Родовід Архів
Sign inStart the search €19Account
Menu
On this page
1. Establish the parish2. Is there a surname index3. If there is no index, look for scans4. Scans exist, there is no index
free · step by step

How to find ancestors yourself, free

These are the same steps our search starts with. Steps 1–3 cost nothing. Step 4 begins where there is no index.

1. Establish the parish

Parish registers were kept by parishes. A village with no church of its own belonged to the parish of a neighboring one. Until you know the parish, you are searching in the wrong place.

  • A parish catalog: the church, the parish’s villages and the parish registers by year with fond and sprava, for Podolia Governorate. Free, no registration.
  • A consolidated catalog of archive files: about 117,000 files from 29,000 settlements and about 40 archives, no login. It searches only file titles.
  • Another catalog shows where a book is available online.
Do not stop at one catalog.

For five Podillia settlements, this catalog did not show about 45% of the files that are in the consolidated catalog of archive files, because it reads only one archive. Settlements with several churches lose the most.

2. Is there a surname index

If an index exists, the surname will be found free of charge.

  • The largest free platform with name indexes: over 100 million Ukrainian records (July 2026), a free account is needed. Its strongest oblasts: Chernihiv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Poltava, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Sumy.
  • The Polish genealogical society’s index, its Ukraine section: 595 indexed parishes, mostly Roman Catholic, no registration. Strongest for Lviv oblast (189), Ternopil oblast (124), Ivano-Frankivsk oblast (48), Khmelnytskyi oblast (41), checked August 13, 2026.
  • A surname distribution directory: shows where a surname occurs, so you are not searching in the wrong oblast.
An Orthodox ancestor from Chernihiv region, born after 1880

An ordinary surname search on the largest free platform with name indexes usually finds ancestors like this. People born before 1880 are mostly no longer in this index. For them, only reading the books straight through remains.

3. If there is no index, look for scans

  • On the largest free platform with name indexes: the “Images” section, search by place. This is where books no one has indexed lie. Lviv oblast: over 13,000 groups of scans, Ternopil oblast about 2,500, Ivano-Frankivsk oblast about 1,300. Checked from home on August 12, 2026, no visit to a dedicated reading room needed.
  • Poland’s state portal for searching archive files, fonds group AGAD 298: Greek Catholic parish registers of the Lviv, Peremyshl and Stanislaviv eparchies, 1728–1951: 460 units, 289 parishes, a gallery of scans exists for 448 units, checked August 16, 2026. Free, no login.
  • An open DAKhmO catalog with PDFs of the parish registers themselves.

Some catalogs also index only file titles. A surname inside a book cannot be found there.

4. Scans exist, there is no index

Then the book is read straight through, page by page: in Latin script, Polish, German or Church Slavonic cursive. File ДАХмО ф. 18 оп. 2 спр. 21, five years of one village, has 253 frames: about 50 a year for births, marriages and deaths together.

Family €490 (€471 after the search): both the father’s and the mother’s side of the family, scope fixed after the search. First, the search for €19: a report within five days after the questionnaire, if you ask to start right away. If an index already exists, we use it to find entries faster, check each one against the page of the book, and read the years it does not cover.

Books for your area in the catalog Start the search €19

2 101 places already have a free page: whether a surname index and scans exist.

The search €19