Find genealogy databases and archives for a country (or region), period and kind of records — 114 sources across Russia and the former USSR, the Caucasus and Central Asia, Eastern, Western and Northern Europe, Germany, the British Isles, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, each with what it holds and how to search it well.

Everything about one source from the catalogue (by id from find_sources): coverage, access, search tips.

Ready search links (open them in a browser) in the sources that take a search URL — FamilySearch, Internet Archive full text, Find a Grave, Arolsen, Geneteka, Open List and others — for a name, with the name's variants.

Which archives now hold the records (parish registers, revision lists, confession lists, civil records) of a province of the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Poland, Galicia, Bukovina, East Prussia, the Baltics or the Caucasus — borders moved, so this is often not the archive of today's region. Also works from a modern region back to the historical provinces it was part of.

Search an open database live and get the matching records back (title, date, place, link, snippet). Sends the query to that one site only. Run it for each name form from name_variants; for FamilySearch, Geneteka, Find a Grave and other sites without an open API use search_links.

Look a place up in Wikidata: what administrative units it was part of (with years where known), coordinates and the Wikipedia article — a first step to the uezd, province and parish of a village. Sends the name to Wikidata.

A step-by-step research plan for a country and period: which records exist, which guides to read and which sources to search, in order (free and country-specific first).

All the forms a name can take in records (and its Daitch–Mokotoff Soundex codes): spelling variants, pre-1918 orthography, male/female surname forms (Колодин/Колодина, Kowalski/Kowalska, Kazlauskas/Kazlauskienė), transliterations (passport, BGN, German, French, Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Ukrainian, scholarly) and given-name equivalents across languages (Иван = Іоаннъ = Jan = Johann = Juan).

A date as people write it ('около 1899', 'between 1900 and 1905', '9 de octubre de 1899', '9.10.1899') → ISO or GEDCOM ('ABT 1899', 'BET 1900 AND 1905', '9 OCT 1899', '1899-10-09').

Convert between calendars of old records: Julian (old style; Russia until February 1918: +10 days in the 1600s, +11 in the 1700s, +12 in the 1800s, +13 in 1900–1918), Gregorian, Hebrew (Jewish registers, tombstones) and the French Republican calendar (1792–1805).

The date of a church feast or fast in a given year (Julian and Gregorian), including movable feasts counted from Easter. Records and family stories often date events by feasts: «родился на Покров», «венчались после Петрова поста».

Church Slavonic numerals in old registers and church books: ҂аѡ҃п = 1880, ѳі = 19 (11–19 are written units first). Reads letters, writes a number, or finds every numeral marked with a titlo in a text.

Which relationships a DNA match fits, from the amount of shared DNA (Shared cM Project 4.0 ranges), closest first. Several always fit: use documents (and the kinship tool) to decide.

The birth-year range implied by an age in a record (census, confession list, death record), exact and loose.

What B is to A, named in Russian, English and Romanian (троюродный брат / second cousin / văr de gradul 2, двоюродный дед / great-uncle), with the expected share of DNA.

Is the person in a found record ours? Compares fact by fact (with name variants and Julian/rounded-age tolerance) and gives a verdict: confirmed (2+ independent facts beyond the name), probable, insufficient, conflict or different_person.

Audit a family tree from any program (GEDCOM) for impossible facts (born after the mother's death, a parent under 14, death before birth), possible duplicates and gaps (no sources, no dates, people cut off from the tree) — a to-do list for the next search.

A draft letter to a registry office or an archive (Russian ZAGS, state, military and FSB archives; any archive in English, Spanish or Portuguese), with what to attach. Gaps are left in [brackets]. The user sends it — not the tool.

How to read and find a kind of record: parish registers, confession lists, revision lists, household books, WWI and WWII records, repression files, passenger lists, censuses, European civil registration, Latin America, evaluating evidence — in English, Russian, Ukrainian, and partly Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, German. Without a topic — the list.

Old Russian terms from records — estates, kinship by marriage (шурин, деверь, золовка), archive citation (фонд, опись, дело, лист), administrative units, pre-1918 letters — explained.

Read the research project kept between conversations — or a family's gene-archive site folder, or the user's own tree in a GEDCOM file: summary (people, open leads, recent searches, problems), one record with its family and sources, a text search, the full search log, or the tree checks. Start every session on an existing project with what='summary'.

Add or change a person, family, source or research lead in the project. Every change of an existing record is logged with the old and new value, the reason and the documents. Save the source first, then cite its S-id. In a gene-archive site folder the change goes through gene apply: refused if it adds an error, logged, committed to git under the owner's name, and the site is rebuilt. In a .ged file only the changed lines are rewritten (everything else in the file stays as it was), a copy is kept, and gedcom_changes shows the lines. Ask the user before writing into their archive or tree.

Write a line in the project's research log, so nobody searches the same place twice. Log negative results.

Export the project as GEDCOM 5.5.1 (for MyHeritage, Ancestry, Gramps, Geni…) next to the project file, or start a new project from a GEDCOM exported by another program.