Service 01 · from $390 · about 2 weeks
The village name on the manifest is wrong. We find the real one.
A tired clerk in New York harbour wrote down what he heard. A century later that spelling is the only thread your family has, and it leads nowhere on a map. Undoing that is the first piece of work in every case we take, and it stands on its own.
What arrives
A written report, in your language, that you can keep, share with cousins and hand to any researcher you engage later — including one who is not us.
- The village identified: the historical name, the name it carries today, the district and region
- Which parish it belonged to, of which confession — Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, Orthodox or Jewish
- Which archive holds the church books, with fond and inventory references where they exist
- What years of records survive, and — just as important — what was destroyed and when
- Present-day photographs and a satellite view; the state of the church and the cemetery
- A map showing where the village sits relative to Lviv, the Polish border and the nearest airport
How it is done
- Your spelling against the gazetteers
- Every distorted spelling is matched against the historical gazetteers of the region — the Austrian Gemeindelexikon, the Polish Słownik geograficzny, the Greek Catholic schematisms — because the name you hold was recorded by ear in one empire's alphabet and repeated in another's.
- Surname distribution and parish structure
- Where several candidate villages survive the first pass, the family name itself decides. Surnames cluster tightly in Galicia, and parish registers show where yours was thick on the ground in the emigration decades.
- What is actually in the archive today
- The last step is the one most reports skip: confirming that the books exist. We check the holdings before we tell you a village, because a correct answer that leads to an empty shelf is not an answer.
Price: from $390 — and what moves it
- Whether you hold one spelling or three contradictory ones
- Whether the family name is common in the district or rare
- How many candidate villages survive the first pass and have to be checked individually
- Whether the records are held in one archive or scattered between Lviv, Warsaw and Przemyśl
Roughly three to five hours of a researcher's time, delivered inside two weeks. You receive a fixed written quote after the free assessment — never a running meter. Half is paid on commissioning, half on delivery.
This is the right first step if
- You have a family name and a place name that does not exist on any modern map
- You want to know whether anything can be found before spending real money
- You are planning a journey and need to know where you would actually be going
- You want a document the whole family can read, not a folder of raw scans
It is the wrong step if
- You already know the village and the parish — commission the archival research instead
- You want the family tree itself: this report tells you where to dig, not who is buried there
Questions about the Village Report
How much does it cost to find my ancestral village in Ukraine?
Our Village Report starts at $390 and takes about two weeks. That covers identifying the real village behind a misspelled name, the parish, the archive that holds its records, what years survive, and photographs of the place as it is today. You receive a fixed quote for your case after a free assessment.
All I have is “Zloczow, Austria”. Is that enough?
Usually, yes. That spelling names a district town rather than a village, but combined with the family name, the emigration year and the parish structure of the area it narrows down fast. If it genuinely is not enough, we say so in the free assessment and tell you which single document from your attic would change that.
What if the village no longer exists?
Some do not — resettled, merged, or emptied in the 1940s. The report says so plainly and tells you what stands there now, where the parish records went, and where the cemetery is, if there is one. That is still an answer, and families would rather have it than a comfortable silence.
Can I use the report with a different researcher?
Yes. It is written to be usable by anyone: archive names, fond numbers, surviving years. We would rather you owned a document that outlives your relationship with us than a dependency.
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.
One report answers the question your family has asked for fifty years.
Write us the family name and the village as it appears on your documents — however it is spelled. We tell you honestly whether it can be found, and what it would cost.