Step one: talk to the living relatives
The most underrated source of information is an oral interview with the oldest people in your family. Grandparents remember names, dates and places that no archive will ever have. Record the conversation on a phone or a voice recorder. Memory is not enough.
Prepare a short list of questions. For each person we are interested in four basic facts: when they were born, where, who they married, and where they worked. Push for detail beyond that — social class before 1917, why they moved, what happened during the wars, whether anyone was repressed.
Step two: pull together the home archive
There is usually more in family albums, on shelves and in boxes than you remember. Look for:
- birth, marriage and death certificates — the factual backbone
- military booklets and old-style passports (the ones issued before 1997)
- work record books — they show every job and every move
- school and university diplomas — dates and locations of study
- photographs with anything written on the back
- letters — return addresses are quietly full of useful geography
Photograph every document in high resolution. Originals fade, rip and disappear. A copy in cloud storage is more reliable than the paper.
Step three: check the open databases
A surprising amount is online before you ever set foot in an archive. The useful starting points:
- OBD Memorial and Memory of the People — open Russian Defence Ministry databases for WWII service records
- civil-registry databases for several Russian regions (gradually opening up)
- Open List (Otkrytyj Spisok) — the database of repression victims
- regional genealogy forums — VGD (vgd.ru) is the largest
- FamilySearch — free, with parish records from many regions
These resources will not replace an archive, but they give you a scaffold and usually cover the first one or two generations of work for free.
Step four: put the tree into a simple tool
Do not try to build a designer chart on day one. A plain spreadsheet, MyHeritage or the Russian app Drevo Zhizni is enough. What matters is recording the connections and the sources behind each one. Every claim should be backed by a document or an interview.
Organise by generation: you are generation 1, your parents are 2, your grandparents 3, great-grandparents 4 and so on. Keep the paternal and maternal lines on separate sheets. It will save you time later when you start working with archives.
When a professional starts to make sense
Self-research usually hits a ceiling at the third or fourth generation. After that the work changes — pre-1917 parish books written in Church Slavonic, revision lists in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, regional fonds organised by former provinces. It is a specific skill.
If your roots are Lithuanian, Polish, Georgian or Central Asian, you will need foreign archives and a translator to go further. The same is true for clergy, nobility and merchant lines — they have their own fonds and their own document languages.
«The first 100 years you can usually cover on your own. That is the part with living memory and recognisable handwriting. The second 100 years is where method matters — dozens of parallel requests to dozens of different places.»
— Pavel Ovchinnikov, founder
