Erik Amburger Database on Foreigners in Prerevolutionary Russia

The extensive personal archive of Professor Erik Amburger is a catalog of about 100,000 foreigners in the Russian Empire until 1917 and represents a unique documentation that researchers in many countries make frequent use of. Professor Amburger bequeathed this register to the Leibniz Institute for East European Studies.

The work was supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation from May 1991 until October 1992, and by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior until the end of 1993. Toward the end of 1996, the Volkswagen Foundation approved a generous grant which made it possible to recruit additional assistants and a project manager in order to fully process the data by 1999 and make it accessible on the internet. From 2006 to 2007, we converted the online database with the help of funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Virtual Library Eastern Europe (ViFaOst) portal. The database has been accessible again since the beginning of October 2007.

The Ancestor Tables of 2,960 families, which are also part of the database, are extremely valuable for biographical research. They represent a unique collection of genealogical data in list format which can be consulted at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS).

In addition to the database, the legacy library and the research archive of Erik Amburger are accessible at the IOS. The library, which has more than 880 volumes, is not only useful for genealogical studies of Russia or the Baltic States, but is also an important resource for sociohistorical studies of this area. The research archive contains manuscripts, collections, chronicles, and lists of individual family and company histories, as well as genealogies, copies of sources and company advertisements, photos, pictures, and maps.