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ARCHIVE DATABASE


KEY TO RUSSIAN TERMS FOR GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH

Archival notations:
fond, fondy or fonds (collection, collections; record group[s])
opis, opisi (inventory, inventories, subdivisions of the collection)
delo, dela (file, files)
list, listy (folio, folios)

Duma (a representative council in Russia; Russian legislature)
Evrei (Jew)
Evreiskaya Kladbisha (Jewish cemetery)
Evreiskaya sinagoga (Jewish synagogue)
Gubernskaya kazennaya palata
(provincial or guberniya Office of the Treasury which compiled census lists)

Metricheskie knigi (metrical books/registers of births, deaths, marriages
                           and divorces)
Molitvennaya doma (prayer house)
Petty Bourgeois
(a Russian register class that united the inhabitants of villages, towns and cities where the capital was less than 1,000 rubles – generally merchants)

Podatnye spiski (poll-tax lists)
Posemeinyi spisok (family register)
Putevoditeli (published archival guides to fonds and collections)
Revizskie skazki (poll-tax census)

Soslovie (social estate):
meshchanstvo (petty townspeople)
kupechnestvo (merchant)
remeslennik (artisan, often included with the meshchanstvo)
pochetnoe grazhanstvo (honorary citizen)
zemledelets (agriculturalist)

ZAGS Archive or Department of ZAGS
(Otdel Zapisi Aktov Grazhdanskogo Sostoyaniya)
Location of vital record registration (previous 100 years) – usually in the local town hall.

PATRONYMIC AND MATRONYMIC NAMING PATTERNS
Personal documents in the Cyrillic (Russian) language are presented in the following sequence: first name - patronymic - surname. Patronymic is indicated by a suffix of "ovich" or "evich" in cases where the first name belongs to a male; and "ovna" or"evna" when the first name belongs to a female.

For example, an entry for Baruch Abramovich Rabinovich refers to Baruch Rabinovich, son of Abram and an entry for Rivka Abramovna Rabinovich refers to Rivka Rabinovich, daughter of Abram.

Also, some Jewish surnames sound like a patronymic, for instance: Rabinovich, Abramovich, Semenovich. In these cases, we must pay close attention to the name sequence in order to understand which is the patronymic name.

Further, -ov is a typical suffix of a Russian surname (example: Odnopozov).


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