Record Atlas
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Last checked 2026-09-29. Tell us if this has changed.

The ground it holds

Record regions whose registers are filed here, and for which years.

Central Istria
  • 1374–1805 Habsburg — County of Pazin
  • 1805–1815 Napoleonic — Illyrian Provinces
  • 1815–1918 Austria–Hungary — Küstenland
  • 1918–1943 Italy — Provincia dell'Istria — THE TRAP. Records of these years are filed under ITALY, not Croatia — FamilySearch's Italy, Pola and Trieste collection (2152685) holds Croatian parishes. Searching the Croatian collection alone finds nothing.
Southern Istria
  • 1331–1797 Republic of Venice — Istria da Mar
  • 1797–1805 Austria — first occupation
  • 1805–1813 Napoleonic — Illyrian Provinces
  • 1813–1918 Austria — Küstenland, diocese of Pola
  • 1918–1943 Italy — Provincia di Pola
The Kvarner — Senj, Vinodol, Rijeka
  • 1469–1809 Habsburg — Senj a Military Frontier garrison — THE TRAP. Senj was Militärgrenze, administered from Vienna and Graz, not from Croatia's civil counties. Military Frontier material is in the Croatian State Archive and in the Vienna Kriegsarchiv — not where a Croatian county search would look.
  • 1809–1813 Napoleonic — Illyrian Provinces
  • 1813–1918 Austria–Hungary — Fiume a Hungarian corpus separatum — THE TRAP. Rijeka/Fiume was governed from BUDAPEST, not Vienna or Zagreb, from 1779. Its administrative records are Hungarian — which is why Hungaricana finds them and Croatian catalogues sometimes do not.
  • 1918–1943 Italy — Fiume; Sušak to Yugoslavia
Carnia, Friuli
  • 1420–1797 Republic of Venice — Patria del Friuli
  • 1806–1815 Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy — THE GOOD NEWS. Civil registration begins in 1806 — births, marriages and deaths recorded by the comune, in Italian, in a standard form. Antenati has the images, free and without an account.
  • 1815–1866 Austria — Lombardy-Venetia
  • 1866–2026 Italy — Provincia di Udine
Dalmatia
  • 1420–1797 Republic of Venice — Dalmatia
  • 1814–1918 Austria — Kingdom of Dalmatia
The Imotski frontier
  • 1717–1797 Republic of Venice — Acquisto Nuovo
  • 1814–1918 Austria — Kingdom of Dalmatia
Campania — Caserta and Naples
  • 1200–1806 Kingdom of Naples
  • 1806–1815 Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples — THE GOOD NEWS. Civil registration begins on the mainland in 1809 — births, marriages and deaths written by the comune on a printed form, in Italian, with the parents named and aged. Antenati has the images, free and without an account. This is the single best year in southern Italian genealogy.
  • 1815–1861 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
  • 1861–1946 Kingdom of Italy
Eastern Sicily — Catania
  • 1200–1816 Kingdom of Sicily
  • 1816–1861 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies — THE TRAP. Sicily's civil registration begins in 1820 — ELEVEN YEARS AFTER the mainland's 1809. A researcher who has worked in Campania and carries the 1809 date across the strait will hunt for a Sicilian birth record that was never written.
  • 1861–1946 Kingdom of Italy
Calabria
  • 1200–1806 Kingdom of Naples — THE HOLE. The earthquake of 1783 levelled much of Calabria Ultra and burned or buried the comune and parish archives with it — Briatico itself was destroyed and rebuilt on a new site. For a great many Calabrian towns there is simply nothing before 1783, and no archive to write to about it.
  • 1806–1815 Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples
  • 1815–1861 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
  • 1861–2026 Italy — Provincia di Vibo Valentia
Posen — Prussian Poland
  • 1200–1793 Poland — the Crown lands
  • 1815–1871 Prussia — Grand Duchy of Posen
  • 1871–1918 German Empire — Province of Posen
The eastern Cape
  • 1652–1795 Dutch East India Company — Cape of Good Hope
  • 1806–1910 Cape Colony — THE TRAP. There is no general civil registration of births and deaths at the Cape until 1895, and it stays patchy after. Hunting for a birth certificate is hunting for something nobody wrote. What names a family instead is the ESTATE FILE — the Master of the Supreme Court's MOOC series, indexed on NAAIRS — together with the Dutch Reformed Church register and the death notice inside the estate file, which lists the parents and the children.
England and Wales
  • 1538–1837 England — the parish register
Queensland
  • 1788–1859 New South Wales — THE TRAP. Queensland did not exist before 6 JUNE 1859. A birth at Brisbane in 1850 is a NEW SOUTH WALES record, indexed by New South Wales, and searching Queensland's index for it returns nothing at all.
Santa Fe — Rosario
  • 1580–1810 Spanish Empire — Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata
  • 1810–1889 Argentina — the Republic
  • 1889–2026 Argentina — Province of Santa Fe — THE TRAP. Argentine civil registration is PROVINCIAL, not national, and Santa Fe's begins in 1889 — later than Buenos Aires. There is no national index to search and the national archive does not hold it: you must know which province, and then find that province's registry. FamilySearch filmed Santa Fe's.
Galicia
  • 1340–1772 Poland — the Crown lands
  • 1772–1918 Austria — Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria — THE TRAP, AND IT IS A THREEFOLD ONE. From 1784 Austria made the parish priest the civil registrar and required THREE PARALLEL SERIES — Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic and Jewish — each kept by its own congregation. A family can appear in more than one and searching only the Roman Catholic books misses half of eastern Galicia. The Jewish series is JewishGen's ground, not the Catholic archives'.
  • 1945–2026 Poland west of the San; Ukraine east of it — THE SECOND TRAP. The border of 1945 cut Galicia in half and its archives with it. Records west of the San are at Przemyśl and Kraków; east of it they are at Lviv and Ternopil, in Ukraine, catalogued in another language under another system. One province, two countries, two catalogues, and no cross-reference between them.
Bukovina
  • 1774–1918 Austria — Duchy of Bukovina
Bohemia
  • 1526–1918 Austria — Kingdom of Bohemia — THE GOOD NEWS, AND IT IS EXCEPTIONAL. The Czech regional archives have digitised nearly every surviving parish register and put them online free, without an account. Western Bohemia is at Porta fontium, the rest at the regional archives' own portals. This is the best-served ground in this entire map.
Moravia and Silesia
  • 1526–1918 Austria — Margraviate of Moravia
Hungary — the Kingdom's core
  • 1699–1867 Habsburg — Kingdom of Hungary
  • 1867–1918 Austria–Hungary — the Hungarian half
Transylvania and the Banat
  • 1699–1867 Habsburg — Grand Principality of Transylvania
  • 1867–1918 Austria–Hungary — the Hungarian half
East Prussia
  • 1525–1871 Duchy, then Kingdom, of Prussia
Pomerania and Danzig
  • 1637–1815 Swedish Pomerania in the west; Brandenburg-Prussia in the east — THE FORGOTTEN TRAP. Western Pomerania was SWEDISH from 1648 to 1815, so its administrative records of those years can be in Stockholm rather than Berlin or Szczecin — which almost nobody thinks to check.
Ireland — the whole island
  • 1534–1801 Kingdom of Ireland, under the English crown
  • 1801–1864 United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
  • 1864–1922 United Kingdom — civil registration
Scotland
  • 1553–1855 Scotland — the Old Parish Registers
Alsace and Lorraine
  • 1552–1792 France — the Three Bishoprics and, from 1648, Alsace
  • 1792–1871 France — civil registration
  • 1871–1918 German Empire — Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen — THE TRAP. The registers do not move and the language does. From 1871 the same volume in the same building is written in German, names are Germanised — Jean becomes Johann, Mulhouse becomes Mülhausen — and the indexes a French-speaking researcher searches will not match. A family that never left the village appears to vanish in 1871 and reappear in 1918.
  • 1944–2026 France
Silesia
  • 1526–1742 Habsburg Bohemian crown lands
  • 1742–1871 Prussia — Province of Silesia (Austrian Silesia stays Habsburg) — THE TRAP. Frederick took most of Silesia in 1742 and left a strip — Austrian Silesia, around Opava and Těšín — with the Habsburgs. Two record systems, two languages of administration and two present-day countries, for a province people still name as one place.
  • 1871–1918 German Empire — Prussian Silesia
  • 1945–2026 Poland, and Czech Silesia in the south — THE TRAP that catches everyone. The German population was expelled and the place names changed wholesale — Breslau is Wrocław, Waldenburg is Wałbrzych, Gleiwitz is Gliwice. Records made in German before 1945 sit in Polish archives under Polish names. Search the German name for the record and the Polish name for the archive.
Livonia, Estonia and Courland
  • 1561–1721 Sweden in the north, the Duchy of Courland in the south
  • 1721–1918 Russian Empire — the Baltic governorates — THE TRAP, and it is a surname trap. Serfdom ended here in 1816–1819, decades before the rest of the empire, and the peasantry had no hereditary surnames until then. Estonian and Latvian surnames were ISSUED between 1822 and 1835, parish by parish, often by the manor. Before that date your family has a first name and a farm name and nothing else, and no amount of searching a surname will find them.
  • 1991–2026 Estonia and Latvia
Congress Poland — the Russian partition
  • 1807–1815 Duchy of Warsaw
  • 1815–1868 Kingdom of Poland, in personal union with Russia
  • 1868–1918 Russian Empire — the Vistula Land — THE TRAP. From 1868 the registers are written in RUSSIAN, in Cyrillic, and they stay that way until 1918. The same parish, the same priest, the same form — in an alphabet most researchers cannot read and most indexes transliterate inconsistently. A family that seems to end in 1868 has not ended.
  • 1918–1939 Poland, restored
  • 1945–2026 Poland
Carniola and the Slovene lands
  • 1500–1784 Inner Austria — Carniola, Styria, Carinthia
  • 1784–1809 Austria — Joseph II's register reform
  • 1809–1813 The Illyrian Provinces
  • 1991–2026 Slovenia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
  • 1463–1878 Ottoman Empire — the Eyalet, then Vilayet, of Bosnia
  • 1878–1908 Austria-Hungary — occupation under Ottoman sovereignty — THE TRAP, and it is a filing trap. Occupied in 1878 but not annexed until 1908, Bosnia was administered by the joint Imperial finance ministry in VIENNA rather than by Austria or by Hungary. Its paper is therefore in neither national series — look in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv and in Sarajevo, not in Budapest.
  • 1992–2026 Bosnia and Herzegovina — THE TRAP nobody wants to write down. The 1992–95 war destroyed municipal register offices, and reconstructed registers were rebuilt from testimony and from surviving copies. A post-war extract may be a reconstruction rather than a transcription, and it is worth asking which.
Vojvodina and the Banat frontier
  • 1699–1848 Habsburg Hungary and the Military Frontier — THE TRAP, and it is the reason this region needs its own entry. The Military Frontier was administered from VIENNA by the war ministry, not from Buda by the Hungarian county — so a family in a Grenzer village has military records where its neighbours ten kilometres away have county ones. The eighteenth-century resettlement brought German, Hungarian, Serb, Slovak and Romanian colonists into the same district, each with their own parish and their own language of register.
  • 1848–1918 Austria-Hungary — the Voivodeship, then Hungarian counties
  • 1944–2026 Yugoslavia, then Serbia — the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina
Quebec and French North America
  • 1621–1763 New France
  • 1763–1867 British North America — the Province of Quebec, then Lower Canada
  • 1867–1994 Canada — the Province of Quebec
Acadia — the Maritimes
  • 1604–1713 France — Acadie
  • 1713–1755 Britain — Nova Scotia; France keeps Île Royale and Île Saint-Jean — THE TRAP, in two halves. Mainland Acadia became British in 1713 and its people did not move; Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island stayed French until 1758 and 1763. Same families, same generation, two sovereigns and two archives.
  • 1755–1764 Britain — the Grand Dérangement — THE TRAP for every Acadian line. The deportation scattered the population to the thirteen colonies, to England, to France, to Saint-Domingue and eventually to Louisiana. A family that vanishes from Nova Scotia in 1755 is not dead and is not in Nova Scotia — look in the Massachusetts town records, in the Poitou and Belle-Île registers in France, and in the Louisiana church registers from 1765.
  • 1764–1867 Britain — Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island
  • 1867–2026 Canada — the Maritime provinces
The Military Frontier — Vojna krajina
  • 1553–1746 Habsburg military frontier, under Graz and Vienna
  • 1746–1848 Habsburg — the regiment system — THE TRAP, AND IT IS THE REASON THIS REGION EXISTS. From 1746 a frontier village belonged to its REGIMENT, not to a county. Its vital registers were kept by the regimental chaplain and filed under the regiment — Ogulin, Otočac, Slunj, Gradiška, Brod, Petrovaradin — so a search of the county archive for a Lika village finds nothing before 1881, and nothing is not the same as not existing. Look for the regiment.
  • 1848–1881 Habsburg — demilitarisation
  • 1881–1918 Croatia-Slavonia, within Hungary
  • 1918–1941 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; Yugoslavia
  • 1945–1991 Socialist Yugoslavia
  • 1991–2026 Croatia
The Netherlands
  • 1580–1795 Dutch Republic
  • 1795–1813 Batavian Republic, then French annexation — THE HINGE OF DUTCH RESEARCH. Civil registration — the burgerlijke stand — starts with the French, and the date differs by where you are: 1796 in the parts annexed early, in Limburg and Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, and 1811 for most of the country. Before that date there is no state record of a birth, only a baptism.
  • 1813–1940 Kingdom of the Netherlands
  • 1940–1945 German occupation
  • 1945–2026 Kingdom of the Netherlands
Denmark
  • 1645–1814 Denmark–Norway
  • 1814–1864 Denmark, after the loss of Norway
  • 1864–1920 Prussia, then the German Empire — in Schleswig only — THE TRAP. Denmark lost Schleswig and Holstein in 1864, so a family from southern Jutland has German Prussian civil registration — Standesamt records from 1874 — for these years, not Danish ones, and the paper may be in Germany. North Schleswig voted itself back to Denmark in 1920; the records of the German period did not all follow.
  • 1920–2026 Denmark
Norway
  • 1623–1814 Denmark–Norway
  • 1814–1905 Norway in union with Sweden, with its own constitution
  • 1905–2026 Norway
Sweden
  • 1686–1860 Sweden
  • 1860–1947 Sweden
Finland
  • 1686–1809 Sweden — the eastern half of the realm
  • 1809–1917 Grand Duchy of Finland, under the Russian crown
  • 1917–1944 Finland — THE TRAP IS KARELIA. The parishes ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940 and 1944 were evacuated, and their registers were evacuated with them — so the records of a place now in Russia are in Finland, at the National Archives, and not where the place is.
  • 1944–2026 Finland
Portugal
  • 1563–1832 Kingdom of Portugal
  • 1832–1911 Kingdom of Portugal — after the civil war
  • 1911–2026 Portuguese Republic
Belgium and the Southern Netherlands
  • 1563–1713 Spanish Netherlands
  • 1713–1795 Austrian Netherlands
  • 1795–1815 French annexation — THE HINGE OF BELGIAN RESEARCH. France annexes the ground in 1795 and civil registration — the état civil, births, marriages and deaths recorded by the commune — begins in 1796. Before that date there is no state record of a birth anywhere in the country, only a baptism. After it there are two independent series for every person, which is why Belgian research is unusually tractable.
  • 1815–1830 United Kingdom of the Netherlands
  • 1830–1914 Kingdom of Belgium — THE TRAP IS THAT THERE IS NO CENTRAL ARCHIVE TO WRITE TO. The State Archives keep the registers in provincial repositories — Antwerp, Beveren, Bruges, Ghent, Hasselt, Kortrijk, Leuven, Liège, Mons, Namur, Tournai, Arlon, Eupen — and a request addressed to Brussels for a parish in Limburg goes to the wrong building. The population registers, kept by the commune from 1846, follow a household from address to address and are the other half of the work.
  • 1918–1940 Kingdom of Belgium
  • 1944–2026 Kingdom of Belgium

7319 volumes across 1886 places

Places in this map that carry at least one volume from FamilySearch.

…and 1486 more.

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