About the past in the present tense

One of my strongest childhood memories is the day when, when I was on summer vacation in a distant Ural village, I found a box with military heirlooms in my grandmother's dresser. Orders, medals, letters-triangles from the front and funerals ... I never saw these people, they died long before my birth, but when I read their letters from the front, for some reason it seemed to me that they speak and me - so much was the warmth and love for their loved ones in these lines, written in confident beautiful handwriting on the yellowed sheets. It was more than just a personal message from one person to another - it seemed that the words addressed to all living far from the horrors of the front, both in space and in time. It was then that I had a desire to learn more about the fate of these people, to understand how they lived and what they thought on that last day of their lives.

More than 35 years have passed since then, today I don’t even know where these relics are and if they survived at all, but each time, as Victory Day approached, I remembered about them and about those people who died in a war distant for me. And for some reason I always felt my guilt in front of them. My unknown relatives gave their lives for me. What did I do for them? Or at least in gratitude? However, this holiday will probably be special for me and my relatives - thanks to the Internet, I was able to return seventy years ago and find out some details concerning my relatives who died in that great war.

It all started by chance, when a few days ago I discovered on the network a generalized Memorial data bank, which contains information about the defenders of the Fatherland who died and went missing during the Great Patriotic War. To date, 13.7 million digital copies of documents about the irretrievable losses of the Great Patriotic War period have been entered in the OBD from 38 thousand archives of the Central Administration of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, TSVMA, RGVA, the General Assembly of the Russian Federation, the regional archives of Rosarkhiv and 42.2 thousand passports of existing places military graves in the Russian Federation and abroad. In total, the database contains information on nearly 9 million Red Army soldiers who died in battles, died in concentration camps or missing. It should be particularly noted that the OBD not only stores copies of documents, but also decrypts all the records, which allows people to be searched by various key data - name, year of birth, rank, military unit and much more. True, there may be some difficulties with the search, but about them later.
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So, by the time the search began, I had only the following information about my close relatives who died in the war:

Shpankov Mikhail Alexandrovich (paternal grandfather) - died at the Kursk Bulge in 1943
Imoluel Ivanovich Golitsyn (maternal uncle) - missing
Golitsyn Grigory Ivanovich (maternal uncle) - died in Austria in 1945

Everything. And no more details. To my surprise, I almost immediately found in the OBD information about my grandfather and Gregory Golitsyn. True, I knew about where they were called from, so it was not difficult to identify them among namesakes. With the second uncle it turned out a little more difficult. The fact is that most of the documents of that time were filled out manually, so errors in the data recording, incorrect decoding or indication of incorrect data are unavoidable. That is exactly what happened: the surname was indicated as “Galitsyn” (through “a”), and the place of the call was Vivimsky District (in fact, Visimsky District) due to the peculiarities of the handwriting that filled in the loss report. In addition, apparently, I was mistaken when I entered the name “Immanuel” - the name “Manuel” is indicated in the documents. In such cases, you need to try two ways to change search queries: try to anticipate what mistakes could be made in writing the names and surnames and repeat the search, or reduce the amount of input data, removing those that could potentially be incorrect (but in this case the number of search results).

Another helpful tip. In documents, quite often the name and patronymic are indicated by initials or not indicated at all. Be sure to search and with such conditions - more likely to find additional information, even if you have already found something using the full name of the full name. Remember that a person can be mentioned in several documents at the same time (for example, in the summary of irretrievable losses, in the lists of the buried and in the books of memory). Sometimes you can guess that there are other documents, by indirect evidence. For example, at first I found my grandfather in the burial lists, but there he was listed without a title, while the “senior sergeant” stood in the decoding. And only a search with initials brought me to a summary of the irretrievable losses, from which I learned both the military unit and the position at the time of my death.

As a result, an hour later I knew almost everything about my relatives - where I died, when, in what rank, position, in which part I fought, how I died and where I was buried (except for Manuel - the place of his burial remained unexplained). In principle, it was possible to stop at this, but I could not. The information I found seemed insufficient - it did not give a complete picture of how it all happened. It’s like in archeology: it’s not enough just to find an artifact — you also need to try to restore the environment to understand how people lived during the creation of this artifact and how they used it. Therefore, I continued to search on the Internet, but already outside the OBD Memorial.

First of all, you can try searching by the name of the military unit. Thus, there is a chance to find not only a brief description of the combat path of the unit (Wikipedia has quite a lot, albeit fragmentary), but also detailed coverage of events in numerous memoirs (especially when it comes to a famous battle or military operation. I highly recommend this site - " Military literature " ). In parallel, you will surely find photographs related to that time or even to specific events. Also as illustrations are very well suited to the schemes of military operations of these military units in those days. If there are no such people in the network, you can take screenshots of maps of the desired scale in popular map services - the locations indicated on them will help to “navigate the terrain” with the course of the battles described in the memoirs.

Finally, it is also useful to know which military units of the Wehrmacht fought on those days against the units where your relative was serving at the time of his death. In addition to textual information on the Internet, you can find German photos of those units, and if you're lucky, even at that time and in that place. By putting together all the information and graphic materials found, you can create for yourself or for others the most complete and quite vivid picture of how, where and with whom your relative fought in the last days of your life. And, of course, you can try to find online and photos of the mass grave or a memorial plaque with the name of the deceased. Quite a lot of enthusiasts are engaged in the publication of photo albums of military monuments and memorial plates with names - for which they thank them very much.

As a conclusion, I would like to explain why I told all this. In fact, in the former USSR, in each family, some of our relatives fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, and, probably, all of us have those who did not return from the war. How much do we know about them? Often - almost nothing. Fragmentary facts from the funerals and stories of old men. I think this is not very correct. Knowing the history of your family, the memory of the exploits of your ancestors (and during the war every day was a feat) helps us and build our lives so that they there, in the past, would not be ashamed of us. Perhaps my example will be useful for you and you can congratulate your loved ones on the great Victory Day in a similar way. It seems to me that this is better than the St. George ribbon on a car antenna or a duty greeting SMS.

And further. If you have the opportunity, ask the participants of the Great Patriotic War, who are familiar to you (and, unfortunately, there are very few), to tell something about that time. I am sure that you will discover many unknown heroic pages of ours, and, possibly, of your personal family history.

Below are examples of what I ended up with.

Shpankov M.A.
Golitsyn M.I.
Golitsyn G.I.

Added by

Found the burial place and photos of the mass grave of Golitsyn Manuil. File updated.