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The village name on your document probably does not exist.

Not because the place is gone — because the name was written down by a clerk who had never heard it, in a language that was not Ukrainian, and has been renamed once or twice since. Type it exactly as it appears on your paper. You will get the most likely places it refers to today.

Copy the spelling from the document, including anything that looks like a mistake. Zbaraz, Skalat, Nowe Sioło, Bandrow Narodowy — all of these are useful as-is.

Surnames cluster regionally and often narrow the search.

Nothing to hand to type in?

An answer usually comes back within half a minute, sometimes a little longer. Leave this tab open — it appears below when it is ready.

Nothing you type here is stored. The request is passed to a language model and the answer is returned to your screen; we keep no record of it and cannot see it.

Why the name on your document is wrong

Western Ukraine changed hands four times in a century. A village in Galicia was written in German by an Austrian registrar until 1918, in Polish until 1939, in Russian until 1991, and in Ukrainian since. Each of those clerks wrote what they heard, in their own orthography — so one place carries four spellings, none of which is the one your family used at home.

Then the family emigrated. The name was written a fifth time, at Ellis Island or Halifax or Buenos Aires, by an official transcribing an unfamiliar sound from a tired traveller. That fifth spelling is usually the one on your document, and it is the furthest from the truth.

Finally the map moved. Soviet administrative reform merged villages and renamed hundreds of them; the 2020 reform redrew every raion in the country. A village that existed in 1908 may today be a street in a larger settlement, or a field with a cemetery in it.

So the search is not a lookup. It is a reconstruction — from the spelling, the surname, the date and the region, back to a place that has a name on a modern map.

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Record reader

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.

Archive letter

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.

Free tools

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.

Found your village? The next question is whether anything of it remains.

We drive to these places. If one of the names above looks like yours, write to us — we will tell you honestly what survives there, which archive holds the registers, and what it would cost to find out. The first assessment costs nothing.