For those searching for the first time
First steps
Six steps to your family. Like the ball of thread in the folk tale: you pull it, and it leads you on — from a conversation with your relatives to an archival entry two hundred years old.
You can follow the course in order — or look at what survives first.
Browse the case catalogue →You need not go in order. If you already know the village and the surname, start at step three. Every step leads to a page of its own, and from there you can come back here for the next one.
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Ask your relatives while there is someone to ask
The most valuable material is not in an archive but at an elderly relative's kitchen table. Write everything down: names, nicknames, years, village names, where people moved, what they did for a living. Even a muddled recollection narrows the search by decades.
Ask about maiden surnames — they are lost first, and without them the female line breaks off.
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Work out where to look
A village is not yet a document's address. You need the uyezd, the volost and above all the parish: registers were kept by churches, and the book you need may be filed under the name of the neighbouring village.
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Read your first entry
This is where it looks most frightening — faded cursive and unfamiliar words. In fact the entry follows a rigid form: once you know what sits in which column, it reads quickly.
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Establish the family's estate
Peasants, townsfolk, odnodvortsi — the estate decides which collections you search next. Getting it wrong means years spent looking in the wrong place.
And you will need it at the very next step: household lists were arranged by estate, not alphabetically, so without it you will not even know which section of the volume holds your household.
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See the whole family at once
A register gives you an event — a birth, a marriage, a death. To see the household entire, with everyone's age and their relation to each other, you need a different document.
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Do not stop when an entry will not turn up
Surnames were written by ear, books burned, families moved. An empty result almost never means the ancestors were not there — more often it means you have to search differently.
Most often the register for that year simply does not exist. Then the entry is looked for where it ended up as a copy: in the act books of courts and notaries.
What you will get out of it
Having gone through all six, you will know how an archival entry is put together, what to look for in it and which document to take next. It does not get easy after that: entries go unread, books are lost, and a single recovered link can take months. But you will no longer be searching blind.
Steps 3, 5 and 6 are also one continuous story: the same people move from page to page, from an 1865 entry to an 1802 case. You can read it straight through, following the “What comes next” links, starting with the first worked entry.
And now — your own surname
The course ends where the search begins. First look in the catalogue to see which books exist for your village and for which years — that tells you what to expect. Then try the surname itself: texts go online case by case, and yours may already be among those transcribed.
Search the surname as it is spelled today, or just the beginning of it
Search for a surname →