Rights and licenses

Order terms: €19, refunds, 14 days

The search costs €19. The written report with the findings arrives within five days after the questionnaire, if it asks to start right away. Without that request, we first wait out the 14-day withdrawal period, counted from the day of payment, and the report arrives within five days after that period. The five days are counted from the day you complete the questionnaire: we cannot start the search without your details. The €19 counts in full toward any work that follows: Family after the search costs €471 instead of €490. Only the search can be ordered right away. Which tier fits your books, we say in the report.

Refunds. We return the €19 only when the catalog shows no book of your parish for the years 1850–1917. If the books survive but are not scanned, that is not grounds for a refund: we offer a paid order for copies from the archive, and the €19 counts toward its price. A free index is not grounds for a refund: through it we find entries faster and check each one against the page of the book. If we offered paid continuation and you did not order it, the €19 is not returned: it paid for the report.

Canceling before work starts. As long as the search has not started, you may cancel the order by email, and we return the €19 in full.

What is not returned. If you ordered a reading of the books and the surname did not turn up in the books read, that is not grounds for a refund. Then you get a report on the books checked and a proven “no entry.” If the sources turned out to be unreachable, the unspent part is returned regardless of the size of the order.

14 days to withdraw. The service is ordered over the internet, so EU law gives you 14 days to change your mind without explanation and get your money back. Paying itself does not take this right away from you.

Only your own request to start earlier takes it away. You write it in one sentence in the email with the questionnaire: “I ask to start the work right away and understand that the right to withdraw is lost for the part already done.” For Family and Heritage, you write the same sentence in reply to the email with the search report. In your account the same request is sent with a button carrying this sentence, and we keep its text and time. If you withdraw after that, you pay only for the part already done, and the rest is returned. Without that sentence we do not start until 14 days have passed, or until you send it. One email to pytannia@rodovidarchive.com is enough to withdraw. We return the money the same way you paid, within 14 days of your email.

What we do not sell. Nothing physical: no printed book, no shipping. The result is always a page behind a link and a written report.

Ancestors’ data: records older than 75 years

Personal-data-protection law does not cover the deceased. But we do not take records younger than 75 years at all: they are closed and held by the civil registry office.

There are no living people in the tree. If a living person turns up in the material, we do not create a card for them, and we mark the link as “exists, not shown.” That is how it is in your tree, and in every example on this site.

Your data, and the 4 services that process it

• We ask only for what you write in the questionnaire: where the family came from, the surname and its spellings, the earliest known ancestor, the rite, what you have already tried, documents if you choose to add them, and the language for our reply. You mark any living people in the email yourself; we do not add them to the tree. Stripe sees the name, email and card. Nothing more.
• The tree lives behind a link, under a password, and is encrypted: the file cannot be read without the password. The page is closed to search engines.
• We do not show your tree to anyone and do not use it as an example without your separate written request.
• We do not sell your data and pass it only to services without which the order technically does not work: Stripe (payment, we never see the card number at all), Google (our email, and sign-in with Google if you choose it), Cloudflare (hosting for these pages, the visit counter and your account), GitHub (GitHub Pages, hosting for your password-encrypted tree).
• There are no ad networks on the site. There is our own visit counter, and it stores no data about you: only which pages are opened and which buttons are pressed, the country, the type of device, and whether a search found a village or a surname in our catalog. It stores nothing on your device: no cookies or other records. Your account and the page after payment remember the chosen language in this browser. A click on a buy button carries a one-time code that links the source of that visit to the order. We do not record your IP address, nor a word of what you type into a search, nor anything that points to you specifically. To tell one visitor from another, the server turns the IP address and the browser’s name into a one-way code with a random key that changes every day; the address and browser name themselves are never recorded anywhere, old keys are deleted, and the next day the same visitor gets a different code. The records are kept in the EU and are deleted after 400 days. If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, the counter sends nothing. No page makes any external request: the counter writes to this same site, and the map in the demo tree is drawn from data that lives here too.
• Ask us to delete it, and we delete it along with the working materials. One email to pytannia@rodovidarchive.com is enough, no explanation needed.

Your account: what it holds and for how long

• Your account opens after payment. You sign in with Google or with an email and a password. From Google we get only your email address and your Google account ID, no name and no photo. We keep a password only as a one-way code.
• Your account holds your email, the name from the payment, the questionnaire, the relatives’ cards, your messages with us and the order status. It has no card number. All of it is stored in a Cloudflare database in the EU. Only you and we can see it, and we pass it to no one else.
• If you add living relatives, write only what the search needs, and tell them we hold this data.
• The account sets one sign-in cookie for 30 days. Page scripts cannot read it. During sign-in with Google one or two more are added for 10 minutes and removed once you are in. The tree window remembers its language and layout on your device. To stop password guessing, the server counts sign-in attempts by a one-way code of the IP address and does not record the address itself.
• We keep your account data while your account exists. You can delete it in the account settings or with one email to pytannia@rodovidarchive.com. We act on the email within 30 days. Database backups disappear within 30 days.
• After deletion two records stay: the payment (amount, date, Stripe payment number) and, if you asked us to start right away, the text and time of that request. No name and no email. We need them for accounting and in case of a dispute.
• If you paid but never created an account, we delete the name and email from the payment after 24 months.

Sources, and Article 20 of the Archives Law

• Open archive catalogs, scans held by state archives, Wikimedia mirrors, free indexes.
• We do not bypass paywalls, do not solve captchas, do not log in under someone else’s account, and do not download anything that robots.txt forbids.
• Scans remain the property of the archives. In the report we give a crop and a link to the frame, and we do not resell anyone else’s images.

Indexes compiled by others

The "What else is known about this place" references on Kyiv Oblast pages are drawn from open indexes published under the MIT license: Copyright (c) 2026 Volodymyr Stetsenko. The indexes of the revision lists DAKO ф. 280 оп. 2 were transcribed by the editors of Ukrainian Wikisource, license CC BY-SA 4.0.

Archive frames on this site

These are documents from the open resources of state archives. Showing them is allowed by Article 20, paragraph 6 of the Law “On the National Archival Fund and Archival Institutions” («Про Національний архівний фонд та архівні установи»): publishing the content of archival documents is allowed “with a reference to their place of storage” («з посиланням на місце їх зберігання»). That is why under every image there is the full reference: archive, fond, opys, sprava (collection, inventory, file), frame number.

Artificial intelligence

Software reads the pages first, and a person checks every fact against the scan. The software holds the structure of a record and the frame numbers well, and reads names poorly; the measurement on a real page, with the failed numbers, is on the Method page. That is why Family takes 4–6 weeks, and the term of Heritage is agreed together with its scope. An illegible spot stays empty: inventing a name from the context of the era is forbidden here.

If a chat ever appears here, it will say from its first message that it is a machine.

There are no testimonials or coats of arms on this site

There are no testimonials here. We do not write them and do not buy them. A testimonial is published only with a name, a date and the client’s written permission. The work can be checked without testimonials: a proven “no entry” and the full 1891 case, where every frame opens.

• Accounts in the name of invented people.
• Bought activity.
• Coats of arms “attached” to a surname. A coat of arms belonged to a specific family line; a surname does not carry it.