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Three ways to search

A surname. Type it and the map lights the countries a register or an archive attests it in. It will not tell you your family lived there — it tells you the name is recorded there, which is where to start.

A village, by any name it has ever had. This is the one most people need and do not know to ask for. Type Gallignana and the map goes to Gračišće; Breslau answers Wrocław, Czernowitz answers Chernivtsi, Memel answers Klaipėda. It works worldwide, not only where this atlas is deep.

A name and a place together. Blazevic Gracisce narrows to that name on that ground.

Or just click a country. Every country on earth answers with something — whose national archive, what research guide exists — even where this atlas holds nothing below the country itself.

Why a map, and not another list

Three things stand between a researcher and a record, and all three are geographic.

The name changed. You cannot search for a place whose name you do not know. That is why the find box matches every name a place has ever had rather than the one it happens to carry today.

The jurisdiction changed. An 1863 baptism from a Croatian village sits in a Croatian archive. A 1930 one, from the same village, is filed under Italy — because between the wars that village was Italian. Searching the Croatian collection alone finds nothing, and nothing is not the same as not existing. Set the year on the map and it tells you which it is; the table behind that is the part of this atlas nobody else publishes.

"Online" is eight different things, not one, and the difference is the whole cost of an evening. Here it is the colour of the dot:

• free — Images, free, no account
• account — Images, free, account needed
• index — An index only — no images
• mixed — Partly free, partly paid
• paid — Images, behind a paywall
• catalogue — A catalogue entry only — the paper is not photographed
• onsite — On paper, in the building
• unsurveyed — Nobody has walked this one yet

The last of those is the commonest colour on this map, and the next section is about that.

When it finds nothing

A grey dot means nobody has surveyed it. It does not mean nothing is there. That distinction is the difference between a map and a claim, and keeping it is worth more than coverage — a map that quietly implies completeness sends people home when they should keep looking.

So if a place is grey, the useful next steps are, in order: set the year and see whose archive held that ground, because the records may be filed under a country you were not searching; open the source directory for that country and write to the archive named there; and check whether the ground was covered by a newspaper rather than a register — for some countries, Australia above all, the newspaper is the record.

If you find the answer, send it back. A grey dot you have personally turned into an answer is the single most valuable thing a stranger can give this map.

What this map does not know yet

It is honest about being early, and the layers are at different stages. 94.9% of the ground here has never been surveyed — that is the number every other one refines.

The archives layer is worldwide — 534 institutions across 83 countries, each saying what it holds and what it costs to look. The shelf is deep in one corner: 40,266 places and 2,828,300 volumes, with Croatia, Istria and Carnia far ahead of everywhere else. The jurisdiction layer covers 41 pieces of ground, not the planet — Central Istria, Southern Istria, The Kvarner, Carnia, Friuli, Dalmatia, The Imotski frontier, Campania, Eastern Sicily and 33 more. A place outside them says so in its own panel rather than guessing, because a confident wrong answer about which archive to write to costs somebody a month.

Still stuck?

Start here walks the first search end to end. About says what this atlas is and where it came from, and what's missing measures the gaps country by country rather than asserting coverage.