Can I trace the Russian refugees who received the Nansen passport?
The research of specific names in the large volume of documents constituting the Nansen Fonds for refugees is quite complex. Indeed, a central repository with the names of all refugees does not exist. Some lists of names, as well as the correspondence exchanged between the refugees themselves and the Nansen Office, are scattered in various record groups, but are frequently incomplete and can require significant time to review. As a result, it is not possible for our staff to perform thorough searches for individuals or families.
However, the Nansen fonds has been digitized as part of our LONTAD project and can now be accessed on our new platform:
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been applied to the digitized files, enabling keyword full-text search on the documents of the Nansen fonds. Researchers may now be able to find results much easier than before.
