Quite often in families, different questions arise both about their relatives (distant and closest), and about their ancestors. Usually this happens when grandparents begin to indulge in memories of their childhood, about how and where they grew up, with what relatives they knew. From these stories, you can try to compose the family tree of your family, because thanks to this lesson, it’s quite possible to learn a lot about relatives. How to find your ancestor? Let's try to figure it out together.
What are searches for?
Every year more and more people are interested in their roots. The science of their own ancestors attracts a huge number of people who are not indifferent to their family tree. Some of them try to find their ancestors for the usual material purpose - either to get rich, or to go to their newfound relatives abroad, or because of their usual prestige, because their grandparents were once famous or belonged to a higher caste. Others begin the search with a simple human goal - they really want to know their race.
How to find your ancestors?
In any case, this search is worthy of respect. But far from everyone who decided to start this work knows how to find their ancestors in the archives. Where to go? What do you need to know? How much is it? And this is not a complete list of questions that arise in the head of people who want to get acquainted with their ancestors.
How to find your ancestor? Here from two possible ways you can choose the most suitable for each situation. The first option is less costly - this is an independent search. If the second option is chosen - with the involvement of professionals, it is necessary to consider in advance that this service is paid and not very cheap. But the result of the work will be more accurate than in the first case, and faster.
Oh, these glorious soldiers!
In almost every family there is a person (or even not one) who gave his strength in the name of the Great Victory of the 45th. Unfortunately, not all descendants of glorious soldiers and officers know a lot of information about their grandparents. How to find your ancestor who fought? And here various services will come to the rescue, thanks to which you can find out some details of their biography, their life, their feat. One of them is the project of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, in which credentials and documents about soldiers killed in World War II and subsequent conflicts are systematized - obd-memorial.ru. There is also a regional youth organization, the search association "Trizna", which searches for missing soldiers. With their help, the problem of how to find your ancestor becomes not so difficult.
And it is very good that there are such services . After all, the phrase “nobody is forgotten, nothing is forgotten”, which has been known to everyone since childhood, turns out to be very correct, which has received a new breath. Everyone who fought in difficult years on the side of the Soviet Union deserves to be known and remembered. For the descendants to keep this good memory in their hearts for many years.
Instructions for use. The beginning of time
To begin compiling a family tree, you can ask your older relatives what they can remember from their family history. Moreover, it is recommended to find out not only first names, patronymics, last names and dates of birth - generally accepted information. When compiling the tree, you can specify other information that can only be found - interesting episodic moments from the biography of relatives, their place of residence, study, work, rewarding with honorary badges, orders and medals, perhaps even some hobbies. Thanks to such additional information, an ordinary tree can easily turn into a small encyclopedia of the history of one particular family.
Where did your last name come from?
No less interesting will be the information about what is the history of the surname. To get at least the minimum data, you can use the dictionary of surnames - both taken in the library and purchased in a bookstore. If the name is quite common, even in such a small directory, brief information about the origin, time and place of its appearance can be found. In addition, the estate belonging to the surname is also realistic to detect.
Similarly, you can find data on the social status of the owner of the surname. As an example, we can take surnames that end in "-sky" or "-tsky" and based on the Greek or Latin word, the name of a theologian or scholar, holiday or sacrament, which is directly related to the church. The genealogy of the surname in this case will show that, most likely, one of the ancestors of the interested person was a student in a theological seminary, within whose walls he received a new surname. This applies, for example, to the version that arose from the name of the Transfiguration holiday - Preobrazhensky. On the other hand, if the surname is shortened by a few letters, but its remaining part is consonant with the generic name of a well-known noble family, it is possible that its bearer is a descendant of some aristocrat. Like Elizabeth Temkina, who was the illegitimate daughter of Grigory Potemkin and, according to rumors, the empress herself. So the search for people by last name can give a lot of not only useful, but also fascinating information.
We determine the types of pedigrees
There are two main types of genealogies - ascending and descending. The first begins to be built from, so to speak, the applicant, from the one who begins to draw up his family tree. Then everything goes to information about relatives - parents, grandparents, and so on.
At the head of the second version of the genealogy is the oldest founder, who could only be found. And after all his descendants are mentioned, including the applicant. Here it is possible to look at the whole clan, at what distant relatives did.
Types of pedigrees can be considered a little differently:
1. Male ascendant - it includes only males. It looks like a normal line. Thanks to this pedigree, you can even determine your connection with some historical figure or even a famous person of past years.
2. Male descending - you must select the head of the clan and from him stretch the chain to the youngest man in this clan.
3. Rising mixed - both men and women are indicated. Relatives are indicated in geometric progression - first 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on.
4. Descending mixed - relatives of both sexes are also indicated. Such a pedigree contains several surnames and genera.
This compilation of the family tree is not difficult. It is important to stock up on time and patience.
Search by last name
How to search for people by last name, if there is information that they moved to live abroad?
To begin with, it should be clarified whether the applicant really has relatives abroad, what their names are, when they went abroad, what is their marital status, whether they have children and where exactly they moved. If their country of residence is unknown, you can start the search with the most popular - Israel, the USA and Canada.
An archive of surnames will always provide invaluable help, because it is there, without even expecting this, you can find information useful to yourself. To search in other countries, it would be nice to know a foreign language. Also try to find relatives using worldwide search engines or social networks.
Archive Search
To at least try to find your relatives, you should contact the archive. The surname, behind each of which is the fate of people, there is a great many in it, so there is hope that this method will be effective.
First you need to find out what the search period is and go to the registry office. And already there - submit a request to search for information necessary for the customer or come in person. Do not forget that archives are not only in the registry offices, but also, for example, in medical and educational institutions.
To get the information you need, you should pay special attention to sources - metrics, inventories of people living in the house, chronicle vaults, a population census that took place over different years.
Another direction of the search is the CPSU - the All-Russian Book of Memory, because it stores data from the inhabitants of the entire collapsed Union. This book has a very large base of citizens who participated in the hostilities during the Great Patriotic War. The names of all people were grouped by place of recruitment. There is an opportunity to get information from here on merit - life and combat, you can even find out where the person who is being sought is buried. Important and very necessary information for many people is found already in 750 volumes.
Do it yourself
In order to understand how to find your ancestor, and to recreate the family tree as accurately as possible, you need to go through several stages. Gather all the information, talk with parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Scan photos that are saved. It would be nice to prepare a description of each of the family members. It is useful to browse through several genealogy sites. And you can turn to professionals.
We need to figure out how to make a tree correctly: genetic diseases and features, hobbies, habits, relationships between relatives - all this is important.
It is necessary to decide which type of tree will be selected - descending or ascending. It would also be nice to choose a program for compiling a family tree. It is very simple, because there are a lot of them. Then put photographs, relations between relatives and the necessary signs in this program. As you search add new information.
Now you can print the prepared tree on a large sheet or, for example, make a book. A copy can be brought to relatives, who will also supplement the materials with information. Thus, the family tree will expand.