Finding out who your ancestors were and compiling a family tree - all this involves research that promises many interesting discoveries. There are many sources that you can turn to to find out who your ancestors were. The main thing is to be interested not only in the results, but also in the process itself.
Instructions
Step 1
It's worth starting with documents and papers at home. Each family usually has a drawer, briefcase, or box containing all the old papers and photographs. The following papers may be useful to you: certificates of birth, marriage or its dissolution, death. It will also be useful to find passports, work books, certificates, various certificates, diplomas and any personal documents. Sort everything by paternal and maternal lines. Create a separate envelope or catalog on the computer for each person.
Step 2
If you find someone else's notebooks, go through them. Passport data, names and surnames, some other types of information may be useful to you. It is also helpful to ask all older relatives about what they remember. You need to write down everything that they tell, all names, all kindred lines. Somewhere someone can make a mistake, sometimes it will be so that no one remembers any relatives, except for one person. Usually women remember family ties better. It is worth writing down the full name, place of birth, date of birth. The place is often more important, as people constantly confuse dates.
Step 3
Then you should go to the city and rural archives. You can usually find out their address on the Internet or in any library. It is important to understand that documents from one area may end up in the archives of a neighboring region, this happens. To obtain admission to the archive, an application is written to the director. You will be given a pass to the reading room, where you can already request the necessary documents. But start with the inventory.
Step 4
The documents in the archive are structured as follows. They are all divided into funds. The fund contains documents for one person, family or organization. Each fund consists of cases, a complete list of which is given in the inventory. Usually, the archives provide free access to the inventories, but with the funds, everything is not so simple. Foundations of churches, treasury chambers, volost boards and so on can be of particular importance. Census forms, which were compiled each time a population census was conducted, can help.
Step 5
Having received documents for the required dates in the required area, review them for the presence of the names of the ancestors. Check how the information from the family archives correlates with what emerged from the official documents.
Step 6
An important source of information is the metric books of churches. Sometimes they are not kept in the regional archives, in order to gain access to them, you need to travel to remote places and talk with the ministers of churches.
Step 7
In each place where you will conduct a search, ask what other documents they can recommend for you. The fact is that the office work in ancient times was not distinguished by special orderliness. In different regions, the documents could be called differently, they were kept by different institutions, and are stored in the archives in different sheets. On the spot, you can find out much more about where exactly it is better to contact directly in your case.
