Russia (bbabo.net), - Many would like to find out who their ancestors were, how they ended up in Siberia. But where to start, where to go? Novosibirsk historian, culturologist Anna Dinelt spoke about her experience in compiling a family tree and searching for great-great-grandmothers.
Anna, how can I explain that now many have begun to look for their ancestors?
Anna Dinelt: First of all, the development of technology. A lot of Internet resources have appeared that help to find relatives. For example, "All-Russian genealogical tree". There are experts out there who you can ask for advice.
As for interest, the history of Russia is a constant change, a turning point - a revolution, when people abandoned their origin of their own free will or "it was necessary" to survive. Shocks led to the loss of related threads. The 20th century is often a big gap in family history. In Soviet times, it was impossible to talk about many things. Not all of the older generation likes to talk about the war, about their youth.
You are probably thinking: oh, this is so boring, you have to sit in the archives. Not at all. You can pretend to be a detective and start investigating the origin of your family. You will need knowledge of psychology, somewhere you need to reconstruct the pedigree lines, because you can only guess about something. I am interested in how relations between men and women evolved against the backdrop of historical events. Have you thought about the fact that we - now living women - are only the third working generation? Until the beginning of the 20th century, a woman was a wife, mother, mistress and that was all.
How did you get the desire to know everything about your ancestors?
Anna Dinelt: I have been interested in history, culture, the past of the country and its people for a long time. I am close to the phrase of the historian Mark Blok that history is the life of people in time. Nowhere better can you learn about people in time than in your own family. This is the first moment.
Second: there were many legends and even mysteries in the family that interested me. For example, the heroic past of my great-grandmother, her sports and love successes. We also have a very large, but not systematized photo archive.
But there is also a third point. The surname Dinelt is special, it distinguished me among my classmates. If we ask Russian Germans of my generation if they have experienced what is today called "bullying", many will answer yes. So I got it, they teased me at school. When I asked my dad where my last name came from, he couldn't tell me anything. What are the Germans, where are they from, what did they do? Zero information. I know that dad at one time wanted to change his last name, because he had problems because of it. My grandfather said that "he will not learn the language of the enemy." My great-grandfather volunteered for the front, and he was returned to the Trudarmia because of "signs of a German surname."
It was a secret in the family. And it was important for me to reveal it, perhaps in order to better understand myself. It took five years.
Where to start looking?
Anna Dinelt:The best thing a person can do is to start interviewing the next of kin. You will be surprised how differently brothers and sisters see their family history.
The next step is a request to the archives. This requires information: where and when your ancestor was born. Thanks to digitalization, many archives are available online, which makes the task easier.
Archives work on a written request, to which they are obliged to respond within thirty days. Most often, there is a form on the website of the department and it is advisable to indicate in it all the information that you have. This will make searching easier. Be sure to say that you are conducting genealogical research, that you have an interest in your great-grandfather, who was born, say, in 1855 in the village of Krasnoe.
The archives store data on birth, wedding, death. In pre-revolutionary metric data, they indicate who the parents were, and everything is written - that this is a non-commissioned officer of the Pskov regiment, godparents are indicated, that is, godchildren. There are books of the nobility for individual provinces, books indicating merchants and philistines. Sometimes information pops up about some lawsuits or stories where a person appears as a plaintiff or defendant. For example, they did not divide the land, and a document about this can also be found on the archive website. A request to the archive is paid, it is different everywhere, but the approximate cost is five hundred rubles.
In order not to sit in the archive yourself, there is a service when an archivist works with the request. This is a significant help. Registers of births are systematized, for example, by the names of churches. How many churches are there in a big city?
Significantly facilitated the search for resources related to the Great Patriotic War. There is a site "Feat of the People", where you can trace the path of the hero. According to award documents, you can also find a person.
Well, if the photos are preserved. Recently, I posted a photo of my great-grandfather on social networks, he has the St. George Cross on his chest. A man approached me and asked: "Did you ask for information on the cross?" I immediately made a request to the Russian State Military Historical Archive.What was the most surprising thing you found for yourself?
Anna Dinelt: I unearthed that my German ancestors were noblemen. After five years of searching and even not understanding in which region and what to look for, I prepared a request to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, since my great-grandfather was resettled in the Kemerovo region. A request to the Ministry of Internal Affairs is always difficult. To get information about my great-grandfather, I needed three notarized birth certificates, I had to prove that I was his great-granddaughter.
Having passed this way, I received a case on thirty sheets. And I found out that my great-grandfather Mikhail Karlovich Dinelt went to the front, saying that his homeland was here, and he would defend it. Mikhail abandoned his relatives in Germany, tried his best to hide his German origin, and not only him. The Dinelt family was noble. Mikhail was born in Tula, on the estate of his grandfather Ludwig Dinelt, who was a hereditary nobleman. I found German metrics from 1865, when he entered the territory of the Russian Empire from Prussia, and he is listed there as a coal miner. So, the title was already given to him in Russia. He also had an estate in the Tula province, the lands of which he partially sold for the construction of the railway.
It is known that in the Tula estate of the princes Bobrinsky, illegitimate children of Empress Catherine II and her favorite Grigory Orlov, Germans were brought en masse, most likely to work in the opened coal deposits. Perhaps this is how my ancestor from Germany arrived in Russia.
And then the grandfather's family ended up in Osinniki, Kemerovo Region, famous for its coal mines. They were sent there from Azerbaijan. When my grandfather was sixteen or seventeen years old, he fled from Osinniki to Novosibirsk. Here he studied and stood at the origins of the telephone installation of the city.
So that you won't be forgotten
Anna Dinelt: They say if you don't forget your ancestors, then you won't be forgotten either. This is proved by the story of the great-grandmother's sister. On the one hand - sad, on the other - very light.There were two sisters - Praskovya and Maria. Praskovya, my great-grandmother, got married and had three children. And Maria never married because she limped, and at that time there was little chance of finding a husband for a woman with physical disabilities. But history decreed that my great-grandmother died at 24. The youngest of her children was then one and a half years old. Maria replaced their mother. She died over sixty years ago, but our family still says "thank you" to her. Light from a person can go for a very long time, even if he did not leave behind descendants.
Where to look?
The State Archives of the Novosibirsk Region: tel.: (383) 223-53-01, 238-61-30, email. address: ganso@nso.ru, website: https://archive.nso.ruPortal "Archives of Russia": https://rusarchives.ru
All-Russian genealogical tree: https://moe-nasledie.ru
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