Researching Central-Eastern European Genealogy

There is a myth that if your ancestors come from Czechoslovakia,  Yugoslavia, Russia, Poland, Galicia, or other countries from that region of the “old country,” you are out of luck.  Not so fast!...
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By Sister Manja Midgl

After attending the FEEFHS (Federation of East European Family History Societies) conference in Salt Lake City on July 12-14, 2012, for me this belief was dispelled. In order to be successful with Eastern European research a thorough search of the information available in the United States and/or Canada must be done first.  The information that is needed is when your ancestor departed from his or her ancestral home and what village, town or city they came from. Having the village and the date information and using a gazetteer, you can determine what churches served that village and where the civil records were kept. A village might not have a church, so your ancestor might have needed to travel to another village to have christenings or marriages performed and/or recorded. Also death information would  have been recorded on the church records.

Knowledge of Eastern Europe history is essential to understand where to look for information. The language in which the the records will be found will depend on what country had jurisdiction over the village. Records in the area of Prussia would be found in German.  Records in the area called Galicia could be in either Latin or German.  Galicia, which was under the Austrian Empire, mandated that the Roman Catholic Church was responsible for keeping all of the records for everyone, including Jewish subjects and the records were kept in Latin.  Areas under Russian domination which originally kept records in Polish were mandated to keep the records in Cyrillic after 1868.

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Some of the easier to understand records were in columnar format.  This makes it easier to figure out who was the person baptized or deceased.  It is easier to figure out who was the bride and groom, their parents, the sponsors, godparents or the witnesses.  Some of the records in paragraph form have standardized formats.  Once you know the format, you will know where to look for the names of individuals in the record and who is who.  Some records, however, are “free form” where anyone can be anywhere in the paragraph depending on where the record keeper recorded the event.  For example, one Latin record listed the midwife’s name first because she was the one who originally baptized the baby because it was felt that the child would not survive.  The record listed the child’s grandparents, parents, and the parish priest who performed the “official” baptism.  The child’s name was near the end of the paragraph.

A knowledge of the grammar rules of the record keeping languages helps since the ending of a word indicates which descriptive words belong to whom.  English doesn’t have these descriptive endings, but in the eastern European languages, words often have gender which mandates the ending of the related word. One of the suggestions I picked up in both the Polish and Russian classes from the conference was to start using the handwriting helps on wiki.familysearch.org and practice writing the individual script symbols for each letter of their alphabet. (Remember, indexes will be listed in the order of the language’s alphabet, not the English alphabet.) 

We think this information may be useful and needed by many people desiring to search for their ancestors. We are ready to start a class if there is sufficient interest in Central Eastern Europe research. Please spread the word and call us at St. George FamilySearch Library. We would also welcome anyone who has an interest or skills in researching in any of the areas mentioned in this article that would be willing to develop and/or share their knowledge. Please contact Sister Anderson or Elder Orman by calling 435-673-4591. You are needed and your service will greatly assist others

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