Prev
Today, I completed week 6 of my 10 week SLIG course.
Every Wednesday afternoon between Sept 15 and Nov 17, I’m being presented with two 75 minute lessons on Researching Russian Genealogy Records. There’s a 30 minute break between the lessons. There’s 15 minutes after the 2nd lesson where we’re given our homework assignment. And we review the previous week’s homework 15 minutes before the first lesson.
This is a virtual course, one of the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy’s Fall Virtual 2021 offerings.
Why Am I Taking This?
It’s been a long time since I last took a course in anything, and I never expected that I’d ever be taking a genealogy course. I’ve been doing my genealogy for over 45 years, learning in the beginning via books and genealogy clubs and finding ways to use a computer (pre-internet) to record my family information in a useful form.
I gained a lot of experience over the years and have written articles and given lectures and workshops on various aspects of both standard and genetic genealogy, but I had never taken a genealogy course before. So why now?
Two of my grandparents and all four of my wife’s grandparents are from what is now the Ukraine and what was at the time the Russian Empire. All of my research on all these lines only went back to the immigrant generation and not much more.
About 2 years ago, I was contacted by Russian researcher Boris Makalsky. He saw my JewishGen Family Finder entries. He emailed me and said he found records for my wife’s Furman family in Zhitomir and asked me if I was interested in acquiring them. For a reasonable price, Boris sent me images of the original documents in Russian along with an English translation. Since then, Boris has found me over 100 documents extending one of my grandparents’ and two of my wife’s grandparents’ lines back to the early 1800’s, dispelling several family myths and adding scores of new relatives living in different towns for me to research.
Today, there are a lot of Russian records available in Russian archives. Most archives require a researcher to visit in person to do research, and you pretty well need to know Russian for that. Only a small number of those records have been photographed. A fraction of those have been made available online, and very few have been translated and indexed.
But new initiatives such such as those by Miriam Weiner and Alex Krakovsky have recently been bringing many more images of records online. I’ve been inspired by the work of Lara Diamond who writes in detail on her Lara’s Jewnealogy blog how over the past few years she has acquired Russian records and greatly extended her family research. Lara does not speak Russian, but she taught herself how to read it and became an expert in doing so.
In August, I saw Judy Russell’s blog post: SLIG 2021 registration opens Saturday. I know Judy often teaches advanced courses at SLIG, IGHR, GRIP, MAAGI, Gen-Fed and elsewhere and was curious what SLIG was offering. So I followed her link to the SLIG site and there I saw this:
It looked like just what I needed. The clincher was that Lara Diamond was one of the instructors and the specific inclusion of Jewish research.
In-Person versus Virtual
Up to a few years ago, to take a SLIG courses, you had to attend in-person in Salt Lake City for a week. The course was Monday to Friday with two morning classes, two afternoon classes, and homework each evening.
I’d have to think that’s pretty intense. Also expensive, both in terms of cost (getting to Salt Lake City and food and accommodations for at least 5 nights) and in time away from the family.
I’m not the best at learning or memorizing things. I have to practise to get familiar with anything, and a few hours each evening for homework or studying isn’t enough for my brain to absorb anything.
The pandemic has also been putting a damper on these in-person events.
So virtual sounded just right. Two classes each week and a week in-between was just perfect to get comfortable with all the material.
What about the social aspect? One nice thing about an in-person course is interacting with the instructors and socializing with the other students. Don’t we lose that?
Well not really. Over the past year and a half, the world has got quite used to using Zoom. And Zoom is the platform for the SLIG virtual courses. The instructors and most of the students have their cameras on, and we see each other and can ask questions live. We can also type into the chat area to mention something to someone or everyone without disturbing the instructor.
Then a private Facebook group was set up for the students and instructors of our course allowing us to communicate in-between classes.
In addition, a study group was set up, where those of us who wanted got together in a Zoom session on Thursday or Sunday to “study”, which more accurately could be described as “compare homework answers”.
Rather than making and spending time with some new friends for just a week in person, the virtual session is allowing our group to be together for a full 10 weeks.
There’s a lot to like about a virtual course.
The Course Itself
Joe Everett is the leading the course and has proven to be an excellent instructor and has really done a good job setting up and administering this course.
These courses are made for the experienced genealogist. The assumption is we want to become able to research Russian documents ourselves. And the course is set up to help us do that.
The only pre-course requirement was that we become familiar with and memorize the Russian alphabet. To make this easier, prior to the start of the course, Joe mailed each of us a set of business-card sized flash cards that he designed to help us work on learning what each letter looked like, sounded like, and what it transliterated to.
I spent a few weeks working on learning the alphabet. What worked well for me was singing the Russian alphabet to the tune of the ABC song, which is the same tune as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. The lines I made for the song are::
Ah beh veh geh deh yeh yo,
zheh zeh ee kah el em en oh peh,
ehr ess teh oo ef kha tseh,
cha shah shyah yeri eh you yah,
Now I know my ah beh vehs,
Next time won’t you sing with me.
(It doesn’t include ee kratkoye or the two znahks, but they’re very easy to remember on their own.)
We were also supplied with a huge 292 page Syllabus containing all the course notes. That document alone is worth the price of the course.
During the first six weeks (12 classes), we’ve been learning how to read Russian cursive (i.e. handwriting) because the majority of documents are hand-written. The tricky part is interpreting and adapting to the differences in people’s penmanship. We learned the minimum (thank goodness) that we needed to know about Russian grammar. We learned the basics about Russian history and how the Russian Empire boundaries changed over time. We learned about the various records available (Metrical, Civil Registration, Revision Lists and the 1897 Census, Military and other) and the various methods of finding and obtaining them.
Heather Stewart, Ellie Vance and Lara helped Joe out as instructor for half the classes.
The goal here is not for us to learn Russian. The goal is for us is to be able to find Russian records for the surnames and places we are interested in, and to be able to extract the information we want from those records. We are given the knowledge and tools we need to do so, which includes Google translate, transliteration aids and a Russian Genealogical Word List.
There are about 16 people taking the course. Most of them are members of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) so I assume many are taking the course to help them to do client work. My needs are personal.
Our last homework was to extract the genealogical information from a number of Russian records. I spent about 20 hours last week working on the assignment and reviewing the methodology in detail. That is exactly what I wanted to learn from this course.
Still To Come
There’s 4 more weeks left. Our 2nd lesson today was titled “Putting the Pieces Together, Part I”. I’m still looking forward to: Research in Ukraine; Jewish Genealogy Research; Where are the Records? Accessing Archival Records; Discovering the Place of Origin and Family Context; and Locating the Ancestral Home using Maps and Gazetteers.
We’ll end with “Putting the Pieces Together, Part 2” and a final homework assignment, which I hope will be to find records of my own family.
I’m really enjoying this course, and I’m excited about how it will help my genealogical research.
RSS
Trackback
Permalink