Genealogy research toolkit

Audit a family tree from any program (GEDCOM) for impossible facts (born after the mother's death, a parent under 14, death before birth), possible duplicates and gaps (no sources, no dates, people cut off from the tree) — a to-do list for the next search.

The birth-year range implied by an age in a record (census, confession list, death record), exact and loose.

Is the person in a found record ours? Compares fact by fact (with name variants and Julian/rounded-age tolerance) and gives a verdict: confirmed (2+ independent facts beyond the name), probable, insufficient, conflict or different_person.

Convert between calendars of old records: Julian (old style; Russia until February 1918: +10 days in the 1600s, +11 in the 1700s, +12 in the 1800s, +13 in 1900–1918), Gregorian, Hebrew (Jewish registers, tombstones) and the French Republican calendar (1792–1805).

Church Slavonic numerals in old registers and church books: ҂аѡ҃п = 1880, ѳі = 19 (11–19 are written units first). Reads letters, writes a number, or finds every numeral marked with a titlo in a text.

Which relationships a DNA match fits, from the amount of shared DNA (Shared cM Project 4.0 ranges), closest first. Several always fit: use documents (and the kinship tool) to decide.

A draft letter to a registry office or an archive (Russian ZAGS, state, military and FSB archives; any archive in English, Spanish or Portuguese), with what to attach. Gaps are left in [brackets]. The user sends it — not the tool.

A birth year estimated from relatives (eldest child −27, spouse and siblings ±8, parents +18…+45, first marriage at about 22) and ages in records: a GEDCOM date (BET … AND … or ABT …), the most likely year and a ready explanation to save with it. Also checks the ages against each other: 7 in 1850 and 22 in 1882 cannot be one person — likely two namesakes.

The date of a church feast or fast in a given year (Julian and Gregorian), including movable feasts counted from Easter. Records and family stories often date events by feasts: «родился на Покров», «венчались после Петрова поста».

A plan for reading unindexed FamilySearch films page by page for a parish, years and parts: which films to read in which order, thumbnails to find the book (title pages, end-of-year summaries naming the church) and full frames only for the record pages, a rough request budget split into sessions under the site's variable rate limit (pause at least an hour after HTTP 429, no parallel sessions), and what to log with project_coverage.

Find genealogy databases and archives for a country (or region), period and kind of records — 171 sources across Russia and the former USSR, the Caucasus and Central Asia, Eastern, Western and Northern Europe, Germany, the British Isles, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, each with what it holds and how to search it well.

Old Russian terms from records — estates, kinship by marriage (шурин, деверь, золовка), archive citation (фонд, опись, дело, лист), administrative units, pre-1918 letters — explained.

What B is to A, named in Russian, English and Romanian (троюродный брат / second cousin / văr de gradul 2, двоюродный дед / great-uncle), with the expected share of DNA.

All the forms a name can take in records (and its Daitch–Mokotoff Soundex codes): spelling variants, pre-1918 orthography, male/female surname forms (Колодин/Колодина, Kowalski/Kowalska, Kazlauskas/Kazlauskienė), transliterations (passport, BGN, German, French, Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Ukrainian, scholarly) and given-name equivalents across languages (Иван = Іоаннъ = Jan = Johann = Juan). Moldovan and Bessarabian surnames: Romanian and Russian renderings (Călugăreanu = Калугарян = Калугаряну = Кэлугэряну, Pleș = Плешъ = Плешу), a second surname flagged («Мокану, он же Плеш»), clerk and recognition distortions as hints, and look-alikes that are another family.

A date as people write it ('около 1899', 'between 1900 and 1905', '9 de octubre de 1899', '9.10.1899') → ISO or GEDCOM ('ABT 1899', 'BET 1900 AND 1905', '9 OCT 1899', '1899-10-09').

A working hypothesis about a parent from a patronymic: the father's given name it implies (Петрович → Пётр, Ильич → Илья), each candidate ranked by name, surname, village and age with the arguments for and against (a grandson named after him, godparents and sureties of his surname, his household listing a child of this name), a warning for a namesake from another village, and the record that would settle it. Always a hypothesis — save it as an open lead or 'probably', never as a link in the tree.

Look a place up in Wikidata: what administrative units it was part of (with years where known), coordinates and the Wikipedia article — a first step to the uezd, province and parish of a village — and the church its books were kept in, where that attachment is known. Sends the name to Wikidata.

A step-by-step research plan for a country and period: which records exist, which guides to read and which sources to search, in order (free and country-specific first).

What has already been read in the registers: parish → year → part → film and frames → status (complete, partial up to No. …, not found). Mark each book when you finish it, and ask what is still unread for these villages and years before opening a film — so nobody reads the same frames twice. Kept with the project (for a .ged file in the file next to it; for a gene-archive site in a file of this server, read together with the site's own coverage).

Review source references for individual birth/death/burial/residence and marriage events, read-only. Uses the project root (or root_person_id), follows ancestors up to 10 generations and prioritizes closer ones. Distinguishes missing/broken references, missing locators and reference presence. A person's general sources do not prove every event; even a located citation still needs inspection. Does not verify parentage or change data.

Write a line in the project's research log, so nobody searches the same place twice. Log negative results. Use source_id/lead_id to track the source checklist; unavailable is not no hits.

Configure this project's policy only (dry_run by default; save within the owner's authorization). Keys: max_active_questions (default 3), allow_archive_requests (default true; drafts only), allow_living_research (default false), owner_tasks [{id, next, due (ISO date), status}]. Read policy, resources and waiting questions with project_view what='workflow'. A custom archive folder without site.json stays read-only; its policy is stored under GENEALOGY_MCP_HOME/policies, never in that folder.

Add or change a person, family, source or research lead in the project. Every change of an existing record is logged with the old and new value, the reason and the documents. Save the source first, then cite its S-id. In a gene-archive site folder the change goes through `gene apply`: refused if it adds an error, logged, committed to git under the owner's name, and the site is rebuilt. In a .ged file only the changed lines are rewritten (everything else in the file stays as it was), a copy is kept, and gedcom_changes shows the lines. Ask the user before writing into their archive or tree.

Export the project as GEDCOM 5.5.1 (for MyHeritage, Ancestry, Gramps, Geni…) next to the project file, or start a new project from a GEDCOM exported by another program.

Read the research project kept between conversations — or a family's gene-archive site folder, or the user's own tree in a GEDCOM file: summary (people, open leads, recent searches, problems), one record with its family and sources, a text search, the full search log, or the tree checks. Start every session on an existing project with what='summary'.

How to read and find a kind of record: parish registers, confession lists, revision lists, household books, WWI and WWII records, repression files, passenger lists, censuses, European civil registration, Latin America, evaluating evidence — in English, Russian, Ukrainian, and partly Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, German. Without a topic — the list.

Find OCR excerpts inside one Gallica book using its ARK/document_id from search_online source='gallica'. Returns scan sequence numbers and stable page URLs, not verified facts or printed page numbers. Sends the query only to Gallica's documented ContentSearch API. start is a zero-based result offset. Access errors are incomplete checks, never no hits; no OCR hit does not prove absence from the scans.

Ready search links (open them in a browser) in the sources that take a search URL — FamilySearch, Internet Archive full text, Find a Grave, Arolsen, Geneteka, Open List and others — for a name, with the name's variants.

Search an open database live and get the matching records back (title, date, place, link, snippet). Sends the query to that one site only. Run it for each name form from name_variants; for FamilySearch, Geneteka, Find a Grave and other sites without an open API use search_links.

Everything about one source from the catalogue (by id from find_sources): coverage, access, search tips.

Which archives now hold the records (parish registers, revision lists, confession lists, civil records) of a province of the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Poland, Galicia, Bukovina, East Prussia, the Baltics or the Caucasus — borders moved, so this is often not the archive of today's region. Also works from a modern region back to the historical provinces it was part of. With a year, says whose land it was then (southern Bessarabia — Cahul, Ismail, Bolgrad — was Moldavian/Romanian in 1857–1878, all Bessarabia Romanian in 1918–1940 and 1941–1944); with a village, which church kept its books (a village without a church was recorded in a neighbouring one).