Service 01 · $140 · usually within two weeks
Before anyone opens a book: do the books still exist?
Half of the money wasted in family research is spent looking for registers that burned in 1944. The first honest step in any case is to find out what survives for your village and your years — and only then decide what is worth paying for.
What arrives
A written answer, in your language, that tells you where you stand — and, if there is a next step, what it is and what it costs.
- The village confirmed — the historical name, the name it carries today, the district and region
- Which parish it belonged to, in both rites: Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic, and the Jewish community where there was one
- Which registers survive for the years you need — births, marriages, deaths — and which archive holds them
- What was destroyed or lost, and when, so you stop looking for it
- Beyond the church books where your case needs it: court, notarial or Soviet-era records for the same place
- The next step, if there is one, with its price in writing
How it is done
- Your spelling against the gazetteers
- If the village is still uncertain, every distorted spelling is matched against the historical gazetteers of the region, because the name you hold was recorded by ear in one empire's alphabet and repeated in another's.
- Both rites, not one
- Galician villages were served by a Greek Catholic and a Roman Catholic parish at once, often in different places, and mixed families appear in both. We check both, because a family missing from one set of books is often simply in the other.
- The archive inventories, year by year
- Registers survive unevenly: a village can have births for 1850–1890, nothing for 1891–1920 and marriages again after that. We go through the inventories for your years specifically, so the answer is about your ancestors rather than about the village in general.
- When the trail is Soviet rather than Austrian
- If nobody emigrated — if somebody was taken west during the war instead — the same check runs through different books: the civil registration a village council has kept since 1919 and the oblast archive rather than a parish. We say which of the two your case is before you pay.
Price: $140 — and what it does not include
- It is a written answer, not the documents themselves — photographing the pages is a day in the archive
- If the books survive, the next step is priced in writing: usually a $290 day in the reading room
- If they do not, the check ends there, and you know it for certain
- A document you already hold — a parish extract, a letter, a passport page — is read separately: $45 per document, four documents of one family for $140
$140, paid in advance; work starts once the payment arrives, and the invoice comes by email with the payment details on it. There is no refund for a negative answer, because the answer is what you are paying for — if the books did not survive, you paid $140 to stop searching, which is the cheapest good outcome a case can have.
This is the right first step if
- You know the village, or roughly where it was, and want to know whether its records exist before spending more
- You have searched online and found nothing, and do not know whether that means nothing survives
- You are hoping to find an older generation than the one you already have
- You want a researcher to tell you honestly whether a trip or a reading-room day is worth it
It is the wrong step if
- You already know the file and the archive — book a day in the archive directly
- You want the village itself photographed — that is a day in the village
Questions about the records check
How much does it cost to find out whether my ancestors' records survive?
$140 for a written answer: which parish the village belonged to in both rites, which registers survive for the years you need, where they are held, and what was lost. It usually takes up to two weeks, and it tells you whether anything further is worth paying for.
All I have is “Zloczow, Austria”. Is that enough?
Often, yes. That spelling names a district town rather than a village, but combined with the family name and the emigration year it narrows down. Try our free village finder first — it costs nothing. If the village is still unclear after that, tell us in your request, and we say in the free assessment whether the check can resolve it.
What if the books did not survive?
Then that is the answer, in writing, with what was lost and when. It is not a failed check: families spend years and far more than $140 searching for registers that no longer exist. Knowing for certain is what lets you stop.
Do I get the documents themselves?
No — the check tells you what exists and where. Photographing the actual pages means ordering the files and a working day in the reading room, which is the next step at $290, priced in writing once we know what there is to photograph.
Our family never emigrated — my grandmother was taken to Germany. Does this work for us?
Yes. The check then runs through Soviet civil registration and the oblast archive rather than the parish books, and for people taken as forced labour through the files of their return. The page on this site about forced labour describes that road.
Can you read a document we already have?
Yes. A parish extract, a birth or marriage certificate, a letter, a page from a passport or a ship's record — in Latin, Polish, German, Ukrainian or Russian, handwritten or printed. Each document is transcribed, translated and explained: who is named in it, what it establishes and where it points next. $45 per document, or $140 for four documents of one family, paid in advance.
Before you commission anything, check what you may already own: The 7 documents that reveal your Ukrainian village
The rest of the ladder
You can start anywhere on it, and stop after any step.
Find out what exists before you pay for anything larger.
Write us the family name, the village as you know it and the years you are after. We tell you in writing whether a check makes sense for your case.