Record Atlas
2 FamilySearch collections · 22 archives · 1,209 places · 1515–1994

Croatia

Where the records of Croatia are, who holds them, and what it costs to look. 7,240,860 indexed records reachable through FamilySearch alone.

Where to start in Croatia

9 of the 17 checked sources here can be opened tonight. 4are free images with no account. 1 needs a free account. 4are an index with no images. 1is paid or part-paid. 7are catalogue cards or paper in a building — a letter, not a click. On top of that, 9 worldwide services reach Croatia without a subscription.

5 more institutions are listed here and have never been checked — nobody has opened them, written to them, or found out what they hold. They are on the map as grey because that is what they are, and the honest reading of this page is 9 known-open, 5 unknown.

Write to ARHiNET — Croatian State Archives, Hungaricana, Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives), Stare hrvatske novine (NSK), HR-HDA-883 — Zbirka matičnih knjiga (Hrvatski državni arhiv) for what is not online. FamilySearch has 2 collections covering it, running 1515–1994, 7,240,860 indexed records. 10 pieces of this ground are mapped for jurisdiction, so the atlas can say whose archive held it in a given year.

1,209 places placed, 6,528 volumes walked. Open Croatia on the map, or tell us what is missing.

Whose archive this ground was

Record regions mapped in Croatia — which empire held the ground, and therefore which archive holds its paper.

The archives

  • Acta Croatica mixed Zagreb, Croatia

    Croatian historical documents indexed by the people named in them, plus a page per surname giving its spelling variants, the towns it is thickest in, and where its bearers emigrated. The closest thing anywhere to what this atlas does, done for names instead of places. Its figures are derived and carry no stated licence, so this is a link, not a source of rows.

  • ANNO — Austrian Newspapers Online free Vienna, Austria

    The Austrian National Library's digitised newspaper run. Full-text searchable, and it covers the whole empire — which is why it finds Croatian and Istrian names.

  • ARHiNET — Croatian State Archives catalogue Zagreb, Croatia

    The Croatian State Archives, and through it the national register of archival fonds — which archive holds which fonds; the paper itself is almost all unphotographed. THE OLD LINK HERE WAS DEAD. This row pointed at arhinet.arhiv.hr, which no longer resolves at all — NXDOMAIN on Google's and Cloudflare's resolvers both, not a timeout or a redirect, so every Croatian researcher who clicked ARHiNET on this map got nothing. hais.arhiv.hr resolves to 161.53.80.20 and serves NOTHING ON EITHER PORT 80 OR 443 — tested 30 September 2026 with curl, which is the difference between a service that is down and one that is refusing us: the host answers DNS and nothing is listening. NOTE ALSO that hais was described here as ARHiNET's "successor"; that is not established by anyone who has checked, and a family archive that repeated it had to withdraw the claim. www.arhiv.hr is a DIFFERENT machine, 161.53.80.7, it works, and it is NOT the fonds register — neither the word ARHiNET nor HAIS appears anywhere on it in either language. What it does carry is the live register search, provider hda-mk-search. So this row points at a working site that answers a different question; the national fonds register currently has no working address known to this atlas. NOTE: the same site DOES carry a working register search — see provider hda-mk-search — which indexes the microfilmed register collection HR-HDA-1448 and answers whether a given parish was filmed. That is a separate tool from the fonds register described above, and it is the one to reach for first when the question is about matične knjige.

  • Državni arhiv u Pazinu onsite Pazin, Croatia

    The Pazin State Archive, which holds the parish registers of central Istria. They will search, certify and post a named record for a fee. Its registers are also filmed as the ZM34K series, supplied as page images. Two of those reels were mapped frame by frame on 30 September 2026 and their contents recorded, because the archive's own paper inventory proved unreliable for them: ZM34K-214 and ZM34K-215 together run M01068774-M01070236 (1,463 contiguous frames) and hold THIRTEEN books - Cerovlje status animarum XIX-XX c.; Gologorica baptisms 1764-1788, 1770-1781, 1784-1880 and 1940-1948, deaths 1646-1806 and 1784-1880, marriages 1770-1789, and status animarum for 1826, 1862, 1894 and 1921; and Gracisce baptisms 1667-1745 with confirmations 1690-1694, and baptisms 1746-1840. TWO TRAPS. The paper inventory's section headings file both Gracisce books under a GOLOGORICA heading, and it stops the Gracisce baptisms at 1780 when the film's own title card says 1840. LINDAR IS NOT ON THESE TWO REELS - it is on ZM34K-219 and 220. Each book is preceded by a printed title card naming the zupa, the register and the years; that card, not the inventory, is the authority.

  • Državni arhiv u Rijeci onsite Rijeka, Croatia

    The Rijeka State Archive — the Kvarner, Fiume's corpus separatum administration, and the Liburnian coast.

  • Državni arhiv u Zadru onsite Zadar, Croatia

    The Zadar State Archive, which holds the Venetian and Austrian registers of Dalmatia — including parishes whose books never went to Split. Its own analytical inventory (HR-DAZD-378, ~2,400 civil-registry books) states the collection's scope explicitly: coastal Dalmatia from Rab in the north to Hvar and Vis in the south. Confirmed by walking the inventory's full parish list: it holds NOTHING for the inland Lika-Senj cluster (Sveti Rok, Lovinac, Gračac, Ričice, Donji Lapac, Gospić) — those parishes are out of scope for this archive, not merely unindexed. The site itself blocks automated/headless browsing (403) but loads normally in an ordinary browser. Its analytical inventory HR-DAZD-378 (Burić and Modrinić, 2014) is now held in data/dazd-378-registers.json: 178 parishes and 1,840 register books with the archive's own signatures, which is what a letter here has to quote.

  • Digitalna zbirka HAZU unsurveyed

    The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts' digital collection — its library's scanned scholarship, including the Starine series. Worked by the Defranceski archive for Klen's edition of the 1425 Urbar of Petar Pilos. Secondary sources that quote primary ones. Not yet surveyed.

  • DZS — Names and surnames in the Republic of Croatia index Zagreb, Croatia

    The Croatian Bureau of Statistics' own lookup: how many people carried a given surname at the 2011 census, with a confidentiality floor of 10. One name at a time — there is no list of what exists, so it answers a question you bring rather than handing over a table. Croatia's PxWeb API has no surname data at all, which is why this atlas missed it for a week.

  • GenTeam.at Vienna, Austria

    Volunteer indexes to the Habsburg lands — Vienna's parish registers, Jewish records, school and guild lists. Free with an account, and it reaches ground the church portals do not.

  • Državni arhiv u Gospiću onsite Gospić, Croatia

    The state archive for Lika-Senj County (except Senj and Novalja) plus Gračac municipality and Srb from Zadar County — the correct regional archive for Sveti Rok, Lovinac, Donji Lapac, and Gospić parish material, which the Zadar archive explicitly does not hold (see dazd). Its own published holdings list confirms collection HR-DAGS-109, "Zbirka matičnih knjiga" (civil registry books), spanning 1793–1998 — well past where the archive.org scans for this parish cluster stop (1940). No online browsing; access is by written request or in person only. Contact: info@arhiv-gospic.hr, +385 53 560 440, Kanižka 17, 53000 Gospić.

  • Hrčak free Zagreb, Croatia

    The portal of Croatian scientific journals, free and full-text. Local history articles here routinely name and date ordinary families.

  • Hungaricana free Budapest, Hungary

    The Hungarian cultural heritage portal — maps, censuses, urbaria and archival finding aids for the whole Kingdom of Hungary, not today's borders.

  • IstriaNet unsurveyed

    A volunteer-built reference on Istria — history, bibliography and the AMSI series index. Worked by the Defranceski archive for the bibliography of Camillo De Franceschi's writings. A guide to where the scholarship is, not a register. Not yet surveyed.

  • Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives) catalogue Budapest, Hungary

    The archives of the Kingdom of Hungary, which until 1920 meant Slovakia, Transylvania, the Banat and Croatia as well. Civil registration duplicates from 1895 are here even where the ground is now in another country.

  • Žrtve rata 1941–1945 — Muzej žrtava genocida index Belgrade, Serbia

    The Museum of Genocide Victims in Belgrade's name-by-name register of people killed in Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945 — 659,122 records, free and without an account. Searchable by given name, surname, year of birth, the MUNICIPALITY AND PLACE OF RESIDENCE ON 6 APRIL 1941, and by place, year and circumstances of death; each row also carries the parent's name, place of birth and nationality as recorded. That pre-war residence field is what makes it genealogical rather than commemorative: it places a named person in a named village on a fixed date, which is exactly what a register would give you and often the only thing that survives for these years. Counted as an INDEX — it gives structured records, not images of the documents behind them. Scope is the whole of the former Yugoslavia; the countries listed here are the ones seen in the data (Vukovar and Vinkovci, Zavidovići and Lopare, Sremska Mitrovica), so it will also answer for Montenegro and North Macedonia beyond what has been checked here. The interface is Serbian. Read from the site itself on 2026-09-29; access class confirmed by use, not assumed. HOW TO SEARCH IT WITHOUT READING A FAMILY AS ABSENT. The surname field matches EXACTLY, not as a substring: «Franceschi» returns 0 while «Defranceschi» returns 2, so a stem finds nothing and every prefixed form has to be sent as its own query. And the spellings are not interchangeable — they hold DIFFERENT PEOPLE. «Defranceschi» gives two men at Pula and Vodnjan; «Defrančeški» gives a third at Pazin and Gologorica, and neither query returns the other's records. Query the Italian, the Croatian and the diacritic-stripped forms separately and treat the results as additive. Verified by search on 2026-09-29. One more thing worth knowing: the front end races when queries are run back to back, and can paint one query's rows under another's count, so a count is only trustworthy taken one query per page load.

  • NSK digitalna — Nacionalna i sveučilišna knjižnica free Zagreb, Croatia

    The National and University Library in Zagreb's digital portal: Croatian newspapers and periodicals, browsable and free. ANNO covers this ground in German for the Habsburg years; this is the Croatian-language press, which is where a family is named in its own language. The oldest run — Stare hrvatske novine — is served from dnc.nsk.hr over http, which the portal links to; the portal itself is https and is the entry point recorded here. The newspaper archive itself is listed separately as nsk-stare-novine.

  • Stare hrvatske novine (NSK) unsurveyed Zagreb, Croatia

    Stare hrvatske novine — the National and University Library in Zagreb's digitised Croatian newspaper runs, the oldest of them, browsable by title and year. Its sibling row nsk-digitalna is the same library's wider digital portal and links here; this is the newspaper archive itself, listed separately because it is served from its own host and is what a reader is told to open. Worked by the Defranceski archive for «Galeb» and «Kvarner», the two Bakar papers. A newspaper is not a register, but it dates a family to a town when no register survives. Access not yet surveyed.

  • Indeks — Hrvatsko rodoslovno društvo index Zagreb, Croatia

    A Croatian genealogical index, run by the genealogical society. Its robots.txt names this class of agent and refuses it, so this atlas links to it and does not read it — see data/_declined.json.

  • Državni arhiv u Dubrovniku unsurveyed Dubrovnik, Croatia

    The state archive of Dubrovnik, in the Sponza palace, holding the records of the Republic of Ragusa, which was its own state until 1808 and kept its own chancery. IMPORTANT, AND THE REASON THIS ROW EXISTS: it NO LONGER HOLDS THE PARISH REGISTERS. A senior archivist there wrote on 28 September 2026 that «Državni arhiv u Dubrovniku predao je sve matične knjige Biskupskom ordinarijatu u Dubrovniku» — all the matične knjige have gone to the Diocesan Ordinariate — and referred the enquiry on. So a register question addressed here is answered with a redirect, and the Republic's own pre-1808 fonds is what this institution is still for.

  • Arhiv Dubrovačke biskupije (Biskupski ordinarijat) unsurveyed Dubrovnik, Croatia

    The diocesan archive of Dubrovnik, and SINCE THE TRANSFER THE HOLDER OF THE CITY'S PARISH REGISTERS: the state archive states it handed over all the matične knjige and gives this as the address for them. Contact arhiv@db.hr, telephone 020 324 913, both as given by the state archive on 28 September 2026. Nothing has been asked of it yet, and no statement about what it holds volume by volume, what it charges, or whether it answers by email, is made here — only that it is where the registers went.

  • HDA — Pretraga matičnih knjiga (HR-HDA-1448) index Zagreb, Croatia

    The Croatian State Archives' own searchable index of HR-HDA-1448, «Zbirka dopunskih mikrofilmova matičnih knjiga i popisa obitelji» — registers of ALL confessions across Croatia, plus Bosnian Catholics, from the mid-16th to the first half of the 20th century, microfilmed from originals held in state archives, church archives, parish offices, registry offices and monasteries. This answers «is this parish filmed at all» in one query, which arhinet's own row cannot: three drop-downs (parish/regiment, confession, type), then Pretraži. A row gives the period, PRIJEPIS when it is a transcript rather than the original, the holding institution, the signatura svitka (e.g. ZM-34C/681), the topografska oznaka (e.g. M-1278) and Digitalni oblik Da/Ne. Types: R births, V marriages, U deaths, S status animarum, Z confirmations, O anniversarii, I index. To order: info@arhiv.hr with place, type, period, signatura and topografska oznaka; consulted in the HDA reading room in Zagreb, max ten units a day. TWO TRAPS. First, the place box is a Telerik combo on an ASP.NET page: setting it FROM SCRIPT changes only what it displays and never commits to the server, so the search runs on an empty place and returns «Nema zapisa za pregled» — identical to a real nil. On 2026-09-29 that manufactured nine false negatives in one sitting, caught only by re-running a known-positive place as a control and watching it come back empty too. Always run that control. Second, the site itself warns that one settlement may be listed under several name forms — CRIKVENICA has four — so check every variant before calling a place absent.

  • HR-HDA-883 — Zbirka matičnih knjiga (Hrvatski državni arhiv) onsite Zagreb, Croatia

    The Croatian State Archives' own collection of ORIGINAL parish registers — distinct from HR-HDA-1448, which is microfilm of registers held elsewhere, and from the register search at provider hda-mk-search, which indexes 1448 and not this. Covers parishes of the Zagreb archdiocese, the Đakovo-Srijem and SENJ-MODRUŠ dioceses, Orthodox parishes of the Gornji Karlovac eparchy, and others. A published inventory lists it parish by parish with date ranges: Angelika Milić, «Zbirka matičnih knjiga u Hrvatskom državnom arhivu», Arhivski vjesnik 60 (2017), 251-311, https://hrcak.srce.hr/194831. A machine-readable extract of those holdings exists — 2,503 volumes across 357 parishes, 1585-1947, as parish/confession/type/date-range — held by the Defranceschi family archive and available on request. IT IS DELIBERATELY NOT COMMITTED HERE: this atlas's own licence gate is right that a dataset dropped into data/ becomes something the atlas must publish and disclose on /data/, and whether to take on a source with no stated publisher licence is the atlas's decision, not a contributing archive's. THE DATE CUT IS THE IMPORTANT THING AND IT IS NOT ARBITRARY: a decision of the NRH Ministry of the Interior of 13 May 1949 required every register with entries UP TO 1860 to be handed to the competent archive, while those from 1860 onward stayed with the state registry offices that needed them in daily work. So a parish that appears here ending in 1858 has not stopped keeping records — anything after 1860 is simply somewhere else, normally the matični ured or the parish. That single rule explains a great many apparent gaps across Croatia.

And 12 worldwide providers reach Croatia too — the full list.

2 FamilySearch collections

Grouped by the ground each one covers, nationwide. A free account opens the images; some are restricted to a Family History Centre.

Croatia — nationwide 2

1,209 places, 6528 volumes

The 250 carrying the most collections are listed; 959 more are in Croatia and on the map. Every place lists them all.

Every country · The map