Moldova

Where the records are

Bessarabia was a province of the Russian Empire from 1812 to 1918, and its church registers were kept by the Bessarabian consistory, the church authority of the province. They are held by the National Archives of the Republic of Moldova (ANRM) in Chisinau. Entries are in Russian, and in many rural parishes also in Romanian written in Cyrillic.

What is online

• FamilySearch, Moldova Church Books 1811-1936. Over three million images of births, marriages and deaths from the Chisinau archive, in Russian and Romanian, browsable by place and not indexed by name. Viewing needs a free FamilySearch account. If the images do not open, try again later: access was limited for a while in 2026.
• The archive's digital documents. ANRM's own platform, free: digitised collections, such as the records of the Chisinau church authority, the consistory (fond 208, 1832-1918), lists of the deported and of victims of repression, and a search over the archive's inventories in Romanian and Russian. The archive has announced that the church registers will be added there.

How to order

The archive's reading room is at str. Gheorghe Asachi 67B, Chisinau. Requests from abroad go by e-mail with the place, the faith and the years.

Traps

• One village may appear under its Russian, Romanian and Turkish names.
• Jewish records of Bessarabia were kept separately by state-appointed rabbis (the "crown rabbinate"); the FamilySearch collection page links to the Jewish record sets that other sites hold.
• From 1918 to 1940 Bessarabia was part of Romania, and its civil records of those years follow Romanian forms.