How to make a family tree

A Life / by admin / December 19, 2019

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faith Bill

Graphic designer and founder of the studio Diplodocus. Production.

The first thing I want to say - this is something that I am not a historian, not a professional researcher and genealogy in any way is not my main job.

Just one day it so happened that I decided a little understanding of family ties, to understand who all these numerous relatives, who periodically congratulate my mother happy birthday and send some greetings. Well approached this issue a little more responsible than I expected, and now in my family tree 1089 people. And my father, and my mother's side, I went deep into yourself for seven generations. That is the oldest I know of today relatives were born around 1800. It's not much, but given our tradition of 200 years of family memories - a major achievement.

I'm not sure that my experience of searching an exhaustive and comprehensive, but it can help you begin to understand the family ties.

Chased. I have developed a kind of algorithm, and now I'm going to share them.

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1. To interview relatives

No matter what motivated me, but I decided to learn more about my family history. To begin, I came to my mother, we sat down with her in the evening and have drawn on a sheet of A4 first circuit. That's my mom, that's her parents, so her grandparents.

Then we started to complicate this scheme. And whether or not her parents' brothers and sisters, whether they are married, if they have children, whether there are brothers and sisters with his grandparents? Where they lived?

This is a stage of collecting primary information, while legends and unverified facts. So far, nothing is impossible to believe, but it is necessary to fix everything. After my mother, I went to talk to my grandmother on my mother's side. Then - down the relatives.

And for this stage I have two life hacking. It's great to help pictures. Take the family album, sit next to your companion, and about every man in the photographs to ask: who is it? whose he was a relative? how come? where he lived? I have worked with? what you remember about him?

Analysis album - one of the stages filled with information. And do not forget to take photos of the old albums. Previously, on the back of the picture it was taken to write, who was shot and for what reason.

How to remember everything? Nothing.

Therefore, all meeting with the grandmothers, I wrote to the recorder, and while talking to make notes in a notebook. All the photos I immediately scanned in the artist photographs wrote the names of all participants of the image and display in separate folders. That is, for absolutely every family member I wound up on a hard disk folder with photos and scans of documents. Ideally, there should also sew a text file with a story about this relative.

We must not forget that no one word for it, and memories are always very volatile and contradictory. We will check them in the archives at a later stage.

At this stage, I spoke with all the elders of our family several times specially traveled to other towns and villages. Said second cousins with different great-grandmothers, who before had seen good if a couple of times in my life. I know that at this stage it may be difficult, because not everyone likes to talk about himself. But I have no such problems. :)

Checklist of how to interrogate a competent family member:

ask to get an old photo album;
together browse the list and to sign anyone who is depicted in the photographs;
ask, not whether to save any documents (birth certificates and marriage certificates, passports, work books, award documents, employment letters, certificates of graduation, receipts, letters, postcards);
together immediately draw portion genealogical tree;
the entire conversation recorded on tape;
ask someone where he lived, where they came from, where he worked;
clarify religion.

2. To study the collected information

So now we have collected the whole base of memories, photos and documents. We need to carefully examine all of this. Because sometimes some seemingly insignificant detail of the photo may be a vector archive search. For example, his cap on my prapradedushki inscription helped me to trace his way in Russian-Japanese War.

3. regular data

On the Internet there are many resources for our purposes. I was building its tree program MyHeritage. Free You can add up to 250 families, but I very quickly exceeded that mark and eventually bought a subscription. I'm not sure that this is the best and most reliable system in the world, but to me it is still very convenient.

I know that there is still a base Ancestry and GenoProBut I did not use them, and nothing but the fact that they exist, do not know about them.

4. Update information

Yet for this I do not even have to leave the house. Here is the online database, which I used:

vgd.ru - Russia's main portal for genealogy;
gwar.mil.ru - portal dedicated to the events and heroes of the First World War;
pamyat-naroda.ru - search for documents about the heroes of the Great Patriotic War;
podvignaroda.mil.ru - data bank "Feat of people in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.";
dostup.memo.ru - historical records of repression;
poslednyadres.ru - Memorial project of repression "Last Address"; you can send a request for the installation of a memorial plaque on the house of the repressed;
yadvashem.org - the memorial complex history of the Holocaust, "Yad Vashem";
kby.kiev.ua - base killed at Babi Yar (Kyiv);
drobytskyyar.org - killed in the framework Drobitsky Yar (Kharkiv);
holocaust.su - killed in the framework Zmievskaya Balka (Rostov);
names.lu.lv - the database of the Jews of Latvia;
ushmm.org - Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC;
its-arolsen.org - archive of the international search service on the crimes of fascism (Germany);
rgvarchive.ru - Russian State Military Archive;
swolkov.org - the database of members of the White movement;
elib.shpl.ru - the nominal list of losses of the worker-peasant Red Army during the Civil War;
kdkv.narod.ru - the list of persons awarded the Order of the Red Banner of the RSFSR;
alexanderyakovlev.org - formulations of triples of the NKVD, the NKVD in each region;
old.memo.ru - data about the system of corrective labor camps of the Soviet Union (1923-1960 gg.).

In addition, in every place, even in the tiny town has its own community history buffs. They have their own forums, and they are usually wildly glad to any attention to their activities.

5. Work with archives

All right, all available to us on the Internet at this time the information is collected, and we want to go to work with the archive. In order to go to the archive, we must clearly find out the place of residence unknown relatives. Here it is necessary to know the following:

All records from 1918 to the present day are conducted by district registrar.
Since the XVIII century to the 1918 records were religious institutions (in the case of my family - churches). Church metric book plant for one year and was divided into three sections: Births, marriages, deaths. At the end there is always a sign of a statistical dead this year.

Until the first half of the XIX century, the information to be found in fairy tales registered males. Revision lists - Documents, reflecting the results of the audit, the citizen of the Russian Empire for the purpose of per capita taxation. Revision lists were conducted separately for each province, we are told by "Wikipedia".
In 1897 there was the first general census of the Russian Empire. Census data also need to look at the regions.

So, we ended up in the place, where our ancestors lived. To fruitfully go to the archive, you need to:

Print a list with the names and data of all your relatives, the information for which you are looking for in the archive.
Next to the name of each family member, specify the years of life, religion, place of work, study, service.
It is advisable to call first to the archive and to agree on the time of the visit. If you are lucky, you will have a file worker who will work with documents.

Remember that the births took place before the reform of the Russian language, and the date they are listed in the old style. And yet - that the names of settlements over the past 100 years may have changed several times. And it concerns not only large cities, but villages.