How to build your family’s shezhire: a step-by-step guide
You can start a shezhire in a single evening and add to it all your life. Here is where to begin, what to ask the elders and how not to lose what you collect.
In short: a shezhire is built from yourself upwards
You start a shezhire (Kazakh family genealogy) with yourself and go up the paternal line: father, grandfather, great-grandfather and on to the seventh ancestor. For each one you write the name, years of life and place, and then everything that is remembered about them. The main rule: write down only what relatives or documents confirm.
Step 1. Write down what you know yourself
Take a sheet of paper or open the builder and enter everyone you know, even if it is only a name. Empty places are not a problem: they show whom to ask about.
Step 2. Ask the elders
The most valuable source of a shezhire in the family: grandfather (ata), grandmother (azhe) and their brothers and sisters. Arrange a calm conversation and record it on a voice recorder, with permission. Questions that help:
- What was your father’s and grandfather’s name? What were they called in the village (aul)?
- Where were they born and where did they live? Where did they move?
- What clan are you from? Who in the family knows more about it?
- What did the ancestors do, and what stories were told about them?
- Are there old photographs, letters, documents, notes in the margins of books?
Ask several relatives: one will remember a name, another the years, a third the story. If the versions differ, write down both and note who told what.
Step 3. Gather family documents
Birth and marriage certificates, passports, work record books, military papers, letters and inscriptions on the backs of photographs. In Soviet times a surname was often formed from the name of the father or grandfather, so a surname in a document sometimes suggests an ancestor’s name by itself.
If there are no documents at home, records of births and marriages are kept by civil registry offices and state archives. The request procedure differs in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, so it is best to check with the archive itself.
Step 4. Check how the names are spelled
The same name is spelled differently in documents of different years: Zhumabai, Dzhumabai, Jumabay. Decide with the family how to spell the names in the shezhire and stick to that version. It is best to keep the Kazakh and Kyrgyz letters (ә, ғ, қ, ң, ө, ұ, ү, і), as they are part of the name.
Step 5. Design it and show it to the elders
Build the tree and show it to the people who told you the stories. Often it is on the finished sheet that they remember one more name or correct the years. After checking, you can print the shezhire, hang it on the wall or turn it into a book.
What not to do
- Do not add ancestors “by logic” or from other people’s shezhires unless you are sure it is your own branch.
- Do not put off the talk with the elders: what they remember is written down nowhere else.
- Do not keep the records in one place: make a copy and send it to relatives.