The Method
How to do this yourself
Seven steps, in order. No training, no subscription, and no trip to an archive. Everything here can be done from a kitchen table, for free.
Feed one name, one place, one document
- 01Normalise the nameevery spelling, and the mother’s maiden name
- 02Search both surnamesfather’s and mother’s, every time
- 03Reconstruct the paper trailarrest, ghetto, transport, camp, liberation, emigration
- 04Read the sequencethe lines and pages either side of a hit
- 05Cross-check with AIcollections, languages and scripts at once
- 06Verify against the originalthe register image, not the index
- 07Search the people around themneighbours, cousins, the same village
Product a verified linkage, or a gap stated as a gap
Write down every version of the name before you search
Before searching anything. The surname as the family says it, as a German clerk would spell it, as a Hungarian registrar would, and as it comes back out of Cyrillic. Helman, Hellmann, Hilman, and in Russian and Ukrainian Gelman, because those alphabets have no H. Landó, Landa, Landau.
Keep the list beside you. Every database below is a name index, and a name index only returns what you type. This is where an ordinary search fails, and where most people stop.
Do this: write the surname five ways on paper. As your family says it. As a German clerk would. As a Hungarian registrar would. Coming back out of Cyrillic, where H becomes G. And the mother’s maiden name.
Search the mother’s maiden name too
The step almost everyone skips, and the one that finds people. Across much of Subcarpathia and Galicia, marriages that were religious only were not recognised by the state, so children were entered in the civil register under their mother’s surname, with the father acknowledging paternity in the margin.
My grandmother’s own birth record carries no surname for her at all. She is filed under Landó. Anyone searching Helman would never have found her.
Do this: run every search twice, once under the father’s surname and once under the mother’s.
Work out where the paperwork had to put them
Locate the person in time and place through the administrative trail rather than by name: arrest, ghetto, transport, camp registration, transfer, subcamp, liberation, displaced-persons camp, emigration. Each stage had to generate a document, and each document names a date and a place.
Someone who cannot be found by name can still be found by where the system was obliged to record them.
Do this: write out the stages in order for the person you want, and search for the stage when the name fails. A transport list is easier to find than a person.
Read the sequence, not just the entry
A prisoner number is not only a label. It is a position in a list, and lists have neighbours. Transports were registered in order of arrival, and rosters were often compiled alphabetically, so people from one place and one family fall together on the page.
This is how the second and third men in this case were found: not by searching for them, but by reading the lines above and below someone already known.
Do this: when you find a record with a number on it, go and read the numbers either side of it.
Let AI do the cross-checking
Link one individual across a dozen collections, languages and scripts at a scale that is not feasible by hand: camp records, civil registers, censuses, victim databases, cemetery transcriptions, directories, testimony. This is the step that makes the search possible from a desk, and the only step here that is new.
Do this: paste what you have found into an AI assistant and ask it to find the contradictions and the gaps. Then go and check what it tells you.
Check every match against the original document
Never against an index entry. Indexes are transcriptions and transcriptions carry errors, and an error copied forward becomes a fact nobody questions. Open the register image, read the fields, and confirm the parents.
AI accelerates the search. It does not decide anything.
Do this: never stop at the index. Open the register image and read the parents’ names yourself.
If someone left no record, search the people around them
Trace the people around them instead. Cousins, neighbours, anyone from the same village on the same transport. Their records will place the person you want in a time and a place, and sometimes name them outright.
Nearly everything recovered in this case came from following someone other than the person being looked for. If your grandmother is invisible, find her neighbours.
Do this: search the village, not the person. Then read every name it returns.
Two rules that matter more than any database
A name written five ways across five countries is one person, not five problems. Treat variation as expected noise. Reject a candidate only when a parent, a place or a date genuinely diverges, never because the spelling moved.
Hold a conclusion only where independent kinds of record agree without contradicting one another, and verify every linkage against the primary document. Where the evidence supports a probable conclusion rather than a proven one, say probable. Disclose conflicts rather than resolving them by preference.
Why women are the hardest to find
The maiden-name rule in step two is not a quirk of one family. It was the ordinary practice of a whole region, and it means that most people searching for a grandmother are searching the one name they were told while she sits filed under another. It is the most common wall in this work, and it is the reason step one comes first.
Where to search
Every collection used in this case, with what each one holds and what it costs, is listed on the databases page.
If you get stuck
Write to me. I read everything, and if I can point you at the right collection I will. sgrajews@stanford.edu
