How do I find records from Tambov, Russia?
I am trying to find my 2nd great grandparents who I am not able to do ordinances for yet. All i have are their names, but I'm not even sure that they are right. How do I begin trying to find their information. They were born in Russia and I think they died there too.
Answers
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What time period? We have some records for this region available on FamilySearch. Are you referring to the state/province, county or city of Tambov?
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between 1860-1900. The county tambov.
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actually, I'm not sure it may be the state/province. probably the largest area there is would be best because I'm not sure exactly where they came from in Tambov
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Okay, perfect. Did these people immigrate to the United States? If so, I would recommend doing a bit more research in the United States first to see if you can narrow down the town. Most Russian records have not been indexed, so it requires page by page searching through the records. Knowing the town helps decrease the volume of page by page searches
You might try checking the Tracing Immigrant Origins page on the wiki https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Tracing_Immigrant_Origins to learn more about what records you could look in to find the name of the hometown. Once you figure that out, we can see about records! We have a small amount of records (see this catalog link https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/results?count=20&placeId=139890&query=%2Bplace%3A%22Russia%2C%20Tambov%22 - subdivided further into counties and then towns)
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the city/district is michurinsk. I know basically nothing about russian stuff, I'm not sure if city and district are the same. I'm not sure what one it is if they are different. On my tree Mike pope's birthplace is listed as krasivoye, michurinsk, tambov, russia. I'm looking for his parents and I don't know where to find them, so I'm just starting where Mike was born.
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Great, it sounds like you already have a possibility of a hometown. Jurisdictions in the Russian Empire can be a bit complicated, so I like to think of it this way. America is divided up into fifty states. Those states are further subdivided into counties. The same goes for the Russian Empire. It was divided up into states/provinces called guberni (gubernia is the singular form, in modern day Russia this is called the oblast). Each gubernia was then further divided into counties/districts called uyezdi, (uyezd is the singular form, in modern day Russia, they refer to these as a rayon). Within that county or district (uyezd or rayon) are the individual towns. It's usually listed from smallest first up to the largest level of jurisdiction. So for your ancestor's birth place, Krasivoye would be the name of the town (which by the way means "beautiful" in Russian!), and Michurinsk is the rayon, while Tambov is the next level up of jurisdiction. Does that make sense?
The town written in Russian is красивое, and here is a link to a Wikipedia page about the town (in Russian, but if you are using Google Chrome, you can right click, press translate to English and then it will translate it for you) - it's pretty tiny in 2010, only 611 people lived there.
ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Красивое_(Тамбовская_область)
I don't know if you are interested, but here's a short little old video about the town in 1962: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnsJ61-4yHo
Here's another link that gives some information about the town (again, in Russian, but use Google Chrome to translate) https://tambovgrad.ru/Tambovskaya-oblast/271-Krasivoe-selo.html
Unfortunately it's not looking like we have records at the Family History Library for this area. According to the Spiski Gazetteer (Krasivoye is entry number 455 on this link: http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/16871-vyp-42-tambovskaya-guberniya-po-svedeniyam-1862-goda-1866#mode/inspect/page/85/zoom/6), it was in the Tambov uyezd (county/district) and we only have records for the town of Tambov within the Tambov uyezd. But I did find this link that says there are revision list records (taxation records that look similar to a a census record) for the year of 1816. https://geneal.ru/modules/archiv/fonds.php?np=271.
Here is the link to the archives website if you would like to contact them. http://www.gato.tomica.ru/ They probably have more resources available there for the town if you were to contact them.
The site doesn't have an English option, but again, you can use Chrome to translate and hopefully navigate it a bit better. From what I can see (I just took a brief look at the site, they might not have much available online - you may have to contact the archive directly and fees for research and record look ups will probably apply).
Let me know if you have further questions or need help contacting the archive or navigating their site. I know this is a lot of information all at once, but I hope it's helpful to you.
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