The Russian Revizskie skazki can be a gold mine in finding information about our ancestors. “Revizskie skazki” literally translates as “revision tales”, though we generally refer to them as “revision lists”. While censuses only provide information on people currently alive, revision lists include “tales” about the men who died or moved away since the prior revision list. The talk will provide an overview of the periodic revision lists and demonstrate how Hal was able to use the 1850 and 1858 ones to identify ancestors, including those who lived earlier, and even to creatively use the information to get back yet an extra generation or two where no records exist at all. During the past three years, the JewishGen Ukraine Research Division has indexed and made available on the All-Ukraine Database, approximately four million Russian records. This includes hundreds of thousands of records from Revision Lists and other censuses of Jews living in the Russian Empire. Hal will demonstrate how to efficiently search this amazing resource

Hal is a retired information systems director and university instructor. He has been researching his genealogy for more than three decades, identifying over 4,000 relatives and tracing two lines to the mid-1700s in modern Ukraine. Hal is a past president of the JGSLA and of the IAJGS. He and his wife, Marci, were raised in the Catskills of New York State and now live in the Los Angeles area. In 2018, he made a journey to Ukraine, visiting various areas of the former Volhynia and Podolia in which his family lived for hundreds of years.