Have you tried to research your family history, only to find dead ends? Have you tried to build your family tree but only managed to find rabbit holes? Believe me, I’ve been there many times.
When I began to look deeper into my grandmother’s memoir Upheaval, which was first published in 1932, I had no idea I would find enough material to warrant publishing a second edition. Did I find dead ends? More than you can imagine. Did I go down rabbit holes? So many I lost count. Where did I start?
I began my research journey from the first chapter of Upheaval: My Family. In it my grandmother mentions the family estate in Potchep, which now lies in Russia’s Bryansk Oblast. I searched Google maps, Google itself, various Russian forums and Google.ru to try to find any mention of the Potchep estate and how it had passed on to my great grandfather, Count Constantin Petrovich Kleinmichel. In the first few pages of Chapter One of the second edition, there are five notes listing resources which mention Potchep. In order to find those five resources, I must have visited almost a hundred websites, reading through unrelated information and often had to translate the information I did find. That effort was just for a couple of paragraphs in the first chapter.
You can imagine the time it took for me to research every chapter in Upheaval, searching for the answers to my questions or even just trying to put a name to my grandmother’s sometimes vague references to a person or place. After the original Upheaval, I began to do the same research for my grandmother’s 1919 diary, which is included in the second edition. At a rough, and conservative, estimate I believe it took me around six years to complete my research.
I was also very fortunate to have made the acquaintance of a Russian genealogist and researcher, Svetlana Starkova whose help I could not have done without. It is more than challenging to try to find information in a country where you don’t speak the language and have no access to archives so Svetlana’s assistance was invaluable.
There are several forums, Facebook pages, and social media sites which feature Russian Imperial history and I was lucky to have found many of them. Generally speaking the people on these forums are incredibly helpful and I am grateful to all of those who had information on my family. I’m a voracious reader and there are plenty of books on Russian history, the ones which were most useful to me were written by Helen Azar and George Hawkins
You might think it would be easy to get disheartened when it takes so much time to research just one small part of your family history. But I have a confession to make – I love it! I could think of nothing better than searching for information on my family. Whether I spend the time online or in a library, on my laptop or reading an actual book, I cannot think of anything I’d rather be doing. The more challenging the question is, the more I enjoy finding the answer. Of course there are some dead ends or brick walls that I still haven’t managed to dig my way through, but that doesn’t mean I will give up. Eventually the information will find its way to me.
