Republic at the time, regardless of what country the land belongs to today. This isn't a claim I'm making from a history book. It's documented in the actual archival records I submitted with my own Polish citizenship application: birth, marriage, and residency documents from that exact period and place, showing the Polish Second Republic's own administrative record of who lived there. That's the piece most people miss: citizenship by descent runs through the borders and laws that existed when your ancestor actually lived there, not the map as it looks now.

Finding Records in an Active War Zone

Understanding the history was the easy part. Finding the actual birth, marriage, and passport records was something else entirely, because those records now sit in an active war zone.

Many families with Polish citizenship claims are in exactly this position without realizing it. Volhynia was part of interwar Poland for two decades before the borders moved again, so a birth certificate or residency record that looks purely Ukrainian on the surface can still be the exact document a Polish citizenship case depends on.

This is exactly where European Roots Consulting specializes: using trusted contacts on the ground rather than wiring money abroad blindly and hoping a stranger follows through on a job you've already paid for.

What Actually Happened

I went through this myself so that a client doesn’t have to. I connected with a local contact on the ground in Ukraine who specializes in genealogy and archive research. The obvious problem: Ukraine is an active war zone. I had to trust someone I'd never met with real money and hope the work got done. Then, once the records were located, getting them out of a war-torn country was arguably the harder half of the job.

It worked. From start to finish, it took a few months to locate the birth, marriage, and passport records I needed for a successful Polish citizenship application, get digital copies made, have them apostilled, and ship them out of the country with a tracking number, first to me in the United States, and eventually to the Polish consulate.

Why Most People Give Up Here, and Shouldn’t

This is the exact point where a lot of people with a legitimate claim give up, because the archive problem feels unsolvable. It isn't. It just requires knowing how to find and vet the right help on the ground, which is precisely what the Done-For-You service exists to handle.

If Ukrainian, Volhynian, or other Eastern European roots are part of your family history and you're not sure whether they connect to a real citizenship claim, the 2-minute eligibility quiz is the place to start. And if you're curious how a similarly complicated case plays out end to end, what it actually costs to do this without a lawyer is worth a read too.