If the village is now in Poland
The registers are in Poland. The cousins are in Ukraine.
If your great-grandfather left a Lemko village for Pennsylvania or Manitoba before 1914, his baptism is in a Polish archive, and we will tell you below how to read it without us. But he had brothers and sisters who stayed. Their grandchildren were put on a train in 1945, and a great many of them got off in the Ternopil and Lviv regions. They took the surname with them, and the memory of the village, and sometimes the photographs your side of the family sent home. That half of the search is ours.
Two deportations, and most people know only the second
Operation Vistula, in the spring of 1947, scattered about 140,000 people across the north and west of Poland, and it is the name that survives in diaspora memory. It was the second wave. The first was larger: under the agreement of September 1944 between the new Polish government and Soviet Ukraine, some 480,000 Ukrainians were moved east between 1944 and 1946. In some counties of the Lemko region and around Sanok the greater part of the Ukrainian population had gone before Vistula began; Vistula took those who had managed to stay.
The first transports went far — to the Donbas, to the steppe around Kherson and Mykolaiv — and the mountain families could not live there. Within a year or two many had made their own way back west, as close to home as the border allowed, and settled in the villages of the Ternopil, Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, very often in houses that Polish families had just been made to leave. That is why a Lemko surname is found today in a village near Ternopil that has no Lemko history at all before 1945.
Where your emigrant's records are — and you do not need us for them
The Greek Catholic parishes of the Lemko region belonged to the Przemyśl eparchy, and their registers stayed in Poland. The main body is the archive of the Greek Catholic bishopric held in the State Archive in Przemyśl; more is in the state archives in Sanok, Rzeszów and Nowy Sącz, and older material is in AGAD in Warsaw. A large part has been scanned and can be read online for nothing, and Polish volunteers have indexed many parishes by name.
We do not travel to Poland and we will not sell you a search you can make yourself. If that is all your case needs, the free assessment will say so and point you to the right archive. For the Slovak side of the mountains — the Prešov region — the registers are in the Slovak state archives, and most are filmed and free on FamilySearch.
The one document that leads to living people
Every family moved in 1944–46 was listed: the head of the household and everybody under that roof with their ages, the village they left, what they left behind there, and the place where they were settled. The lists were kept by the resettlement offices and are now in the state archives of the regions that received the families.
For a genealogist this is an unusual kind of record. A parish register leads backwards, to the dead. A resettlement list leads forwards: it names the village in Ukraine where your grandfather's brother's family arrived in 1945, and in a village people do not move much. The surname is usually still on the gate, and certainly in the cemetery.
Why the surname has to be spelled twice
Your documents carry the name in Polish or American spelling — Chomiszczak, Homishak. The Ukrainian lists carry it in Cyrillic, as Хомищак or Хомишак, written by a Soviet clerk who heard it said. An index does not answer a spelling it was not given, and this is the point at which most searches stop and conclude that nothing exists. The same holds for the village: a list may give it in its Ukrainian form, its Polish form, or the form a clerk in Donetsk made of it.
Our free village finder knows what a Polish, German or English ear did to a Lemko place name, and gives you the forms to search under.
What is still there to be found in the village where they settled
The graves of the generation that was moved, with the birthplace sometimes cut into the stone, because people wanted it known where they were from. A church or a chapel the newcomers built or took over. In many villages a Lemko society, a small museum room, a yearly gathering. And people in their eighties who were children on the transport and can tell you which families came from which village — knowledge that is written down nowhere, and that will not be available for very much longer.
What we do, and what it costs
The assessment is free: write us the surname, the village in Poland, and whatever the family says about who stayed behind. We tell you in writing which part of your search is in Poland and free, and whether the Ukrainian half is worth opening.
A records check is $140: whether the family can be found in the resettlement records, where they were settled, and which later records exist for that place — a written answer, in your language. A day in the village where they settled is $290: the cemetery read stone by stone, the families with your surname found and spoken to, the church, the street, all of it photographed and recorded. If nothing of your family is found there, half comes back to you. We work in the Ternopil, Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk regions; for other regions, ask first.
What Lemko families ask us
My ancestor left in 1905. What use to me is a list from 1945?
He left; his brothers and sisters did not. The people on the 1945 list are their children and grandchildren — your second and third cousins — and the list says where they went. It is also a check on your own tree: a household recorded with ages in 1945 can be matched against the baptisms you already hold, which shows whether you have the right family in a village where half the people shared a surname.
Do you search in the archives in Poland?
No. We say plainly which Polish archive holds your parish and what is already online, and that advice is free. Our own work begins where the family crossed into Ukraine.
We are Rusyn, not Ukrainian. Does that change where the records are?
It does not. The registers record a rite — Greek Catholic, later sometimes Orthodox — and a village, not a nationality, and the resettlement lists were drawn up by village. However your family names itself, the paper is in the same place.
Does this apply to Boyko families, or to the villages around Przemyśl and Jarosław?
Yes. The 1944–46 agreement covered the whole strip along the new border — the Lemko region, the western Boyko villages, Nadsiannia, the Chełm region — and the same lists exist for all of them. Families from around Przemyśl and Lubaczów were mostly settled in the Lviv and Ternopil regions.
What if my relatives there do not want to be found?
Then we leave them alone. We ask in the village openly, we say who is asking and why, and we pass on a name or an address only when the person has agreed to it. In practice the usual answer is a kitchen table and a box of photographs.
Tell us the surname and the village in Poland
The surname as you spell it, the village, and anything the family says about the ones who stayed. We answer in writing within two business days — what is in Poland and free, and whether there is a trail on this side of the border.
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 Polish family from the Kresy
Lwów, Tarnopol, Stanisławów, Wołyń: what is in Warsaw, what stayed here, and what is left of the village.
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.
Somebody in a village near Ternopil has your surname on their gate.
They were moved there in 1945 from the village your family left in 1905. Tell us the surname and the village, and we will tell you, for nothing, whether the list that connects the two can be found.