Source 1. Archives of neighbouring regions
The first thing a professional checks: were you even looking in the right archive? The borders of old provinces and modern regions do not match, and in Soviet times the administrative divisions changed repeatedly. In one of our cases the parish registers of a single Altai village were split across four archives at once, the Altai, Novosibirsk, Omsk and Tomsk, plus a village museum. Always check the neighbouring regions.
Source 2. Party, employment and personal files
If an ancestor lived in Soviet times, they almost certainly left a trace in a personal file at work or in a Party archive. Personal files hold an autobiography, a photograph, details of the family makeup, a home address, education and previous jobs. Handwritten autobiographies are especially valuable: they almost always gave a place of birth. If the ancestor was a Party member, the route leads to RGASPI or a regional archive of socio-political history.
Source 3. House registers
If at some point the ancestor lived in an apartment block, check the house registers for that address. A house register is an alphabetical list of residents with full name, age, where they came from, religion (before the revolution) and place of work. In the Central State Archive of St Petersburg the house registers run from 1904 to 2017. Other large cities have similar fonds.
Source 4. A request to ZAGS
If an ancestor died after 1970, order a new-format death certificate from the ZAGS office. The death certificate forms of the 1970s–1990s simply had no 'place of birth' column. But the act record itself almost always carried it. A new-format certificate gives the exact place of birth, and with it the key to further searching.
Source 5. Local-history literature
When archive sources are exhausted, local-history publications can help. It sounds unlikely, but it works. Family Relic once researched a non-Russian line in Western Siberia with almost all official documents lost. In the historian N. M. Yadrintsev's main work, 'Siberian Natives', there was a whole section on the settlement history of the rural district in question, with settlers' surnames drawn from revisions now lost. The book even named the ancestors we were after.
Source 6. Genealogy forums and living relatives
Information you cannot find in an archive is often kept by living people. The genealogist Olga Gorbenko posted data on her ancestors on genealogy forums and waited nearly five years. A young woman from another town replied: 'I know these people.' She had kept a great-grandmother's diary with a detailed account of the family's move to Siberia, something no archive could hold. Publish your data; a family's history lives not only in documents but in people.
Source 7. A DNA test
When the documentary sources are fully spent, a DNA test can be the last tool. It will not restore names and dates, but it can confirm or disprove kinship, establish ethnic origin and lead to living relatives who hold more. Our genealogist Olga Sukhanina confirmed kinship with a researcher from Irkutsk through a DNA test; a shared ancestor born around 1777 was established after every archive route had hit a dead end.
Feels like the search has hit a wall? For Family Relic there are no dead ends. Tell us your story at myrodoslovie.ru
