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Each one answers a question every family search starts with — what this place is called now, what the priest wrote in 1878, how to ask an archive in the language it answers in. They run on a language model, they cost nothing, they ask for no email address, and they keep nothing.
01
Type the name as it stands on your ship manifest or gravestone and see which places in Ukraine it most likely means today — the oblast, the older Austrian, Polish and Hungarian spellings, and which archive should hold the parish registers.
02
Photograph a page of a parish register and get a transcription and translation line by line — the names, the dates, the abbreviations the priest used, and an honest note where the ink has defeated it.
03
Describe who you are looking for and get a letter in Ukrainian, in the form an archive expects, ready to paste into an email — including what to ask for and what not to.
All three are a language model reading what you give it and answering from what it has learned. None of them opens a register, telephones a village council or looks at a map. A confident answer from a machine is still a hypothesis.
That is not a small thing. Most family searches stall at the first step — a name nobody can place on a map, a page nobody can read, an archive nobody knows how to write to. Getting past that step for nothing is worth the half-minute it takes.
But the truth is in the step after it, and that step is physical: a register pulled off a shelf, a churchyard walked, a village clerk asked in person. That is the work we charge for, and it begins with an assessment that costs nothing.
Your text and your photographs are passed to the model and the answer comes back to your screen. We keep no copy, we cannot see what you asked, and there is nothing to sign up for. Close the tab and it is gone.
All three tools start from something you already hold — a name as it was written down, a photograph of a page, a file number. If you have none of that, this is the ordinary place to begin: the village name is almost always on paper somebody in the family still owns. The checklist names the seven documents that carry it, where each one is searchable from your own chair, and the trap that hides the name on every one of them.
Not everyone left
Two million people were taken from Ukraine to work in Germany between 1941 and 1944, and much of the diaspora descends from those who never went back. That search runs through different archives from the ones described above — and the page about it says which, and what you can look up yourself for nothing.
Five different searches
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.
Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Warsaw: it depends on the year, the rite and the eparchy — not on today's region.
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.
Lwów, Tarnopol, Stanisławów, Wołyń: what is in Warsaw, what stayed here, and what is left of the village.
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.
Villages and towns of the Ternopil region found in 15th-century court records decades before their official first mention.
Send us what the tools gave you. We will say plainly what survives in that village, which archive holds the registers, and what it would cost to find out. The first assessment is free.