Newly added records and databases offer some treasures for Russian genealogy

Some treasures of records and databases are finally online, thanks to the work of Russian archives and other ongoing independent projects. It’s been a slow process to move Russian archives into the 21st century but it’s a gift to find more online records and databases from Russia.

It is highly recommended to use a language translator app for your web browser such as Google Translate, a free app, to view these websites. The free records and information on the below websites will not be found on any subscription genealogy websites. Searching these databases is as simple as translating names of people and places on Google Translate, copying the translations and pasting them into the search boxes.

The effort to find these new online records and databases took a week of searching each region of Russia. I picked the most useful ones for Russian genealogy.

Here are the great finds from Russia:

• The Yandex Archive’s project has expanded to almost 7 million records that are scanned and transcribed by artificial intelligence onto a searchable database. Now records from the State Archive of Novgorod Region, Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, State Archive of Saratov Region and the Republic of Mordovia can be found on this database, which already had records from regions of Moscow, Orenburg and Novgorod. Learn more about this database and how to use the database without knowing Russian from this post.
•  The Great Inventory database has almost doubled in size since this blog reported about the project back in May. Now more than 550,000 listings of fonds (sets of records) at archives in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania can be found in this database. The listings from Ukrainian archives for the regions of Zhytomyr, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi and Chernihiv were recently added to the database. Learn more about this database and how to use the database without knowing Russian from this post.
• The Central State Archives of Moscow Region has introduced two important databases. One has more than 95,000 indexed records from the registry offices, which have been documenting births, marriages, divorces and deaths since the 1920s. The database provides the following information: date of event, place of event, parents of individual documented and the exact file location within archives. The second database is indexed records of births, marriages and deaths from parish books. There are almost 20,000 people in this database.

• Evacuated Children– About 1,500 children from boarding schools in Moscow and the Moscow region are documented in this database. These children were evacuated during World War II  from 1941-1945 to the Komi-Permyak National District. The database provides the following information on the children: year of birth/age, gender, place of residence before evacuation, place of relocation, parents’ information and exact file location within archives.
• The State Archive of Oryol Region has created a searchable database, Participants in the Oryol-Kursk Battle, with more than 900 soldiers documented. The database, introduced in July, has the full name, birth year, birthplace, residence, awards and exact file location within archives, in addition to photos of some soldiers. The information also can be viewed in an alphabetical index.
• Lists of settlements in the Vyatka province, Kirov Province, 1905– The database can be searched by village names and other criteria through advanced searches. The results will identify the exact location of villages by neighborhood and parish and where village records are located within the Central State Archive of Kirov Region.
• The State Archive of Kemerovo Oblast– The archive has opened an online portal for its scanned records, which can be viewed for free after completing  registration. Scanned records are listed here but they must be viewed in the portal.
• Electronic local history encyclopedia of the Lipetsk Region– The information on villages is organized by alphabetical order. Users can find the sources of information in the State Archive of Lipetsk Region from the database.
• The State Archive of Ivanovo Region has the goal of uploading more than 300,000 pages of records online this year on its electronic archives portal. The list of digitized records can be found here.
• The State Archive of Tomsk Region is maintaining a database of evacuees of World War II that can be searched.
• The State Archive of the Altai Republic has digitized metric books from Maima of the Gorno-Altai Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church for 1875-1899. The project involved more than 3,000 sheets of records.  This effort is part of a bigger project to digitize about 29,000 sheets of records (mostly birth, marriage and death records) for the archive’s electronic database of records that is still in the works.
• The State Archive of the Altai Republic will release a database on its website in early 2024 on more than 2,000 residents who faced Soviet-era persecutions.
• The State Archive of the Altai Republic has updated its database of more than 4,000 citizens of the former USSR citizens who were relocated to the region during WWII. The database has Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Estonians. Citizens came as far as Latvia, Leningrad  (Saint Petersburg) and Kursk.
• More than 2.4 million records on Soviet-era persecution victims have been declassified by Kazakhstan officials. The records are dated from 1929 to 1956. The process to make these records public took a three-year process with the help of a state commission created in fall 2020 to give all the victims rehabilitation (exoneration from the false crimes), according to a Deutsche Welle article. To learn more about the significance of Kazakhstan in Soviet-era persecutions, see this article in English for more information.

The variety of information and records going online from Russia is impressive. Tomorrow, Oct. 22, is the 12th anniversary of Find Lost Russian & Ukrainian Family blog going online. I never imagined that so much would be online from Russia, which is breaking my heart with the war in Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine, the birthplace of my wonderful mother!

Don’t forget to check out Scanned Russian and Ukrainian Archive Records and Free Databases, which are both completely updated with new resources.

Stay tuned to more updates on Russian and Ukrainian archive records and databases going online by following this blog with the top right button.

Related posts:
Free database of old photos opens door to finding valuable gems
Top tips for researching Ukrainian and Russian resources on Genealogy Indexer
Database locates more than 270,000 vanished villages from maps
Photo database of more than 20,000 Russian churches brings new life to genealogy

A Russian genealogy gold mine awaiting to be cleared of its treasures

The gold mines of Russian genealogy aren’t advertised. It takes a lot of sifting through boring technical databases to find the true gold mines of Russian genealogy.

After years of wondering where the Russian government has been unloading its electronic treasure trove, I think I have found a gem for genealogy. Thankfully, the database comes with the tools that help avoid sweating to find the treasures.

The Russian State Library is claiming to have the second largest online database. That’s hard to believe but the amount of records here are unreal.

Users can immediately begin searching with the help of Google Translate.

Here’s how to take full advantage of this user-friendly database even without knowing Russian.

1. Copy and paste your keywords (surnames, villages, events, etc.) translated by Google Translate in the search box and click искать (find in English) on the right.
2. When results come in, click on еще (more in English) at the end of each description.
3. Copy and paste the results into Google Translate.
4. Once you’ve selected which results are most interesting, right click on or copy and paste the link for прочитать документ (read document in English).
5. Select Онлайн-просмотр (online viewing in English) on the top of the next page and then click открыть документ (open document in English).
6. Then the document will open. Click on поиск (search in English) on the left.
7. Copy and paste your keywords in Russian in the search box and click on найти (find in English).
8. The exact pages where your keywords appear in the document will be listed under Найдено: (found in English).
9. If you can’t find your information or read the text, right click to save the document. There are Facebook groups to help with translations. See Facebook Genealogy for links to those groups.

Once this is all done, the journey has only begun. Take the journey one step further by picking out keywords from the documents and using a Russian keyboard to retype important keywords.

Then copy and paste on Google the keywords from the documents to see what else can be found and who else is researching the same information.

Push yourself and you’ll go farther. Get annoyed that taking on Russian is challenging, you’ll be watching others take down their genealogy brick walls this year.