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, 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.
Next, 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.
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
and 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. In the future, I will address
this subject with detailed descriptions of other documents and their locations
and uses.
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!
|
