Reference
About this site
What is here, how it is arranged and what state it is all in. Briefly, so you need not feel your way around.
What this is
Knyha Rodu is a section of the Chronicle of Horodkivka devoted to people: archival records of the Horodkivka community from 1700 to 1935, gathered from dozens of files into one place.
The Chronicle tells the story of the village — who owned it, when the church was built, how the borders shifted. Knyha Rodu answers a different question: is your surname here.
How it is arranged
First steps: the course →
Six steps for first-time searchers. Start here if you have never held a parish register.
Record types →
What a register, a confession list, a revision tale or a court file is — and what each gives a family. With worked examples.
Geography →
Governorate, uyezd, volost, parish: the address a document is filed under, and what our villages were called then.
Social estates →
Odnodvortsi, townsfolk, peasants. The estate decides which collections you search next.
Search the texts →
A surname in the texts of the books already read — the main section of the site.
What state it is in
- The reference — being filled in; sections marked “In progress” have no text yet
- Worked examples — ready for registers, confession lists, revision tales, court and notarial books, and clergy records
- Search the texts — working; texts go online case by case, the rest of the catalogue so far carries only a description of the carrier
The readings are largely machine-made. To a computer a scan of an old sheet is just a picture, so before anything can be searched it is read by software trained on the handwriting of our own scribes. It reads with errors: faded 19th-century cursive does not always yield even to a human eye. So the machine text here is not a translation of the document but a draft for searching: it tells you where to look, and the reading itself is done by a person, against the original. We mark the doubtful places rather than filling them in, and every record stays tied to a page of a specific archival file.
If you can help
Old photographs, parish extracts, family recollections — and above all, corrections to our readings. Someone who knows how a surname sounded in the village sees in an illegible line what software will never take off a scan. Recollections we still check against documents — but they are what tells us where to look.
And if this is your first time here — start with the course, six steps
To the course →