Heritage AIFree, no registration
What to ask your relatives
Twelve questions for older relatives. A patronymic, a maiden name or the name of a village often gives more than weeks of searching databases. Write each answer down at once, even an approximate one: "somewhere near Tambov, I think".
The product is currently available in Russian for families in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Twelve questions
Print this list or keep it on your phone.
- What were the full names of your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, with patronymics?
- What maiden names did your grandmothers and great-grandmothers have?
- In which village or town was each of them born? What was it called before, which district or uyezd was it in?
- When and where did the family move? Why did it leave the earlier place?
- How was the surname spelt before? Was it ever changed: at marriage, on moving, in documents?
- Did the ancestors have brothers and sisters? What were their names, where did they live later?
- Who served in the army or fought? Where, in which years, were there awards?
- What did the ancestors do for a living, where did they study?
- Where are your relatives buried? Are there photos of the gravestones with dates?
- Which documents and photographs are left at home: certificates, military IDs, work record books, letters?
- Which other relatives may remember more, and how can they be reached?
- Which family stories did you hear as a child? Which do you remember most exactly?
Relatives live far away?
In the app you can send a question about a person by link: open the ancestor's card in the tree and use Ask relatives. The relative answers without registering, and the answer reaches the tree only after you check it.
Ask while there is someone to ask
Start with one relative and one question.
Sources: Method based on the open project ex-ussr-kinship-research, (c) 2026 Denis Shiryaev, MIT licence