Records from the Russian Empire show that people were often registered as citizens of one town but lived in another. What was the system of registration and residence permits under the tsars and later in the Soviet Union? How were people divided into social estates? How did our ancestors obtain steamship tickets and travel from their shtetls to the steamship ports? How can these records and historical knowledge help us trace our families before they arrived here?

 

Alan Shuchat is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Wellesley College. He has researched his family’s history for several decades and traced branches back to around 1800. He lectured on Jewish agricultural colonies in the Russian Empire at the 2013 IAJGS conference in Boston. He is a member of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston, where he coordinates the Ukraine Special Interest Group and is an instructor in the annual genealogy course.