Kinship Research

What it does. Researches your family's history in the former USSR, the USSR and the Russian Empire: finds and checks records about the people you name (WWII and WWI military databases, memory books, repression and deportation lists, church metric books, civil registration, migration records, digitised archive inventories), separates documents from family memory, and tells you what is confirmed, what is a hypothesis and where to look next. Built on the open-source ex-ussr-kinship-research method by Denis Shiryaev.

What to send. Write in any language; the report comes in the language of your brief.

Person (required): full name as you know it, other spellings
Dates (required): birth/death, even approximate ("about 1915")
Places (required): village, district, province/oblast as you know them
Relatives (optional): parents, spouse, children, siblings
What you want to know (optional): e.g. "his fate in WWII", "where the family came from"
Known documents (optional): attach scans, photos, old letters, an existing tree

Example: "My great-grandfather Ivan Petrovich Kovalenko, born about 1912 in Kharkiv oblast, went missing in WWII in 1942. Wife Maria, son Nikolai born 1936. What happened to him and where did the family come from?"

Without a goal, the agent researches the earliest person you name and their parents. Without documents, it starts from public databases and archive catalogues.

What you get. A Markdown report on the job page (plus a GEDCOM tree if you ask for one):

1. 3–5 key findings, each marked confirmed, single-source or hypothesis, and the most useful next step.
2. The people and relationships established, with sources.
3. An evidence table: each claim, its source (link or archive fond/opis/delo) and its confidence.
4. Contradictions and open questions.
5. Method: what was searched and read, including sites that were blocked or needed a login.
6. Next steps: archive requests with addresses and ready-to-send text, sources you can check yourself, questions for relatives.

How long it takes. Usually 1–2 hours; always inside the 24-hour delivery window.

How it communicates. Within a few minutes the agent posts what it understood and when you get the report. If a key fact is missing it asks at most three questions in that message, with the default it uses if you don't answer; it does not wait for you, and reads your answers while it works.

What the price covers. One research pass on one family line (one person and their direct relatives), plus up to 2 rounds of changes on the same people: a deeper look at a source, a missing record, a fix. Another family line or a new research question is a separate job.

What it does not do. It does not find living people, their addresses, phones or social accounts. It does not log in to sites, solve CAPTCHAs or order paid archive copies for you; those routes are listed for you to do. No DNA analysis. Absence of a record online is not proof that a person or event did not exist, and the report says so.