If your family came from the Kresy
The papers went to Warsaw. The village stayed here.
A family expelled from the Tarnopol or Lwów region in 1945 carried a suitcase and a memory of a village, and the memory is now eighty years old. The good news is that Poland kept far more paper about those families than most of their grandchildren know, and much of it is free. The better news is that it is not the whole of it: part of the record never left, and the village itself — the cemetery, the orchard where the house stood — is still where it was. This page says which is which.
Start in Poland, not in Ukraine
We would rather tell you this than be paid to find it out for you: the first documents in a Kresy search are in Polish archives, and you do not need us to reach them.
- The repatriation papers — every family that came west in 1944–46 was registered by the State Repatriation Office, the PUR. The card gives names, ages, trade, the composition of the family and the village they left, written down that year rather than remembered eighty years later. The files are in the Polish state archives of the region where the transport arrived
- Registers younger than about a hundred years — the księgi zabużańskie, the parish books taken to Poland after the war, are kept by the civil registry office Warszawa-Śródmieście, which issues extracts to descendants
- Older registers — the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw, AGAD, holds the Roman Catholic books of the Lwów archdiocese together with Greek Catholic, Evangelical and Jewish registers. A large part is scanned and free to read online, and volunteers have indexed many parishes by name in Geneteka
- If somebody was deported in 1940 or arrested in 1939–41, the Indeks Represjonowanych is searchable online, without charge
What never went to Warsaw
“Everything is in Warsaw” is the usual advice, and it is only half true. The series taken to Poland break off: for one town the Roman Catholic books in Warsaw end in 1920, for another the marriages begin only in the 1870s. Meanwhile the oblast archives here hold the village's own parish books for the interwar years and the first years of the war — shelved in the fonds of the civil registry, which is why nobody looks for a church book there — and these have no copy in Poland at all.
Registers were also kept in two copies, one in the parish and one sent to the bishop's consistory. After the war one set often travelled and the other stayed. The two are not identical: the second was written out separately, sometimes weeks later, and a record missing from one is regularly present in the other. A family that has “all the records” from one country has usually seen half.
And then there is everything that was never a church book: the district court files with guardianship and inheritance cases, the land registers arranged by house number, the school records that name a father, his trade and his address, the Austrian cadastres of 1787 and 1820 that list every household by house. None of it was evacuated. For Wołyń the archives are in Lutsk and Rivne, and part of what they hold has quietly been put online, free.
The Polish family in a Ukrainian village
In a village that was mostly Greek Catholic, the Roman Catholics were a few households, and they had no parish of their own. They belonged to the Roman Catholic parish of the nearest town, eight or fifteen kilometres away — so the records of the Polish half of the family are not in the books of the village at all. People spend years winding through the wrong microfilm because of this. The question is never “which village” but “which Roman Catholic parish covered that village”.
Mixed marriages close the same trap from the other side. A Greek Catholic groom and a Roman Catholic bride were married in the parish of one rite, most often hers, and in the other parish there is no entry whatever. The record exists; it is in the book nobody thought to open.
If the address was an “osada”
In the Polish administrative lists of 1921–39, the word osada beside a place nearly always means a military settlers' colony: plots granted after 1921 to veterans of 1918–20. For the search this changes everything. There are no local records of such a family before 1921, because they arrived from central Poland, and their earlier registers are there.
It also explains February 1940. The deportation lists were not drawn up from village gossip; they were compiled from the commune papers the NKVD had seized the autumn before, which included the land register of the settlement programme. Whoever held a plot was on the list, with everybody living on it. The heads of those families often disappear from the deportation indexes altogether, because they were arrested earlier and separately — and that trail is a prison trail, and it is in Ukraine: the investigation files in the security service archives, open by law since 2015, and the so-called Ukrainian Katyn list of 3,435 prisoners shot in the spring of 1940, published by name.
The wife who reached Poland without him usually went to court to have him declared dead. Those files hold the family's own testimony of when and where he was last seen, taken down while people still remembered, and the court's announcement was printed in the official gazette, which is digitised and searchable for nothing.
The village that is no longer on the map
A good many Kresy addresses return nothing on a modern map. Sometimes the name was changed after the war; sometimes the village was destroyed in 1943–45 and never rebuilt; sometimes it is under a reservoir. An empty search proves none of these, and before anybody pays for a day on the ground it has to be settled which.
The way to settle it is the interwar Polish military map at 1:25,000 laid over today's satellite image. It places the village to within tens of metres and shows what is there now: a field, a wood, a cross, the remains of a cemetery. Where Polish families were replaced by new settlers the houses were renumbered, so a pre-war house number no longer matches anything on the street — but the pattern of the road, the stream and the farmsteads does, and so does the name of the hamlet, which the oldest people in the village still use.
If your family has a plan of the village drawn from memory by somebody who left in 1945, with the farmsteads numbered, it is worth more than any map. The number on that plan is the same number that stands in the parish register.
What we do, and what it costs
The assessment is free: tell us the surname, the village as your family says it and the years, and we answer in writing — including, where it is the truth, that your next step is an archive in Poland and not us.
A records check is $140: which books for your village and your years survive on the Ukrainian side, in both rites, what they cover that Warsaw does not, and what is lost. It is a written answer, and “nothing survives here” is an answer too. A day in the reading room is $290, and so is a day in the village: the cemetery read stone by stone — the Polish graves are usually the oldest and the most overgrown — the place where the house stood, the church, the street, and the neighbours asked what they remember. If nothing of your family is found in the village, half of that comes back to you. Recording an entire cemetery, every stone with a numbered plan, is $490. We work in the Ternopil, Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk regions; further afield, ask first.
What Kresy families ask us
Is it possible to go there now, during the war?
We are already here — that is the point of the service. Western Ukraine lives under air-raid alerts but it lives, the archives' reading rooms are open, and the villages are where they were. You do not have to travel; you receive the photographs, the recordings and a written report. If you want to come yourself later, we say honestly what that involves on our safety pages.
Will there be anything left of a Polish cemetery?
Usually something, rarely everything. Stone crosses and family tombs from before 1914 survive better than the interwar graves; wooden crosses are gone; some cemeteries have been cleared by volunteers and some are a thicket. We look at the satellite image and ask in the village before the day is booked, and we tell you what to expect. A burial made quietly at night in 1944 may never have had a stone, and we will not promise you one.
I need a document for an office or a court, not for a family tree. Can you provide it?
Our photographs are research, not certificates. An office wants an official extract with a seal, and only the archive or the registry can issue it — to you, as a descendant, usually for a small fee. What we can do is find where and when the entry was made, which is the part the archive will not do for you: a request for “somewhere near Tarnopol around 1930” comes back “not found”. With the year, the parish and the entry, you order the extract yourself.
My grandmother said the village was “near Tarnopol”. Is that enough?
It is a start. Several villages of the same name can sit in one region — there are at least four called Załawie — so we ask for a second coordinate: the parish, the county, a neighbouring village, a river. Our free village finder takes the name as your family spells it and shows the candidates, with today's name and district.
Do you write in Polish?
Yes. Write to us in Polish, and the answer, the report and the invoice come in Polish.
Write us the surname and the village
The surname, the village as your family says it, and what happened in 1939–46 if you know it. We answer in writing within two business days: what is in Poland and free, what is only here, and whether a day in the village is worth it.
Five different searches
Which of these is your family's story?
Where the records are depends on what happened to the family, not on where the village is today. Each of these pages says which archives your case runs through, and which part of it costs nothing.
Which archive holds your village
Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Warsaw: it depends on the year, the rite and the eparchy — not on today's region.
A Lemko family
The village is in Poland and so are the old registers. The family that stayed was moved to Ukraine in 1944–46 — into the regions where we work.
A Jewish family from Galicia, Volhynia or Podolia
Two empires and two record systems. Which books are in Warsaw, which survive in Ukraine, and what to do where the community's registers are gone.
Taken as forced labour, 1941–45
Nobody emigrated — somebody was taken to Germany. Three archives in three countries wrote it down.
Eighty years is not too late. It is nearly too late.
The registers will keep. The people who remember which house was whose will not. If your family's village is in the Ternopil, Lviv or Ivano-Frankivsk region, tell us its name.