Village of Khutor in Orlovsky District, Oryol Oblast
Hi everyone,
I require some help. I am about to start family research in Russia and need some guidance as I am really starting from scratch.
I am looking into my father-in-law's family, but we don't have much information.
Information
- The trail starts with Alexandra, supposedly born in the village of Khutor in Orlovsky District, Oryol Oblast.
- Possibly born Oct 1922 give or take
- Father's name was Ivan - not sure if this is accurate
- From what we know she also had a sister - She was sent to Ukraine
- Alexsandra was sent to Georgia as a child between 1925-1927 with a bucket of gold
- The children were split to increase the odds of survival. But for them to be sent away and with money, the family must have had some resources
- We know that the family ended up in the Urals afterwards and once sent someone to check on Alexandra in Georgia
- We have done a DNA test, but the connections are too far removed with no ancestry tree to help
Would anyone know what data base I can use to search archives. I am wondering if I can find some birth records from the church or from a government administration? Would anyone know what church or admin in particular I should be looking at?
I appreiacte your help!
Matthias
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Hello Matthias,
this is unfortunately not enough to go by for several reasons
- name of the village very generic and could be only a part of it, khutor is small settlement with a few houses, often populated by one family and not large enough to be called a village. Usually they'd have something else in the name, for example family or the owner last name, like Khutor Popova. There were at least a couple of places name just Khutor around Orel, but could be many more.
- Orel area suffered a lot in WW2 including loss of many archives, so very few metric books are available even if you know exactly the settlement name and years (in my case for example Karachev, 1876-1890)
- Areas changed a lot in last 200 years and some of the settlements that belonged to Orel at some point could be a part of neighbouring territories like Bryansk, Kursk or Kaluga for example meaning the documents could be in any of these archives. If indeed in Orel district though, i.e. area around Orel itself, it is more like to always have been a part of Orel area though.
- 1922 is the time right after revolution and at the end of civil war with large part of the country still in chaos and birth record ownership being transferred from church to state, the entry may have been not there from the very start or lost and could have been restored (and maybe elsewhere) in 1930s or 40s.
- considering the family tales (which are often quite wrong though) it may have been wealthy or noble, both of which could be a reason to be sent to Siberia or executed after all belonging were taken away. Due to this families changed their last names, destroyed any documents linking them to ancestors and would not speak of them even to family. It wasn't so life-threatening after middle of 1950s, but still until 90s it was better to have originated from "working class family".
There is a state-owned database of any records after 1924, but making any requests to it would require more specific information, documents proving relation to the person (all birth and death certificates throughout the chain and marriage certificates where a last name was changed) and possibly physical presence in Russia or a Russian consulate and a lot of waiting.
I'd say chances of finding something would be only if the last name you are looking for is very uncommon or if you somehow manage to locate a document from before 1917 from within the family. Start with searching in Russian for your last name in https://catalog.gaorel.ru/ and see what comes up
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Hi @IgorYa ,
Thank you very much for the detailed information, I will use it to guide my search. Unfortuantly we dont have a last name to start with, so I am now starting by going through Georgian archives to see what they have on her first to see if it will help when I search in Russia. As for the village, in her passport it was only written Khutor, so not much to go by there. I was also skeptical with the family story as I know sometimes they can change over time, but some of the Gold was still around until 1990, that was kept by my father-in law. Eventually it was just melted down for jewlery.
Matthias
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I don't quite understand how you have the passport but not the last name, if there is no maiden name there you'd need to look up the marriage record that contains it. Also for DNA, try to upload test results to https://genotek.eu/ it's a company where a lot of people that live in Russia do their tests now and sometimes do not upload their results to other systems, just make sure you enable private messaging in the profile, it's off by default and potential matches won't be able to contact you unless you explicitly allow this.
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