Free guide · 15 min read

Find your family in the archives of Eastern Europe, on your own

Most church registers and tax censuses of the Russian Empire survive, and many are online for free. What stops people is not access. It is knowing which record to open, and reading what the priest wrote.

Find the place before the name

Archives keep records by place, not by person. Before you search a surname, find the village, then the parish it belonged to, and the district and province it sat in during the years your family lived there. Borders moved many times: a village in today's Ukraine may have been in a Polish, Russian or Austrian province, and its records may sit in an archive of a neighbouring country.

Write down every name the place has had, in every language: the official Russian name, the local Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian or Romanian name, and the Polish or Yiddish one if your family used it. Old maps and the village lists on genealogy forums help here.

Trap. Families of different faiths in one village were written in different registers, often kept in different towns: Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish and Old Believer records were all separate.

Know which records exist

Record	What it tells you	Years
Church registers ("metric books")	Births and baptisms, marriages and deaths, with parents, godparents and witnesses	From the 18th century to 1918, later for some faiths
Yearly church lists of households ("confession lists")	Every household of a parish, year by year, with ages	18th and 19th centuries
Tax censuses ("revision lists")	Every tax-paying household, with ages and where people moved	Ten censuses between 1719 and 1858
Soviet registry offices (ZAGS)	Soviet births, marriages and deaths	From 1918-1920 on; often closed for 75 to 100 years
Military and war records	Service, wounds, deaths, awards	First and Second World Wars

Read an archive reference

Every file in a former Soviet archive has an address in five parts. Learn it once and every catalogue opens up.

Part	Means
Archive	The institution, often abbreviated: DAKhmO, TsDIAK, NIAB, LVIA, ANRM, TsGIA SPb
f. (fond)	The collection, usually one institution's papers: a consistory, a district court, a parish
op. (opis)	The inventory: a numbered list of the files in the fond
d. (delo, sprava, byla)	The file: one book or one bundle of papers
l. (list, arkush, lapas)	The sheet; ob. or zv. means its reverse side

An inventory is your map of a fond. Read its titles before you order anything: one fond of the church authority (consistory) may hold copies of every parish's church registers, year by year.

Spell like the scribe

Before 1918 Russian was written with letters that no longer exist, and a search in modern spelling silently misses them.

ѣ (yat) was written where modern Russian has е: Звѣревъ for Зверев.
і stood before vowels: Іоаннъ for Иоанн.
ѳ (fita) became ф: Ѳеодоръ for Федор.
ъ closed every word ending in a consonant: Петровъ.

Names were written in their church form: Іоаннъ for Ivan, Ѳеодоръ for Fedir. Search for every form, and for the Polish and Latin ones in Catholic registers.

Trap. Until 1918 the Russian Empire used the Julian calendar: in the 19th century a date was 12 days behind the Western one, in the 20th century 13 days.

Search across countries

FamilySearch. Microfilmed church registers and tax censuses from most of the archives in this guide. Search the catalogue by place, not by name. Viewing images needs a free account.
Yandex search in archives. A full-text search of handwritten church registers read by computer. Search the start of the surname, for example Kovalch, so every ending is found, and read the page itself: the computer makes mistakes.
Velikie opisi. Archive inventories typed by volunteers: more than four million file titles from dozens of archives, searchable for free.
Old maps online. Old maps laid over today's, to find a village that has changed its name or disappeared.
Arolsen Archives. Records of Nazi persecution, among them forced labourers taken from these countries.
JewishGen. Jewish records, town pages and research groups for Eastern Europe.
BillionGraves. Headstone photographs with GPS positions, searchable by name.

Ask the people who already looked

Before you write to an archive, ask on the forums. On the VGD forum there is a thread for almost every district, where researchers post which records still exist, page by page, and who has already read them. Reading it is free; asking a question needs a free registration. The catalogue of Ridni, a society of Ukrainian genealogists, lists where Ukrainian church registers are kept and which are digitised.

Choose a country

The country pages say where each kind of record is kept, what is online, how to order a copy, and the traps of each archive.