Finding Ancestors in the 19th Century Russian Revizskie skazki

The Russian Revizskie skazki can be a gold mine in finding information about our ancestors. “Revizskie skazki” literally means “revision tales,” though we generally refer to them as “revision lists.” While censuses only provide information on people currently alive, revision lists include “tales” about the men who died or moved away since the prior revision list.

This talk will provide an overview of the periodic revision lists and demonstrate how Hal was able to use the 1850 and 1858 ones to identify ancestors, including those who lived earlier, and even to creatively use the information to get back an extra generation or two where no records

exist. JewishGen’s Ukraine Research Division has indexed thousands of revision lists and made them available on the All-Ukraine Database. Hal will demonstrate how to use the revision lists to search the database efficiently.

Hal Bookbinder is a retired information systems director and university instructor. He has been actively researching his genealogy for more than three decades, identifying over 4,000 relatives and tracing two lines to the mid-1700s in modern Ukraine. He is a past president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Los Angeles (JGSLA) and of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS).

He and his wife, Marci, were raised in the Catskills of New York State, in the famed “Borsht Belt.” After attending New York University and a four-year stint in the US Air Force, they have lived in the Los Angeles area. In 2018, he made a journey to Ukraine, visiting various areas of the former Volhynia and Podolia in which his family lived for hundreds of years. He also spent time experiencing Kyiv during its Independence Day celebrations and even visited Chernobyl. Hal publishes a series of monthly articles on safe computing which are freely available at https://www.jgscv.org/pdf/Practicing%20Safe%20Computing%20Articles.pdf

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