ARCHIVAL RESEARCH
Recovering the Record, One Fragment at a Time.
Documents, photographs, testimony and family records survive across archives, countries and private collections. Our research brings these fragments together to recover individual lives, relationships and events that history left scattered.
RESEARCH METHOD
The Archive Is Only the Beginning.
Historical records rarely survive as complete stories. War, migration, occupation and decades of political change scattered documents across countries, institutions and family collections, often separating photographs from names and testimony from the records that can help explain it.
Archival research begins by locating those fragments, but the larger task is connecting them. A photograph may identify a face found elsewhere in testimony. A government record may clarify a date, address or relationship. A survivor’s memory may provide the context that an official document never recorded.
Sources are compared across archives and against scholarship, testimony and evidence gathered in the field. Contradictions and uncertainties are preserved rather than forced into conclusions the evidence cannot support.
The goal is not simply to collect documents, but to reconstruct the human histories contained within them.
ACROSS BORDERS
Following the Evidence Wherever It Leads.
The records needed to reconstruct a single life are rarely kept in one place. A family photograph may survive in the United States, a military file in Lithuania, a wartime document in Germany and testimony in an archive somewhere else entirely.
Research therefore often requires following the same person across institutions and countries. Names change spelling, borders change, records are filed under different languages and entire collections may have been separated by war, migration or political upheaval.
The Gens Family Project compares material across archives in Lithuania, Europe and the United States, looking for connections between documents that were never intended to be read together. A date in one record can unlock a photograph elsewhere; an address can reconnect a family; a handwritten note can reveal the identity of someone previously unknown.
The process is often slow, but every confirmed connection strengthens the historical record and brings another fragment of a life back into view.
IDENTIFICATION
Putting Names Back to Faces.
Photographs often survive after the knowledge surrounding them has been lost. A face may remain visible long after a name, date or relationship has disappeared from family memory or archival description.
Identifying the people in these images requires comparing photographs with testimony, documents, family records, institutional files and other surviving evidence. Sometimes a single detail—a uniform, handwriting, address, school, workplace or familiar face appearing elsewhere—can provide the clue that makes an identification possible.
This work can reconnect photographs to the individuals and families they once belonged to, restoring names and relationships to images that might otherwise remain anonymous. It can also reveal unexpected connections between people whose histories were separated by war and migration.
Recovering identity is one of the most important parts of archival research because it returns the record from abstraction to individual lives.
DOCUMENTS AS EVIDENCE
Reading Beyond the Record.
Official documents can preserve facts that memory alone cannot: names, dates, addresses, occupations, military service, movements across borders and the decisions of institutions that shaped individual lives. But no document tells the whole story on its own.
A personnel file, identification card, school record, military document or government report was usually created for an administrative purpose—not to preserve a person’s life for future historians. Understanding it requires asking who produced the record, why it was created, what information it includes and what it leaves unsaid.
The project compares documents across different institutions and periods, looking for details that confirm, complicate or sometimes contradict one another. Even small discrepancies in spelling, dates or addresses can become important clues when tracing a person through war, displacement and migration.
Read together, these records can transform scattered pieces of bureaucracy into something far more human: the outline of a life that can once again be followed across time and place.
TESTIMONY & ORAL HISTORY
When Memory and Evidence Meet.
Survivor testimony preserves dimensions of the past that official records often cannot. It can reveal relationships, emotions, motives, routines and moments of decision that never entered an archive.
At the same time, memory is shaped by time, trauma and perspective. Testimony therefore becomes most powerful when it is read alongside documents, photographs, maps and other surviving evidence rather than treated as a complete record on its own.
The Gens Family Project compares oral histories with archival sources to clarify chronology, identify people and places, and understand how individuals experienced events that official records describe only from the outside.
Where testimony and documents agree, they can reinforce one another. Where they differ, the differences themselves can become historically important—revealing how events were remembered, recorded and understood from different points of view.
FAMILY NETWORKS
Reconnecting Histories Separated by War.
The Holocaust and the migrations that followed scattered families across countries and continents. Photographs, letters, testimonies and archival records often survive in different places, with descendants holding only fragments of the larger story.
By tracing names, addresses, relationships and recurring faces across collections, the project can begin to reconstruct family networks that were broken apart by persecution, deportation and displacement.
Sometimes a photograph in one family’s collection can identify a person remembered only by name in another. A letter can reconnect relatives separated for generations. A survivor’s testimony can clarify the relationship between people whose records had never previously been brought together.
These discoveries do more than fill gaps in a family tree. They restore relationships, return context to surviving evidence and reconnect descendants to histories that war had left fragmented.
VERIFICATION
What Can Be Proven—and What Cannot.
Historical records are rarely perfect. Names may appear in several languages or spellings, dates can conflict, testimony can differ from official documentation and entire parts of a person’s life may be missing from the surviving record.
The Gens Family Project treats those gaps and contradictions as part of the history itself. Rather than forcing certainty where the evidence does not support it, sources are compared, provenance is considered and conclusions are separated from possibility.
A strong identification or historical claim should rest on more than resemblance or assumption. Photographs, documents, testimony, addresses, institutional records and chronology are weighed together before a connection is presented as established.
Where uncertainty remains, it remains visible. Preserving the difference between what is known, what is probable and what is still unresolved is essential to responsible historical research.
ARCHIVES & COLLECTIONS
Where the Evidence Survives.
The records needed to reconstruct a life may survive in national archives, museums, Holocaust collections, libraries, military repositories, local institutions or private family collections. No single archive contains the whole story.
Each collection preserves a different part of the record. Government files may document official decisions, while family photographs preserve relationships that institutions never recorded. Survivor testimony can supply context that a bureaucratic document cannot, and local archives may hold material unavailable anywhere else.
The Gens Family Project works across these collections to bring evidence into conversation with one another. A record discovered in one institution can change the meaning of material found somewhere else, while private collections can reveal details absent from the formal historical record.
Archival research is therefore both investigative and connective: locating what survives, understanding why it was preserved and bringing scattered evidence together into a fuller historical account.
FROM ARCHIVE TO PLACE
Following the Record Back Into the Landscape.
Archival research often points beyond the document itself. An address can lead to a former home, a transport record to a station, a wartime report to a mass-grave site, or a photograph to a building whose history can still be traced on the ground.
Returning to these places can clarify details that records alone cannot. Street layouts, surviving structures, distances and changes to the landscape help reconstruct how events unfolded and how particular locations were used.
The Gens Family Project connects archival evidence with field research so that documents, testimony and physical places can be studied together rather than in isolation.
This approach helps transform the archive from a collection of records into a map of lived experience—linking names and documents back to the streets, buildings and landscapes where history actually happened.
PRESERVATION & ACCESS
From Discovery to Historical Record.
Finding evidence is only the beginning. Documents, photographs and testimony must also be preserved, described and connected to the wider history they illuminate. Without context, even important material can remain difficult to understand or use.
The Gens Family Project works to organize and interpret research so that individual discoveries can become part of a larger historical record. Names are connected to places, photographs to people, testimony to documents and family histories to the events that shaped them.
Preservation also means making history accessible. Research findings inform documentary films, educational resources, public presentations and future historical work, allowing evidence recovered in archives to reach audiences far beyond the collections in which it was found.
The aim is not simply to preserve fragments, but to ensure that the lives and histories contained within them can continue to be studied, understood and remembered.
CONTINUE THE WORK
Follow the Evidence Into the Field.
Archival records often lead back to the places where history unfolded. Continue into the Gens Family Project’s field research and see how documents, testimony and physical landscapes are brought together.