Russia Beginning Research

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This article is intended to provide the background needed to pursue an ancestry that extends back into the Russian Empire. Whether the person searching for their Russian ancestry does the work or has it done, he needs to have a basic understanding of what sources exist and where they are found in order to obtain and evaluate the information. We will look at the historical administrative environment, the archival environment, and the sources.

Localities
There are several geographic terms by which the records are organized because they represent the jurisdictions administered by government agencies. Click here for geographic terminology and to learn about various Russian jusrisdictions.

Often, the records of several modem provinces are found in the archive of a single province, whose capital happened to have been the capital of an imperial province.

Borders fluctuated greatly along the western edge of the Russian Empire. Click here for the table that identifies some of the more significant changes.

Gazetteers
There are several basic gazetteers that provided place name and jurisdictional information to make sense of these localities.