If you decide to learn more about your family's history, you will have to get to know your predecessors in the family line - your ancestors. How do you find them? We tell you in this article how find people free.
Interview your relatives
The first step in finding your ancestors should be a thorough conversation with your living relatives. They will help you learn the names of your family members, their places of residence, the history of their career and personal life. On the basis of this information you can visualize the geographical map of your family history and understand where you can request documents about your deceased relatives.
We gave a checklist with instructions on how to get as much information as you can from your conversation with your relatives in this article.
Another important place to start your research is at civil registry offices. Civil Registry Offices hold documents on births, marriages concluded and dissolved, and deaths. Registry offices can ask for certificates or references that may contain additional information about your relative's place of employment, career, places of residence, religious affiliation, and other information that may be helpful to you. But you need proof of kinship in order to obtain documents from the Registry Office.
You should also remember that you should look for information about your relatives in the district Registry Offices, otherwise your request will not be processed.
Work with archives
The next step in compiling research is state archives. They store information about births and deaths, about your relative's joining or exclusion from the party, census data, where you can immediately get information about entire branches of your family, and many other valuable information.
Requests to archives are paid and can be processed within a few days to a few weeks. We told you about how to make a proper request to the archives in this article.
What you have to pay attention to
There are many nuances in genealogical work, so it is important to know what you need to pay special attention to and what documents will simplify the research. What you need to pay special attention to:
Also you can get a lot of information from the personal files of a relative, especially if he had a high position.Another important source of information is party archives. If a relative was a party member, you can find his questionnaire. Party files have a questionnaire that says where the person was born, what his parents' names were, his service record and other data. Therefore, such a source of information should by no means be written off.
When to apply for genealogical research
Finding information about family members is a very energy-consuming and painstaking process, and most often, it can advance to information about your great-grandparents. Often it becomes difficult to find information about more distant relatives due to many factors:
Lack of information in archives (documents may have been lost or destroyed);
Lack of information about your ancestors' names and places of their lives;
information that your ancestors lived in other countries, from the archives of which it is impossible to request data.
In these cases you can request a consultation with a genealogist or order a research of your family history. We wrote about the timing and cost of such research here.