The growth in online platforms and documentary aggregator sites has revolutionised the process of Jewish family history research. This article records how the loss of EU citizenship rights following ...Britain's departure from the European Union encouraged the author to investigate their own family history. Drawing upon the author's findings, it describes how communal record books left on the shelves of town halls across Romania for over a century have been given new life thanks to the efforts of community archivists. This article chronicles their efforts to identify, preserve and digitise these documents which help to shed light on the history of the Jewish community of Dorna Watra, now Vatra Dornei, a small town in the former Austrian crownland of Bukovina. This article provides a detailed evaluation of the opportunities facing Jewish family researchers and the strengths and weaknesses of online aggregator sites such as Ancestry.Com and JewishGen.
During the past 30 years, Romanian historians have paid limited attention to the rich history of social-democracy in Romania, despite the opportunities offered to them by the fall of the communist ...regime. To be sure, the post-revolutionary period has yielded a good deal of published material concerning social-democracy, or more broadly, the history of the left in Romania – monographs, memoirs, various collections of documents, scholarly work, some of the latter very good. All things considered, research has yet to explore certain avenues of inquiry. There are still unaddressed questions in this field of study.
In this study, the land use around the Churches of Moldavia, UNESCO WH (World Heritage) sites, has been analysed using photo interpretation and GIS. The cartographic analysis used historical maps and ...modern orthophotos to highlight the main changes that took place over the last century in the area surrounding the sites, which has been extended to 1 km buffer. Historical maps and orthophotos of the years 1917, 2005, and 2016 have been processed to identify the present and historical changes in one of the most well-known historical areas of Eastern Europe. Monuments have a significant universal, national, and local value, contributing to the touristic development of the area. The most important processes that can affect the integrity of the monuments are the deforestations and the anthropogenic environmental changes. Significant changes took place around Probota, Humor, Patrauti and Arbore churches, while Sucevita, Voronet and Moldovita churches still preserve the natural landscape specific to the Bukovina historical area; Suceava church is part of a strongly urbanised landscape.
•Churches of Moldavia, Bukovina are listed in the UNESCO World Heritage List.•Land use dynamics by means of remote sensing and GIS techniques were undertaken around the eight Churches of Moldavia.•A diachronic analysis was performed over a timespan of approximately 100 years (1917–2016).•Natural processes and anthropic interventions have a significant role in the land use category changes.
Sustainable forest management highlights the multipurpose use of all forest resources, including the use of wild mushrooms, by a variety of forest users and especially for rural livelihoods. To ...achieve sustainable forest management, among others, decision-makers and forest managers need to identify the important elements for the livelihoods of local communities dependent on forests. Therefore, our aim is to analyse the importance of contemporary use of wild mushrooms for daily livelihoods in rural areas of the Carpathian Mountains by comparing two ethnic groups, Hutsuls and Romanians, living in a similar ecological environment and formerly belonging to the historical region of Bukovina, but currently split by the border between Ukraine and Romania which have different governments and economic situations. One hundred and twenty-one face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted in the summers of 2018 and 2019. We compared the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of Romanians and Hutsuls living, respectively, in lowlands and mountain areas on both sides of the border. Our results demonstrated the homogenous use of mushroom species for cultural purposes (e.g. ritual foods). Yet, we detected a remarkable difference in the role mushrooms play in providing income: Hutsuls in Ukraine use forest products as a main (rarely additional) source of income, while Romanian Hutsuls use them solely as additional income. Romanians on both sides considered mushrooms mainly as food and did not sell them (probably due in part to less abundance in the area). We also documented the fear of local residents that forest management and protected areas could suppress the right to collect wild mushrooms. The use of mushrooms is an important aspect of local TEK and needs to be considered as a part of sustainable forest management and as a means of poverty reduction in the region.
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