The expert named ways to restore the family archive
Modern technologies open up new opportunities for studying the family tree. Alexander Bolkhovityanov, head of the Yandex Archive Search project, told Izvestia on June 9 how to start searching for ancestors and what digital tools can help.
As a first step, the specialist recommends contacting the family archives and asking older relatives. It is important to record key events, dates, and names, but treat oral narratives as hypotheses — the details may become distorted over time.
After collecting the primary information, it is worth digitizing the data. For this purpose, there are special online services where you can create a family tree and edit it together with relatives.
For a deeper search, Bolkhovityanov advises contacting the registry office and state archives.
"Birth, marriage, divorce and death certificates — these documents can become key links in restoring the family tree, especially if you do not have information about great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers. It is important to keep in mind that access to these records is provided only upon confirmation of kinship," the specialist noted.
For example, to obtain a grandfather's death certificate, you will first need to request (or provide) the birth certificate of one of his children. This is how the document chain will be built: each document you receive helps you take the next step.
In addition, do not forget about online archives. The specialist recommends starting the search with simple queries — last name and locality. If there are few results, it's worth trying different spelling options. According to him, the search for ancestors is similar to the work of a detective — sometimes one line from an old document can open a new branch of family history.
Bolkhovityanov noted that pedigree research takes time.
"If you haven't been able to find information, that's no reason to stop searching. Repeat the request later — perhaps the data has not yet been digitized and will appear over time, because the electronic databases are constantly being updated with new data," he said.
The expert also added that specialized communities can also help — forums, chat rooms, telegram channels, and social media groups. They will tell you how to formulate the request more correctly, help you decipher an illegible entry, or send it to the desired archive. And sometimes there may even be distant relatives or fellow countrymen.
Earlier, on November 17, he was the project manager of the .RU/ Domain Coordination center.Evgeny Pankov told Izvestia about the steady increase in phishing attacks carried out through messengers, especially Telegram and WhatsApp (owned by the Meta organization, recognized as extremist in the Russian Federation).
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