02:00pm - 04:00pm  Life Under the Tsars: Registration, Residence, and Exit Routes

Speaker: Alan Shuchat  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 ...