How to create a family tree

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Feel like a detective and learn more about your family's history. And an algorithm tested on personal experience, useful resources and several life hacks will help in this.

The first thing I want to say is that I am not a historian, not a professional researcher and genealogy is by no means my main job.

It just happened that one day it turned out that I decided to understand a little about family ties, to understand who are all these numerous relatives who periodically congratulate my mother on her birthday and send some kind of greetings. Well, she approached this issue a little more responsibly than she expected, and now there are 1,089 people in my family tree. Both on my father's and on my mother's side, I independently went deeper for seven generations. That is, the oldest relatives I know of today were born around 1800. This is not much, but taking into account our tradition of family memory, 200 years is a serious achievement.

I'm not sure my search experience is exhaustive or comprehensive, but it can help you get started understanding family ties.

They drove. I have already worked out a certain algorithm, and now I will share it.

1. Conduct a survey of relatives

It doesn't matter what moved me, but I decided to learn more about my family history. To begin with, I came to my mother, we sat down with her in the evening and drew the first diagram on A4 sheet. Here are my mother, here are her parents, here are her grandparents.

Then we started to complicate this scheme. Do her parents have brothers and sisters, are they married, do they have children, do grandparents have brothers and sisters? Where they lived?

This is such a stage in the primary collection of information, the time of legends and unverified facts. So far, nothing can be trusted, but everything needs to be fixed. After my mother, I went to talk to my grandmother on my mother's side. Then - further on to relatives.

And for this stage, I have two life hacks. Photos are very helpful. Take out a family album, sit next to your interlocutor and ask about each person in the photographs: who is this? whose relative is he? where did you come from? where did you live? what did you work with? what do you remember about him?

Parsing a photo album is one of the most information-filled stages. And don't forget to get old photos from albums. Previously, it was customary to write on the back of a photo who was filmed and for what reason.

My great great grandfather

He is also with his twin brother

How to remember everything? No way.

Therefore, I wrote all meetings with grandmothers on a dictaphone, and during the conversation I made notes in a notebook. I immediately scanned all the photos, wrote the names of all the participants in the photo in the title of the photo and put them in separate folders. That is, for absolutely every family member, I have a folder with photographs and scanned documents on my hard drive. Ideally, you should also file a text file with a story about this relative there.

We must not forget that no one can be taken at their word, and memories are always very changeable and contradictory. We will check them in the archives at a later stage.

At this stage, I talked with all the elders of our clan, several times specially went to other cities and villages. I spoke with various second cousins, great-grandmothers, whom I had seen well before, if a couple of times in my life. I know that difficulties can arise at this stage, because not everyone likes to talk about themselves. But I didn't have such problems.:)

Checklist on how to interview a competent relative:

• ask to get an old photo album;
• leaf through it together and sign everyone who is shown in the pictures;
• ask if any documents have been preserved (birth and marriage certificates, passports, work books, award documents, work certificates, certificates of graduation, receipts, letters, postcards);
• immediately draw together a section of the family tree;
• record the entire conversation on a dictaphone;
• ask who lived where, where he came from, where he worked;
• clarify religion.

2. Examine the collected information

So, now we have collected a whole database of memories, photographs and documents. We must study all this carefully. Because sometimes some detail of a photograph, insignificant at first glance, can become a vector of an archive search. For example, the inscription on my great-great-grandfather's peakless cap helped me track his path in the Russo-Japanese war.

3. Organize data

There are many resources on the Internet for our purposes. I built my tree in the MyHeritage software. You can add up to 250 relatives for free, but I very quickly passed this mark and ended up buying a subscription. I'm not sure if this is the best and most reliable system in the world, but I still find it very comfortable.

I know that there are also Ancestry and GenoPro databases, but I have not used them and I don’t know anything about them except that they exist.

4. Clarify information

So far, you don't even have to leave the house for this. Here are the internet databases I used:

• vgd.ru - the main Russian portal for genealogy;
• gwar.mil.ru - a 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 "The feat of the people in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945";
• dostup.memo.ru - archived data on repressions;
• poslednyadres.ru - the Last Address memorial project about the repressions; you can leave an application for the installation of a commemorative plaque on the house of the repressed;
• yadvashem.org - Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Complex;
• kby.kiev.ua - base of those killed in Babi Yar (Kiev);
• drobytskyyar.org - base of those killed in Drobitsky Yar (Kharkov);
• holocaust.su - the base of those killed on the Zmiyovskaya Balka (Rostov);
• names.lu.lv - a database of Latvian Jews;
• ushmm.org - Holocaust Museum in Washington;
• its-arolsen.org - archive of the international search service for crimes of fascism (Germany);
• rgvarchive.ru - Russian State Military Archive;
• swolkov.org - database of white movement participants;
• elib.shpl.ru - a personal list of losses of the workers 'and peasants' Red Army during the civil war;
• kdkv.narod.ru - a list of persons awarded the Order of the Red Banner of the RSFSR;
• alexanderyakovlev.org - NKVD-UNKVD troikas in each region;
• old.memo.ru - data on the system of labor camps in the USSR (1923-1960).

In addition, each, even the tiniest city, has its own community of history lovers. They have their own forums, and they are usually wildly happy for any attention to their activities.

5. Work with archives

Well, everything, all the information available to us on the Internet at the moment has been collected, and we want to move on to working with the archive. In order to go to the archive, we must clearly find out the place of residence of the sought relatives. Here you need to know the following:

• All records from 1918 to the present day are kept by the regional registry offices.
• From the 18th century to 1918, records were kept by religious institutions (in the case of my family, churches). The church registration book was started for one year and was divided into three sections: births, marriages, deaths. At the end there is always a statistical table for the dead this year.

• Until the first half of the 19th century, information should be sought in revision tales. Revision tales - documents reflecting the results of an audit of the subject of the population of the Russian Empire for the purpose of a per capita taxation. Revision tales were kept separately for each province, as Wikipedia tells us.
• In 1897, the first general census of the population of the Russian Empire took place. Census data should also be looked at by region.

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

1. Print out a sheet with the names and data of all your relatives for which you are looking in the archive.
2. Next to the name of each relative, indicate the years of life, religion, place of work, study, service.
3. It is advisable to call the archive in advance and agree on the time of the visit. If you are lucky, you will be assigned an archivist to help you with the documents.

Remember that registers of births were kept before the reform of the Russian language and the dates in them are indicated in the old style. And also - that the names of settlements over the past 100 years could have changed several times. And this applies not only to large cities, but also to villages.