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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.

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.

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.

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.