Looking for ancestors in pre-revolutionary archives means going through hundreds of scanned pages — and then forgetting which of them you have already read. So I made a search journal: Журнал поисков

For now it covers Приказы по войску Донскому (Orders of the Don Cossack Host) for 1867—1903, scanned by the Vivaldi digital library. The journal answers one simple question I kept asking myself: which surnames have already been checked in which files?

What it keeps for every document:

  • a timeline of years — green means the surname was found, grey means it was searched for and not found, dashed means the file has not been opened yet
  • a readability score, because OCR of the old typeface is far from perfect: “not found” on a badly recognized page is not a proof of absence
  • every search with its date, the candidates it produced, their confidence scores and page numbers
  • notes explaining why each candidate was rejected — most of them turn out to be ordinary words or similar-looking surnames

The icon is the letter ѣ (yat), the one that disappeared from the alphabet in 1918 and is the first thing you notice in these documents.