About the Talk:

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 emigrated?

About the speaker:

Alan Shuchat is a retired professor of mathematics at Wellesley College. He has researched his family’s history for several decades and traced branches back to around 1800.