For parishes and organisations
A page you can forward to your pastor.
Half the families we help were sent to us by someone at their church. This page exists so that a parish can read the whole proposal in five minutes, without a meeting and without an attachment nobody opens.
What we can give your parish, free
- A written piece for your bulletin — 400 to 700 words on how to begin looking for an ancestral village, with no sales pitch in it. Written for you, not reprinted from our site
- A recorded talk with slides, in Ukrainian, Polish or English with subtitles, that you can show after liturgy or send to your mailing list
- A live talk in Ukrainian or Polish, by video call, for parishes whose members prefer it in the old language
- Answers to your parishioners' questions in writing, whether or not they ever become clients — including the ones we have to answer with “this cannot be found”
Your parish anniversary
A great many North American parishes are approaching a hundred years, or have just passed it. The founding families almost always came from a handful of villages in Galicia or Zakarpattia, and that is a story sitting in archives on our side of the ocean: which villages, which parishes they left, what stands there now, and which surnames on your founding roll still exist in those villages today.
We do this work for anniversaries at cost, and the parish keeps everything — the research, the photographs, the film if we make one. It is the piece of a jubilee that nobody else can supply from your side, and it usually surprises the committee more than anything else in the programme.
A journey for your community
Groups of six to twelve travel at a substantially lower cost per person than a couple does, and a parish group is the most natural version of this journey: people who already know each other, whose families often came from neighbouring villages, and who can be routed through several of them in the same week.
For a group we prepare each family's research beforehand, so that nobody spends the trip watching someone else's homecoming. A priest travelling with the group goes at our cost — that is not a discount we advertise, it is how we would want it done.
What it costs the parish
Nothing, and there is no exclusivity, no contract and no obligation to mention us again. If a family from your parish does commission work, ten per cent of what they pay goes back to the parish as a donation, itemised so your treasurer can see exactly where it came from. Families who would rather that money did not move at all can say so, and it does not.
We would rather be the firm your pastor is comfortable naming than the one that bought the naming.
What we ask
- A mention in the bulletin or the parish email, if — and only if — the material we sent is genuinely useful to your people
- Permission to send the material again next year, updated
- Honesty in the other direction: if a parishioner comes back unhappy with us, we want to hear it from you before we hear it anywhere else
Who you would be dealing with
One person in Ternopil, named on this site, with a doctorate in economics from Ternopil Ivan Puluj National Technical University and sixteen years of field research in the rural communities your founders left. He also heads a registered Ukrainian non-profit, Memory of the Future, which has been recording endangered church heritage — photogrammetric scans of eighteenth and nineteenth-century sacred sculpture — since 2016, with twenty-five models published openly with the National Reserve “Castles of Ternopil Region”.
All of it is verifiable in public registers before you put our name in front of your parishioners, and the links are on our About page. We would expect a pastor to check.
What parish councils ask us
Is this a sales presentation dressed as a talk?
No, and you can check before it goes anywhere near your people: we send you the bulletin piece or the recording first, in full, and you decide. Our name appears once, at the end. A talk that sells is a talk your parishioners resent, and it would cost us more than it earns.
We are a Polish or Roman Catholic parish, not Ukrainian. Does that matter?
Not at all. The territory is the same and so are the archives — Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish communities all kept parish books in Galicia, and we work in all of them. The founder speaks Polish fluently, so a talk in Polish is straightforward.
Can you help with our parish's own history, not just families?
Yes — the founding families' villages, the parishes they came from, and often the priest who sent them. For an anniversary we do this at cost, and the parish owns the result outright.
What if a parishioner's case turns out to be hopeless?
Then we tell them so in the first written reply and charge nothing. That happens with roughly one case in ten. We would rather your pastor hear that from a parishioner than hear that we took their money for a search we already knew would fail.
How do we start?
Write to us and say which of the four things above interests you — bulletin material, a recording, an anniversary, or a group journey. There is nothing to sign and nothing to pay, and if the answer is later “no thank you”, that is a perfectly good answer.
The simplest first step
Send us one line saying which parish you are and what would actually be useful. We reply within two business days with the material itself, not with a proposal to discuss the material.
Your founding families came from a handful of villages. We can tell you which.
Write to us as a parish, not as a customer. The bulletin material, the recorded talk and the answers to your parishioners' questions cost nothing and carry no obligation.