An interesting gem for exchanging photos from Russia

Here’s a great free website to check out for exchanging Russian family photos before 1957-  Great Russian Album.

This is the first website based in Russia I’ve seen to post old family photos. The website has more than 26,000 photos posted. That’s an impressive amount of photos when so many family photos were destroyed during World War II and the communist period.

Users of Great Russian Album can exchange information with each other. The website also has a useful search engine.

So go check out this website and post your old family photos.

One stop clicking for former Russian Empire and USSR directories

It is awfully lucky to find phone, business and farmers directories from the former Russian Empire and USSR online. GenealogyIndexer.org has an incredible list of links for these directories.

The webpage has links to directories from Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Belarus, in addition to former Eastern Block countries and other western and eastern European countries.

Since borders have changed over the years, please make sure to check the whole list. Directories for Lviv, now in western Ukraine, is listed under Poland. Bialystok, once part of the Russian Empire, is now in Poland and among the Poland links.

These directories will not be as easy to leaf through as 21st century directories but it is well worth checking out these directories. With so many records destroyed during the eastern Europe’s communist era, any information from the early 20th century is a blessing.

So go check out these directories at GenealogyIndexer.org to see whether your relatives or ancestors are mentioned in these directories. Gems of information may be waiting to be discovered.

Venturing into microfilmed church records with success

Until recently, I have been pretty stubborn about reading church records on my own. Thanks to Latvian archives posting online church records from Bialystok, formerly in Russia and now in Poland, I have developed confidence to do the research myself.

Not many former USSR church records are posted online. But the Mormon church has microfilmed so many records that genealogical research of church records can be done dirt cheap. One microfilm costs $7.50 to rent for two months through this website.

I have lost count of the number of microfilm I have ordered from the Mormon church. I have not been able to claim any success until last week.

My visit to a nearby Mormon church Family History Center uncovered my great-great-great-great-grandfather married at age 60, a fact no one in my family knew. His marriage record had the full names of his deceased parents and reconfirmed his birth year and place. Now I am hoping to find his parents’ death records in western Poland archives to go back further in time.

I am finally making some major breakthroughs, thanks to getting out of my comfort zones. When I started my search for missing relatives and research into my ancestry,  I was using English to search the Internet. That got me hardly anywhere.

I am finally comfortable with using Google Translate to search the Internet in Russian and post messages in Russian on genealogy forums. Now, I need learn to get more comfortable with reading some of the bad writing in church records so I can make breakthroughs on my own.

Luckily, I got “Going Home: A Guide to Polish American Family History Research” by Jonathan D. Shea as a Christmas present. With Poland being a melting pot of Poles, Germans, Jews and Russians, the book is useful for those researching Russian ancestry.

The book shows how to read Russian church records, in addition to writing to archives and villages for family information. The Russian list for occupations, family relationships, vital record jargon, numbers, dates, time expressions, months, numbers and days of the week is remarkable. This book is expensive and worthwhile at $42.99 but it may be available at some libraries.

Russian genealogy is an exciting adventure but it requires getting out of comfort zones. Progress in Russian genealogical research will be seen once the attitude of “I can’t do that” is gone.

FamilyTreeDNA makes interesting change and offer

Two years ago, I decided to tryout DNA testing for my genealogical research. I first started with FamilyTreeDNA because it has the largest database for DNA genealogy testing.

I had four pages of matches until a few weeks ago for the FamilyFinder test, which was advertised as a test that finds maternal and paternal relatives within 5-6 generations. So now, FamilyTreeDNA has decided to make improvements to its analyzing system to guarantee that matches are really within 5-6 generations.

It is great that FamilyTreeDNA wants to make sure that my matches fall within the time period promised on its website. But I still lost a few matches I have  spent time to determine which line connects our families. Now, FamilyTreeDNA has admitted its improvements have had some glitches so I am hoping some matches will return.

I also tested with AncestryDNA last fall after I was offered a free test to be part of the first group for the new test. I have 1,500 matches on AncestryDNA. So far, I have confirmed a German surname  with a match. A bunch of people have my Hoffmann surname in common but that does not guarantee that is where our families really connect.

All of my matches on AncestryDNA are not closer than 5th-8th cousins so the test’s confidence level that these people are my relatives is very low. With having 100 percent eastern European ancestry, I am not going to get those great matches as people with British Isles, French and Italian ancestry until DNA genealogy tests become more popular.

It is pretty obvious why FamilyTreeDNA decided now to guarantee the FamilyFinder matches will be within 5 to 6 generations for customers’ paternal and maternal lines. AncestryDNA is taking away customers from FamilyTreeDNA. It is hard to compete with Ancestry.com when it offers more information with its new DNA test and has a very popular genealogy website.

Another change FamilyTreeDNA made to attract more customers is offering a $39 Y-DNA12 test, which only men can take to analyze their paternal line. The test is pretty weak. It will find matches within 29 generations, but there is an advantage to getting this test. After taking this test, you can wait for a sale on upgrades for the stronger Y-DNA tests. FamilyTreeDNA has sales throughout the year.

DNA genealogy testing for those with Russian and Ukrainian ancestry is a gamble but it may be worth trying the $39 test. The Y-DNA test may be the best route for starting in DNA genealogy testing if you can get a bunch of male relatives from different family lines.

Get the formal attention of Ukrainian archives

After several years of researching my relatives and ancestors in Ukraine, I have finally learned that Ukrainian archives have a form for obtaining civil records.

A lot of Ukrainian archives have Web sites, but some choose not to answer their e-mail messages or have non-working e-mail addresses posted. If you have contacted a Ukrainian archive office and have not received an answer within six months, I highly suggest you use this form.

Here is the link for the form, which is in Ukrainian. The form must be filled out in Ukrainian. You must know exact dates of birth, marriage, divorce and death. Here is an English version of the form, but it cannot be used.

If you do not know Ukrainian, use Google Translate to fill out the Ukrainian  form.

Hopefully, the archive office will respond to your request better than an informal e-mail message or letter. The Consulate General will actually send the archives’ response to you.

If sending this form directly to archives does not result in a response, the Ukrainian Consulate General in New York City will process your request. The charge is $75. Here is information on that process.

I highly recommend first sending the form to archives on your own. I do not know whether the Consulate General’s office will refund your money if nothing is found. 

A learning lesson in a Ukrainian registry office

I was hoping to find the marriage record of paternal great-grandparents in Kharkiv archives. I found a very resourceful guy on a Russian genealogy forum to help me get the record. This experience has taught me a lot.

Ukrainian archives are getting stricter about access to their records. I was shocked to learn that my great-grandparents’ marriage record from 1890 was still in the registry office. I didn’t think this search would become a major headache because my great-grandparents were born more than 130 years ago.

But people are using officially released archive documents to sue Kharkiv to recover property taken during World War II and the communist era. So researching the last great-grandparent line in my family tree has become a headache. I paid this man $100 so he could extract information from my great-grandparents’ marriage record.

This man knew my agenda was to get my great-grandparents’ birthplaces and parents’ names. Two months after I paid him, he tells me that this information is not available on marriage records from this time period. He did confirm the registry office has the marriage record but he cannot try to get me any information from this record unless I e-mail him a power of attorney document and records that prove ancestry.

So I had enough. I will write to Kharkiv registry office myself and provide proof of ancestry through family documents. Hopefully, the office will tell me whether the marriage record has the information I want. I already have a good portion of the marriage record rewritten on my great-grandmother’s high school diploma.

I also recently asked the researcher to check whether the birth record of my grandmother’s brother can be found at Kharkiv registry office. He did not answer my question about this record. The researcher wanted $200 to check for the marriage and birth records and extract information from the records. I negotiated the price down to $100, not knowing the disappointment and anger I would face two months later.

I am relieved that I have so much ancestry in Russia. The Russian registry offices usually have records from 1920 and later so I have avoided proving ancestry to research my ancestors. Thankfully, Kharkiv is the last registry office for my Ukrainian genealogical research.

So the lesson learned is that it is better to obtain information from registry offices on your own. A researcher cannot breakthrough the wall of rules at the registry offices.

Every Russian archive teaches lessons in genealogy

I was hoping to find the birth record of a paternal great-grandfather for cheap in Kostroma regional archives. But I got a rude awakening about how Russian archives operate. I have yet to see a standard rate for researching records in Russian regional archives.

My expectation was that the search would cost around $50. Not even close. Thanks to my peasant ancestry, the archives do not have my family’s surname in church records. I have a lot of Russian peasant ancestry and Kostroma Region is only my second experience dealing with this problem.

I thought giving the archives my great-grandfather’s given and patronymic names, the two possible years he could have been born, the name of his church, the name of his family’s village would make the search less complicated and more affordable. Nope and nope. Archives want between $100-$330 American dollars for a search that could find nothing.

So I decided to contact the same researcher who studied my paternal grandfather’s mother’s family to find records on my grandfather’s siblings. My grandfather wrote in letters that he was the only child who survived childhood. So that made me curious about how many siblings my grandfather lost.

The researcher found four siblings. My grandfather had two sisters and two brothers as sets of twins. It is sad I will never find cousins through my grandfather’s siblings. But the siblings’ lives were still interesting.

The first set of twins, Alexander and Ivan, were born in October 1883. Alexander died in August 1885 and Ivan died December 15, 1883. This information seemed unexciting until I realized that my grandfather had a brother who died on his birthday two years before he was born and my great-grandmother faced a second child death while she was 6 months pregnant with my grandfather. The grief of losing a second child could have resulted in my grandfather being miscarried.

Then I learned my grandfather’s two sisters, Elizabeta and Alexandra, were born in October 1887 and died in April 1888 one day apart. I cannot imagine giving birth to a second set of twins in the same month as the first twins who died young. I wonder if my grandfather even remembered his sisters who died when he was 2 1/2 years old.

It is sad that my great-grandmother was a mere 22 years old when she had her last children. So maybe the death of four children was all it took for her to not have any more children.

My curiosity continued into my Ivanov family and I agreed for the researcher to study my family as far back as records would allow. It was exciting to see my family tree go back to my sixth great-grandfather, born around the 1720s, and then interesting to know my great-grandfather Nikolai had two brothers, including another Nikolai, who was 17 years older than him.

I thought the researcher would find that my great-grandfather’s siblings also all died young. It is great to know there is a possibility that I could one day find Ivanov cousins, especially when my father was an only child and so was my grandfather.