On December 26, 2020, the Main Archives of Moscow (Glavarkhiv) launched the free online service “My Family”. This resource provides remote access to documents related to family and birth history. Since its launch, the volume of digitized documents on the service has exceeded 13.5 million pages.
Residents of any region of the country can now study the origins of several generations of citizens living in Moscow and the Moscow province. The “Archive Search” platform, which uses neural networks, allows you to quickly find information in many parish records, confessions, and audit stories.
The head of the Moscow Archives, Yaroslav Onopenko, said the earliest documents on the online service date from 1694 and contain information about all faiths. Now, information about family history is available to students and their parents through the educational platform “Moscow Electronic School”.
The platform contains data not only for Moscow, but also for 20 other regions of the country. Onopenko noted the increase in the number of My Family users, emphasizing that the platform is actively introducing artificial vision technology for genealogical searches. He affirmed that this “living spiritual heritage” must not only be respected but also preserved, consolidated and developed.
“Our goal is to transfer as many documents online as possible, to open as many sources as possible to study family relationships. But a very important task remains to preserve the originals of the most valuable documents. This is our common obligation towards present and future generations”, Onopenko emphasized.
Users have access to profiles of Orthodox, Catholics, Lutherans, Muslims, Jews and Old Believers living in Moscow and the Moscow Oblast. This service includes parish books, audit stories, confessions and marriage search materials.
Although handled with care, any storage media needs to be restored. Every year, the Preservation Laboratory of the Main Archives restores more than 110 thousand unique sheets of documents for further use for the benefit of the people of the city and the country.
Working with handwritten documents that have passed through time is done in a targeted manner. For each such material, an individual plan for restoration and conservation activities is developed, which requires a special approach. Skilled restoration artists will hand restore pages with wrinkles, tears, and faded text, bringing them back to usability.
This restoration work not only restores documents but also helps users discover new facts, find ancestral names, and recreate unknown pages of family history. Since this year, the Yandex company has become a partner of Main Archive, which has been engaged in work on heritage preservation and restoration of historical documents used in the joint project “Search in the Archives”.
How modern technologies and digitalization have influenced the operation of the main storage unit, how and what the robotic storage complex works projects carried out by Main Archive — “Moscow Evening” talked about this and many other things with Yaroslav Onopenko.
