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This project is dedicated to identifying profiles, where facts do not match documents, or documents present confusing information. Please highlight the profiles of those persons, where extraordinary changes appear: new names, new social status, new documents not matching the past, and so on.
If in your family tree, you have profiles that are associated with confusing documents, please add them to this project. Please recount the confusing facts within the profile description. This project can be also added to the images of fake documents.
Falsification of Nobility in the Russian Empire
During the 19th century in the Russian Empire, the nobility had privileges, which caused inequality in social rights. The nobility was provided with significant benefits in comparison with other classes - freedom from compulsory military service, more lenient taxation, and the right to own (sell, exchange) serfs and their residences - all that lay within the boundaries of nobleman's possessions.
The big issue was education inequality: for children of peasants only parishional schools were available (only primary education: 3-4 years of schooling); district schools (8 years of schooling) were for children of merchants, artisans, and other urban inhabitants; gymnasiums (high schools) were for children of nobles and officials.
In 1827, a decree and a special circular were issued prohibiting the admission of serfs to gymnasiums and universities unless there were guarantees that they would be provided with living conditions consistent with the education they received. The basis of public education was the principle of class and bureaucratic centralization. To better their children's possibilities in education, wealthier farmers, merchants, and urban inhabitants often illegally purchased their nobility status or faked their documents.
There were several ways to fake the nobility:
- Taking the identity of the deceased noble, or better yet using the name of a noble person who relocated and died away from his homeland. Servants and estate workers knew these sorts of facts and were able to use it for themselves or sell this opportunity to other seekers.
- Bribing heraldry office workers, using a family tree of the existing legitimized noble family whose surname is similar or the same (some peasant families had surnames of their masters), then legitimizing a new branch of that same family, by adding a new unknown brother to an ancestor, who lived a century or two ago, or adding son to a person, who died childless.
Forging of documents during the WWII-era
During WWII documents were forged to save lives. Those documents helped thousands of persecuted people to escape deportation to concentration camps and death. Forged documents helped people of resistance to Nazi occupation, some nationalities and social groups, including Jews, Roma and Sinti people and black people. Slavic people, such as those from Poland and Russia, were considered inferior and were targeted because they lived in areas needed for German expansion. The Nazis persecuted people they deemed to be disabled, either mentally or physically, as well as gay people. Political opponents, primarily communists, trade unionists, and social democrats, as well as those whose religious beliefs conflicted with Nazi ideology, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, were also targeted for persecution.
If in your family tree, you have people who escaped prosecution by using forged documents, please add them to this project.
Fraud - Forgeries for financial gain
Fraud is a criminal offense with the intent of passing it off as genuine, usually for financial gain or to gain something else of value. This often involves the creation of false financial instruments, such as checks, official documents, and forged wills, . Please add profiles of persons who committed major fraud and it dramatically affected their lives or the lives of their families.
Forged documents to escape criminal punishment
Forging documents is often meant for criminal ends, such as various domestic crimes, the smuggling of migrants, and the trafficking of people. Also, criminals relocate and start a new life using forged identities. This includes war criminals, financial crimes, physical crimes, kidnapping, treason, etc. If in your family tree, you have profiles of people who forged documents to conceal their crimes and/or escape punishment, please add them to this project.
Other strange cases
Please add this project those profiles where identification of the person, status, relocation, and relationships lack reasoning, documents do not match known facts, or it is known, that that person committed some fraud to change their life: escaping a stalker, escaping genocide, escaping abusive relationships, saving themselves from crime, or the opposite - escaping responsibility for crimes committed. This project will highlight cases of unusual events, and mismatched information in the family tree.