Find Your Ancestors

Since its founding in 1968, the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia has developed a strong genealogy program. Its purpose is to help individual members with their own family research and to make information we have available to all members. Identification with an ethnic heritage can best be accomplished by the study of one's family history. There is an old saying, "You can't tell where you're going until you know where you've been."

Although it is now possible to obtain some information from the former Soviet Union, one of the best means available for learning more about one's family is to share information with others and receive what others are willing to share. For this reason we urge all members to complete the following genealogy forms. After AHSGR receives a minimum of one each of the Membership Data Form (Form G-1), and the Ancestral Chart (Form G-2) or the Family Group Chart (Form G-3) from a member, that member is eligible to be listed in our Surname Exchange of our genealogical publication CLUES.

Forms are listed at the bottom of this page, and instructions for each form appear at the top of that form.

The information you provide on these forms will be entered into our genealogy database, now holding more than 460,000 entries. If you use genealogy software, we encourage you to submit a GEDCOM file of your information, as this saves a great deal of financial and human resources in data entry. If you do not have your family data on a computer we encourage you to complete and submit (with the information you have available or are willing to share) an Ancestral Chart with your name in the first position and at least one Family Group chart.

After we have received your genealogical forms by mail, we will be happy to help you with your research problems through the various resources located at headquarters. For a list of available resources, please refer to the Research Request Page. This page also indicates charges for research services.

The Surname Exchange is published annually in the fall issue of Clues.. The deadline for submission of genealogy forms for inclusion in each year's Surname Exchange is June. For more information on AHSGR's genealogy collection, please refer to the Family Sheets.

These 3 genealogy forms are available in Adobe^® Acrobat^® Reader^® format! This is done so each form will print cleanly on a single page, on nearly every printer. You may print as many copies as you need.

• MEMBERSHIP DATA FORM
• ANCESTRAL CHART
• FAMILY GROUP CHART

If you cannot view these files you may need to download and install the free Adobe^® Acrobat^® Reader^®.
 

Send your membership check and these 3 forms to:

AHSGR
631 D Street
Lincoln, NE 68502-1199

You can also purchase or renew your membership in the Online Store.

It is difficult to get the forms to print correctly on every printer. If your printer is set on too large of a font or typeface, you may lose some lines at the right hand margin. So, it is important that the typeface be set to FIXED (where each letter is the same width - courier or monospace) and a font size small enough (size 8 or 10) to ensure that all the form will fit on a standard 8.5 x 11 inch page. To set your printing typeface and size, there is normally a setting in your web browser that specifies this.