Locating Vital Records
An Overview and Step-By-Step Approach
The first step in locating vital records is
knowing your ancestral town or village. Visit my page devoted to this
important first step--finding your ancestral
village.
The next step in finding vital records is knowing
the Roman Catholic and/or Greek Catholic parish to which your village belonged.
Keep in mind that parish borders may have changed over time and your
village records may be found in more than one parish. Of course, knowing
the religious center for your ancestral home is important for Jewish, Lutheran
and other religious groups, as well. To find out this information, you
must go to gazetteers. See my page on gazetteers to learn about various
Galician gazetteers. (Or, for impatient folks, you can do a quick
search of a
database of
parishes as found in the Gemeindelexikon der im Reichsrate vertretenen
Konigreiche und Lander (Gazetteer of the Crown Lands and Territories Represented
in the Imperial Council) of 1907.)
Once you've located this place, you should learn all you
can about it. This will not only help your research (including finding
neighboring villages to look for "missing" relatives), it will give you a sense
of how your ancestors lived and add depth to your family history. You can
learn more by using the Galician gazetteers and
internet searches.
Once you learn the parish name, you can begin your search
for records. Search by village name and parish name in the following
three possible places a vital record can be:
- The first place to check is the Family History Library
(FHL) to see if you can view records easily right near your own home.
The records may have been microfilmed by the Family History Library and are
available to be viewed through the Family History Library or your local
Family History Center.
First, search the main database of records in the Family History
Library. Proceed to my page on the
Family History Library Collection for more
information and link directly to the
www.familysearch.org searchable database.
Next, check out my online database of Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic
records from the massive collection of Eastern Galician vital records housed
at the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine, city of Lviv/Lwów.
These records are currently being added to the Family History Library
catalog as listed above. But until the process is finished, you can
search my databases:
The records could be housed at a repository or
archive in either Ukraine or Poland, but there are no microfilms available
at the Family History Library. Proceed to
Archival research in Ukraine and Poland
for information and tips along with a searchable database of parish
registers housed in Polish Regional State Archives.
Unfortunately, a very real possibility is that the
records no longer exist. Although possible, the situation is not as
bad as previously thought before the break up of the Soviet Union, when the
status of such materials was not known and feared lost forever. But
still, time is not always kind to paper documents. Natural
catastrophes, such as fires and floods, did as much damage as man-made world
wars, civil wars, and revolutions. For such bad luck, the genealogist
must turn to other types of sources to research a family history.
Once you've located records, go back to my general page
on Vital Records for information on the language
of the records, tips on translating, convenient tutorials and document examples.
Happy Hunting!
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