This class will focus on a selection of relevant websites and archives for researching ancestors who lived in the former German Empire provinces of East and West Prussia. Today this area is split between Poland, the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, and a small section of western Lithuania.

This lesson will teach you how to use the online gazetteer Kartenmeister.com to find German, Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian names for the same locality. You will also learn to find all the villages listed within a county or “Kreis” and how to collaborate with other people researching the same localities.

Explore billions of records in the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union to find family across different eras, from tsars to the Soviet Republics.