Search for relatives in the archives

Where does the search for information in the archives begin?

To begin with, you need to find out from your relatives key data about the people you would like to find using the archives. Then it is worth paying attention to the study of those documents related to the family that you have. The more information you have, the easier it will be later to find and obtain the necessary archival data about a person.

Even in the case where there are no living relatives, you can recover a lot of information through RACs and archives. So, what can the RATS be useful for? There are metric books and birth certificates. The only significant clarification is that you can get such information from the RATS authorities only for the last 75 years. Everything related to older periods is contained in the archives. As a rule, most of the necessary information can be obtained through regional state archives. In some cases, there may be a need to interact with representatives of the Central State Historical Archive. For example, this may refer to data on Lviv residents who lived on the territory of the then Austro-Hungarian Empire. In addition, important archival institutions include the archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Security Service of Ukraine.

How can you interact with archives?

You can interact with archival institutions both directly and through your authorized representative. With our help, it will be much easier, since the law provides for fairly short deadlines for responding to a lawyer’s request.

In general, interaction with archives can take place in various formats, namely:

1. through mail correspondence;
2. through email communication;
3. directly on the spot.

When our team is contacted to find information about relatives, we know which archives and databases need to be consulted in each specific case in order to provide quality assistance. General databases may be relevant somewhere, and narrower ones elsewhere, for example, databases with information about people who became victims of political repression, the Holodomor, or databases of participants in the Second World War. In order to collect complete information, it is often necessary to turn not only to Ukrainian, but also to foreign resources and archives. This may be relevant in the case when a person’s family roots cover several nationalities at once. Most often, we are asked to perform a search for Polish roots and a search for Hungarian roots.

What are the “pitfalls” of such legal processes?

With the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion in Ukraine, a large part of people began to think about obtaining additional citizenship. A number of countries provide such an opportunity without losing the citizenship that a person currently has. Each state has its own procedure for obtaining citizenship, but in many cases it can be done by descent if the ancestors belonged to a certain nation.

Second citizenship can be relevant in many cases. Someone lost their home in Ukraine or their home ended up in the occupied territory. Someone wants to have more prospects in the context of professional self-realization and a wide range of rights in the EU. For example, in the case when there are distant relatives abroad, and family roots are connected with the state of their residence, this becomes an opportunity to facilitate obtaining citizenship.

At the same time, the high demand for the support service in the registration of citizenship of another state has become the basis for many fraudulent schemes to appear in this area, where clients are promised a result, take money and disappear.

In order not to encounter such fraudulent schemes, it is worth cooperating with those legal companies that work officially and conclude appropriate contracts with their clients. It is under this clear, transparent and legal system that the lawyers of the law firm “Prіkhodko&Partners” work. We offer the following services:

• Consultative assistance. This service will help you understand your objective perspectives and the algorithm of actions necessary to achieve the result.
• Legal support. It can be relevant when interacting with archival institutions and state authorities.
• Representation of interests in court. For example, it may refer to cases of establishment of legal facts.

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