Not everything was destroyed. It is just not where people look.

First question: Austria or Russia?

Lviv, Ternopil, Stanislav, Brody, Drohobych, Kolomyia — Galicia — were Austrian until 1918 and Polish until 1939. Zhytomyr, Berdychiv, Proskuriv, Kamianets, Uman, the towns of the Kyiv region were in the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement. Volhynia — Lutsk, Rivne, Kremenets — was Russian until 1917 and Polish between the wars. The registers were kept under different laws, in different languages, on different forms, and they ended up in different countries. A search that begins with the wrong empire looks in the wrong country.

Galicia: the registers are mostly in Warsaw, and half of them are online

The vital registers of the Galician Jewish communities were taken to Poland after the war. Those older than about a hundred years are in AGAD in Warsaw, in a collection of several thousand volumes, roughly half of them scanned and free to read; younger ones are at the civil registry office Warszawa-Śródmieście, which issues extracts to descendants. JRI-Poland and Gesher Galicia have indexed a large part by name, and searching their indexes costs nothing. You do not need us for any of this.

What you need to know before you search: the series have hard edges. For a given town the births may begin in the 1860s, the marriages only in the late 1870s, and nothing earlier exists in Warsaw at all. And most Galician Jewish couples married under the chuppah only, without the civil ceremony the state required — so the state recorded their children as illegitimate, under the mother's surname, sometimes with the father's added later. A family that “changed its name” between two generations very often did nothing of the kind.

What stayed in Ukraine, where nobody indexes it

The community's own office papers mostly went the same way as the registers. But a Jewish family was also a family of townspeople, and the town wrote about it in its own books. In Ternopil, a register of Jewish marriages for 1859–1876 sits among the papers of the city magistrate, not among the vital records — and covers exactly the years that Warsaw does not have. Nobody finds it, because nobody looks for a Jewish register in a municipal fond.

The same holds for the district courts, the notaries, the land and tax registers, the school files that name a father, his trade and his street, the lists of voters and of tradesmen. For interwar Volhynia the advice to “write to Warsaw” is simply wrong: the large Warsaw collection is Galician, and the registers of the Jewish communities of the Volhynian towns from the 1920s and 1930s — and for some towns from the 1840s on — are in the archives here.

The Russian Empire: what a rabbinate register actually says

From 1835 the crown rabbi kept births, marriages, deaths and divorces on printed forms, in Russian and Hebrew, in two copies — one for the community and one for the provincial government. You can recognise a page at a glance by its two date columns, Christian and Jewish, side by side. The second copy is a separate original, often cleaner and sometimes fuller, and it may lie in a different fond from the first; where one burned, the other sometimes did not.

The most useful words on the page are the ones people read as a formality. “Townsman of such-and-such a town” is not where the man lived; it is the community he was legally registered with, and registration did not move when he did. A family “from Kiev” before 1917 was almost never registered in Kiev, where most Jews were not permitted to settle, but in Bila Tserkva or Skvyra or Fastiv — and that is where the older books of the family are, along with the revision lists and the family lists of the townspeople's society, which hold whole households across decades.

A marriage entry also names the two witnesses to the ketubah and its sum. The bride's father is sometimes named there and nowhere else.

Where the community's books are gone

For many towns in Podolia and Volhynia no rabbinate register survives at all; fires, two wars and, in 2003, a fire in the archive itself saw to that. The family did not become undocumented.

• ◆Soviet civil registration of the 1920s and 1930s — the district registry kept its books by village council, and in a shtetl the Jewish population often stands as its own section. It is the last generation that knew the town, listed by name, and it is online nowhere. A Soviet clerk also wrote a woman under her own surname and named her parents, so a great-grandmother absent from every earlier record appears in the entry of her own death
• ◆A family that fled a pogrom and lived afterwards under another name kept its real one for two things: the grave and the property. A house plot, a mill, a tavern lease stood in a real name with a father's name beside it, and those papers stayed in the county long after the family had gone
• ◆The family's memory of a trade — “they had the mill” — is not colour. In a town with five families of the same surname, the document that gives occupation and address in its own columns is the one that turns a matching name into an identification
• ◆On the American side, the Social Security application of each child who reached the United States asks for the mother's full maiden name in the applicant's own hand, and so does the death certificate. One document is a version; two that agree are a fact

The cemetery, and what we do

Many Jewish cemeteries here were destroyed — the stones taken for roads and foundations under two occupations. Many were not. Where stones stand, we photograph each one so that the inscription can be read and translated afterwards: the name, the father's name, the date. Where there is a mass grave, there is usually a memorial, and often somebody in the town who looks after it and knows what the older people said. We photograph the street and the houses that survive from before the war, and the building that was the synagogue if it is still there.

The assessment is free: the surname, the town, the years, and what your family says. A records check is $140 — what survives for your town and years, in which archive and which country, and what is lost; a written answer, in your language. A day in the archive reading room or a day in the town is $290; if a day on the ground finds nothing of your family, half of it comes back. A complete record of a cemetery, every stone with a numbered plan, is $490. Our own ground is the Ternopil, Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk regions; for towns further east, ask first and we say honestly whether we can go.

What Jewish families ask us