Heritage AIYandex Archive: How to Search for Ancestors by Surname Online
Part of the archive records can now be searched by surname from home. Yandex Archive reads even handwritten church books. Here is how to use it and where its limit lies.
Also in Russian: the original article
In this article· 3 sections
Not long ago, finding old documents meant travelling to an archive. Now part of them can be searched by surname from home, in Yandex Archive (Yandex Arkhiv).
It is an aggregator of digitised archive materials: metric books (metricheskie knigi, parish birth, marriage and death registers), revision lists (revizskie skazki, tax censuses of 1719–1858), censuses and service records (posluzhnye spiski). Its main feature is that the search can recognise handwritten text. It finds a surname directly in old entries that you would otherwise have to leaf through page by page.
How to use Yandex Archive to search for ancestors by surname
Enter the surname, preferably together with a place and an approximate period. The service shows documents where it appears. Then you open the scan itself and read the whole entry, often with a whole family beside it.
What to keep in mind
Handwriting recognition is powerful but not perfect. On difficult handwriting and faded entries it makes mistakes. So try different spellings of the surname and check against the scan itself instead of trusting the automatic search blindly.
Know the limit
Not the whole country and not all years are available online yet. If the service has no documents for your place, that is not a dead end. The road simply continues to a regional archive. Requests to Russian archives are written in Russian. Heritage AI prepares the letter text for you.
Still, it is worth starting here: sometimes the first generation of ancestors is found in five minutes. Save the scans you find at once, with a caption: who, where, which year. In Heritage AI they can be attached to the person in the tree. Not sure where to begin? The first research plan is free: /en.
Questions and answers
- What is Yandex Archive?
- An aggregator of digitised archive materials: metric books, revision lists, censuses and service records. Its search can recognise handwritten text.
- How do I search for an ancestor in Yandex Archive?
- Enter the surname, preferably with a place and an approximate period. Then open the scan and read the full entry. Try different spellings, because handwriting recognition can make mistakes.
- What if my place is not in Yandex Archive?
- Not all regions and years are online yet. If your place is missing, the next step is a regional archive. Requests to Russian archives are written in Russian.
Next step
Start with a free research plan
Tell Heritage AI where your family came from and get a plan for where to look first. It shows the route; it does not promise to find a record. The product is currently available in Russian for families in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.