The book by Moscow historians and genealogists Alexander and Maxim Andreev tells in detail, accurately and clearly how you can find your ancestors without a lot of time and money and write the history of your own family before the era of Peter the Great, and possibly even before Rurik. The authors talk about the science of genealogy, why people need genealogies, where, for what periods and in what documents and materials the personal archives of subjects of the huge Russian Empire and citizens of the Soviet Union are stored, they explain in detail what metric books, confessional paintings, audit tales are and population census, they tell how to conduct a military search for ancestors, not only participants of the Great Patriotic War, but also all military personnel before the formation of the Russian regular army by Peter I, they talk about the ideal genealogical book they invented and its composition, they provide information necessary for searching for ancestors Russian archives.