Search for personal files

Sometimes our customers would like not just to get data about some biographical fact in the life of a relative, but to delve into family history and find documents showing a whole period of the life of a person important to them. This is often quite a difficult task, as sources of this kind may simply not exist in some cases.

You can find more data about a person if he/she “left a trace” about himself/herself in the form of personal files in organizations and structures of various kinds. We present below a list of the most common types of such documents.

• Personnel file of the Soviet officer is a really important source, which can contain information about officer’s military history sheet, his/her awards, ranks, and movements in connection with his/her service. It is also often possible to see a photo of a person there. It is possible to get access to them only to the relatives of the officer (if there are documents of kinship) or to a third person by power of attorney from relatives.
• Personnel file from a place of employment is a rather fuzzy category, since not every place of work of your ancestor will be relevant and effective for such a search. In our practice, there have been cases of finding personal files of an employee of the Kiev Soviet police, a research scientist of the research institute, etc. If your relative held a high enough position, the chances of finding documents are greater. If we are talking about working professions, for example, a turner at a factory in the 1930s, there is very little chance of finding something, since personnel documents (autobiography, questionnaire, etc.) are stored for 75 years under the legislation. Here it is also worth bearing in mind that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of the enterprises were liquidated and their personnel records may have been lost/destroyed.
• Criminal case of a repressed person is one of the most psychologically difficult types of documents to study, since it may contain more than just interrogation protocols, and the shooting sentence marked “executed”. Criminal cases of victims of repression in Ukraine have no restrictions on access, which certainly makes it very easy to find them. The archive of the Security Service of Ukraine makes digital copies of cases without requiring proof of kinship.

• Personal file of a university student. If you want to know what subjects your ancestor studied and what grades he/she received, you should inquire about finding student records from institutions of higher education. A large array of personal files of students from the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet period in Kyiv can be found in the State Archive of Kyiv (SAK), for other cities – in the regional archives by the modern territorial division of Ukraine.
• Filtration cases are the documents kept by the Soviet authorities for the purpose of verifying the ostalbaiters – persons taken out by the occupation authorities to Austria and Germany during World War II. After their return to the USSR territory, they were filtered – checked for the circumstances of their entry into enemy territory. Often a person was released after interrogation and verification, but sometimes the case turned into a criminal one, if the Soviet authorities suspected him/her of voluntary work for the enemy. As a rule, the filtration case is a very small folder of documents (8–20 sheets on average), but their value lies in the fact that among them may be a photo of your relative, autobiography written in his/her hand, and other sources important to family history. On the territory of Ukraine, filtration cases are stored in regional archives.

• Party cases are a source that will be relevant if your ancestor was a member of the CPSU. The main array of party files and party questionnaires is in storage in Moscow in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RSASPH). To get documents you need to know the year and place of joining the party and/or party card number and/or date and place of death, because the party card was extinguished after the death of a person who was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The cost of obtaining copies of a personal file is about $200-300.