How to find your ancestor? Compilation of the family tree

Quite often, families have different questions about their relatives (far and near) and 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. According to these stories, you can try to create a family tree of your family, because it is quite possible to learn about relatives quite a lot because of this occupation. How to find your ancestor? Let's try to figure it out together.

Why do we need a search?

Every year more and more people are interested in their roots. The science of one's own ancestors attracts a huge number of people who are not indifferent to their ancestry. Some of them try to find their ancestors with the usual material goal - either to get rich, or to go to their new-found relatives abroad, or because of the usual prestige, because their grandmothers or grandfathers were once famous or belonged to the higher caste. Others begin to search for a simple human goal - they really want to know their kind.

How to find your ancestors?

In any case, this search is worthy of respect. But how to find their ancestors in the archives, not everyone knows, who decided to start this work. Where to go? What do you need to know? How much is it? And this is not a complete list of issues that arise in the minds of people who want to get acquainted with their ancestors.

How to find your ancestor? Here from two possible ways it is possible to choose the most acceptable for each situation. The first option is less expensive - this is an independent search. If the second option is chosen - with the involvement of professionals, it is necessary to take into account 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 more rapid.

Oh, these glorious soldiers!

Almost every family has a person (and sometimes not one), who gave his strength in the name of the Great Victory of the 45th. Unfortunately, not all the descendants of glorious soldiers and officers know a lot about their grandmothers and grandfathers. How to find your ancestor who fought? And here various services will come to help, thanks to which you can find out some details of their biography, their lives, their exploits. One of them is the project of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, which systematizes credentials and documents about the soldiers who died in the Second World War and subsequent conflicts - obd-memorial.ru. There is also a regional youth organization search association "Trizna", which searches for soldiers who are missing. With their help, the problem of how to find one's ancestor is not that difficult.

And it's very good that there are such services . After all, the phrase "no one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten", known to everyone since childhood, turns out to be very correct, having received a new breath. Everyone who fought in the difficult years on the side of the Soviet Union is worthy of being known not only about, but also remembered. To the descendants kept this good memory in their hearts for many years.

Instructions for use. The beginning of time

To start compiling a genealogical tree, you can ask your older relatives about what they can remember from the history of their family. And it is recommended to learn not only the names, patronymics, surnames and dates of birth - generally accepted information. When composing a tree, you can indicate other information that you can find - interesting episodic moments from the biography of relatives, their place of residence, study, work, rewarding with honorary signs, orders and medals, perhaps even some hobbies. Thanks to this additional information, the ordinary tree can easily become a small encyclopedia of the history of one particular family.

Where did your name come from?

No less interesting will be information about what the story of the emergence of the name. To get at least the minimum data, you can use a dictionary of surnames - both taken in the library, and purchased in the bookstore. If the name is quite common, even in such a small directory, a brief information about the origin, time and place of its occurrence will be found. In addition, the class affiliation of the surname is also really detectable.

Similarly, you can find data on the social status of the owner of the surname. As an example, you can take surnames that end in "-sk" or "-tsk" and have basically a Greek or Latin word, the name of a theologian or scholar, a holiday or a sacrament directly related to the church. Genealogy of the surname in this case will show that, most likely, one of the ancestors of the interested one was a student of the theological seminary, in the walls of which he received a new surname. This applies, for example, to the variant that arose from the name of the Transfiguration Day - Preobrazhensky. On the other hand, if the surname is shortened by several letters, but its remaining part is consonant with the generic name of a well-known noble family, it is possible that its carrier is a descendant of some aristocrat. Like Elizaveta Temkina, who was the illegitimate daughter of Grigory Potemkin and, according to rumors, the empress herself. So searching for people by last name can give a lot of not only useful, but fascinating information.

We are determined with the types of pedigrees

There are two main kinds of pedigrees - ascending and descending. The first begins to be built from, so to speak, the applicant, from the one who begins to make up his ancestry. Then everything goes to information about relatives - parents, grandparents and so on.

At the head of the second version of the pedigree is the oldest founder, which could only be found. And already after all his descendants are mentioned, including the applicant. Here it is possible to look at the whole family, on what the distant relatives did.

Kinds of pedigrees can be considered and a little differently:

1. Male ascending - it includes only males. It looks like an ordinary line. Thanks to this genealogy, you can even determine your connection with some historical figure or even a famous person of past years.

2. Male descending - you must choose the head of the family and from him to stretch the chain to the youngest man in this family.

3. Ascending mixed - both men and women are indicated. Relatives are indicated in a geometric progression - first 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on.

4. Descending mixed - also indicate the relatives of both sexes. Such a genealogy contains several names and genera.

This compilation of the genealogical tree is not difficult. It is important to have time and patience.

Looking for a surname

How can you find people by their surname, if there is information that they have moved to live abroad?

To begin with, it should be clarified whether the applicant has relatives abroad, what are their surnames, when they left abroad, what their marital status is, whether they have children and where they moved. If the country of their residence is unknown, you can start looking for the most popular ones - Israel, the United States and Canada.

The archive of names will always be of invaluable help, because it is there, even without waiting for this, you can find useful information for yourself. To look in other countries, it is good to know a foreign language. Also try to find relatives with the help of global search engines or social networks.

Search with archives

To at least try to find their relatives, it is worth turning to the archive. Surnames, each of which has human destinies, there are a lot of 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 ZAGS archive. And already there - to file a request for the search for information necessary for the customer or to come personally. Do not forget that there are archives not only from registrars, but also, for example, in medical and educational institutions.

In order to obtain the required information, it is necessary to study with special attention sources - metrics, household records, annalistic vaults, a population census that took place in different years.

Another direction of search - VKP - All-Russia book of memory, because it stores the data of the inhabitants of the whole disintegrated Union. In this book there is a very large base of citizens who participated in the fighting during the Great Patriotic War. The names of all people were grouped by places of conscription. There is an opportunity from here to receive information about the merits - life and combat, you can even find out where the person who is being searched is buried. Important and very necessary information for many people are found already in 750 volumes.

Doing everything yourself

To understand how to find your ancestor, and how to reconstruct the genealogical tree as accurately as possible, you should go through several stages. Collect all the information, talk with parents, grandparents, aunts-uncles. Scan photos that have been saved. It would be nice to prepare a description of each member of the family. It is useful to view several genealogy sites. And you can turn to professionals.

It is necessary to understand how to make a tree correctly: genetic diseases and features, hobbies, habits, relations between relatives - all this is important.

It is necessary to decide what type of tree will be chosen - descending or ascending. It would also be a good idea to select a program to compile a generic tree. It's very simple, there are a lot of them. Then in this program to put photos, links between relatives and the necessary notation. 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 generic tree will expand.