Whose archive

No parish registers exist anywhere for this period. Trent required them only from 1563, and Istria's earliest surviving books are seventeenth-century.

The books stayed with the parish and were gathered to Pazin in the twentieth century. FamilySearch filmed them as Croatia, Church Books (collection 2040054).

The parish books continue unbroken; the regime change is invisible in them.

Parish registers to Pazin. The imperial press covering these years is in ANNO, and it names people the registers only number.

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.

Civil registration is patchy. Arolsen holds the deportation and forced-labour records of these years.

Registration moves to the matični ured. Anything inside the hundred-year privacy cut-off is not public, whoever holds it.

Current registration is with the matični ured in Pazin. Not public.

Before registers.

Venetian Istria, diocese of Pola. The registers are in Italian and Latin and the hands are Venetian.

Pula becomes the imperial navy's main port, and the population triples. Naval and garrison records are Viennese, not local.

Filed under Italy. FamilySearch collection 2152685 covers Buje, Novigrad, Oprtalj, Brtonigla and Materada among others.

The esodo: most of the Italian-speaking population leaves between 1945 and 1956. People vanish from these registers without dying.

Before registers.

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.

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.

The border ran through the town. Fiume was Italian and Sušak, across the Rječina, was Yugoslav — two filing systems, one city, for twenty-five years.

Before registers.

Parish registers only, kept by the parish and now largely with the diocese of Udine. There is no civil registration yet.

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.

Civil registration lapses; the parish register is the record again for these fifty years.

Civil registration resumes in 1871. Antenati holds Udine's, and FamilySearch filmed the same books as collection 1939238.

Before registers.

Venetian Dalmatia. Many parish books went to Zadar rather than Split, which is where a Split-only search fails.

Governed from Zadar, and its records went there.

A short Italian occupation with its own paperwork, easy to miss between two Yugoslav periods.

THE HOLE. Two hundred years of Ottoman rule, and Catholic parish registers barely survive it. What exists for these years is Franciscan, held by the monasteries, and almost none of it is online.

Taken by Venice in 1717. Registers begin here, and effectively nowhere earlier.

Parish registers only, and only after the Council of Trent required them in 1563. They stayed with the parish and the diocesan archive; there is no civil registration to find because none was kept.

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.

The Bourbons came back and kept the French registers. The series runs unbroken through the restoration, which is not true of everything Napoleon started.

Antenati publishes to a hundred-year cut-off. Anything more recent is at the comune, and is not public.

Parish registers only, kept by the parish and the diocese.

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.

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.

Civil registration from 1809, as on the rest of the mainland.

The earthquakes of 1905 and 1908 took another bite out of the Calabrian registers. A gap here is more often a destroyed book than an unfilmed one.

Catholic parish registers in Latin, kept by the parish.

Napoleonic civil registration, kept by the parish priest acting as registrar — in Polish, and in a standard narrative form.

Three parallel series and a family can be in more than one: Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, each kept by its own congregation.

Civil registration by Standesamt from 1 OCTOBER 1874 — the date to remember for anywhere in Prussia. From then there is a state record for everyone regardless of religion, and the Polish state archives hold it.

Arolsen holds the deportation, forced-labour and displaced-persons records of these years.

THE TRAP. The German place names are gone, and the catalogues are in Polish. Schubin is SZUBIN, Bromberg is BYDGOSZCZ, Posen is POZNAŃ. The registers mostly stayed where they were and are held by the Polish state archives — but they are catalogued under the Polish name, so a search for Schubin returns nothing while the books sit in Bydgoszcz.

The Dutch Reformed Church register IS the record — baptism, marriage, and the opgaaf rolls. There is no civil registration and there will not be for two hundred years.

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.

Thomas Cromwell ordered every parish to keep a register in 1538, and until 1837 it is the record. THE TRAP is where it lives: parish registers are held by COUNTY record offices, not nationally — Somerset's at Taunton, Kent's at Maidstone — and each licensed its images to a different commercial site.

Civil registration begins 1 JULY 1837. THE TRAP is that the GRO index gives you a reference, not a record: you order and pay for the certificate. FreeBMD indexes the same thing for nothing. And registration was not the parent's legal duty until 1875, so the first four decades are incomplete by design.

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.

Civil registration from separation. Queensland's historical index is free to search and the certificates are charged.

Immigration, naturalisation and wartime alien registration are FEDERAL and are at the National Archives in Canberra, not with the state. For a European arrival those files are often fuller than anything the state holds.

Catholic parish registers only, in Spanish, kept by the parish and now largely with the diocese.

Independence changes the flag and not the filing: the parish register is still the only record of a birth.

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.

Before registers anywhere.

Roman Catholic registers in Latin, Greek Catholic in Cyrillic, kept by each parish.

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'.

Galician Jewry is destroyed in these years. Arolsen and Yad Vashem hold what the parish registers stopped recording.

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.

Orthodox monastery records, and almost nothing that survives as a register.

Registers in German and Romanian, in four parallel series — Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic and Jewish. Czernowitz was one of the most Jewish cities in Europe and its records are filed accordingly.

The deportations to Transnistria fall in these years. Yad Vashem holds the names.

THE TRAP. The line drawn in 1940 still runs through Bukovina. Northern records are at Chernivtsi in Ukraine, southern at Suceava in Romania, and a family that never moved can have its baptism in one country and its marriage in the other.

Before registers.

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.

The Sudeten borderlands are annexed in 1938 and the interior occupied in 1939; the German population is expelled in 1945. The registers largely stayed.

Before registers.

Acta Publica has the Moravian and Silesian parish registers, free and without an account — the same exceptional provision as Bohemia.

Before registers.

THE HOLE. A hundred and fifty years of Ottoman occupation across the centre of the kingdom, and almost no parish register survives it. Hungarian genealogy very often simply stops at 1700 and the reason is here.

Parish registers resume, in Latin, kept by Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Orthodox and Jewish congregations separately.

CIVIL REGISTRATION FROM 1 OCTOBER 1895 — state-kept, in Hungarian, covering everybody regardless of religion. The single most useful date in Hungarian research, and the duplicate copies are at the national archives.

THE TRAP, AND IT IS THE LARGEST ON THIS MAP. Trianon in 1920 moved TWO THIRDS of the Kingdom of Hungary to Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. A village that was Hungarian in 1890 keeps its pre-1920 registers in Budapest AND its later ones in Bucharest, Bratislava or Belgrade — under a name that also changed.

Before registers.

Saxon Lutheran towns keep records earlier than most of the region; elsewhere very little survives.

Four recognised religions and a Romanian Orthodox majority, each keeping its own registers: Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Unitarian and Orthodox.

Civil registration from 1 October 1895, in Hungarian, whatever the family's language at home.

THE TRAP. Pre-1918 records are HUNGARIAN and largely at Budapest; post-1918 are ROMANIAN and at the county archives. A family in one village, unmoved, is filed in two countries and two languages either side of 1918 — and the village has a Hungarian name, a Romanian name and often a German one.

Before registers.

Overwhelmingly Lutheran, so the church books are Protestant and Archion is the route to them.

Civil registration by Standesamt from 1 OCTOBER 1874, as everywhere in Prussia.

THE BIGGEST TRAP OF ALL, AND IT RUNS THE OTHER WAY. The population fled or was expelled and — unusually — MANY OF THE CHURCH REGISTERS WENT WEST WITH THEM. East Prussian Protestant registers are largely in Berlin and Leipzig, NOT in Kaliningrad. Looking for Königsberg records in Russia is the classic wasted year of German genealogy.

Before registers, and then barely after them.

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.

Standesamt civil registration from 1 October 1874.

Danzig is neither German nor Polish between the wars but a League of Nations free city keeping its own registers.

THE TRAP, the same one as Posen. Stettin is SZCZECIN and Danzig is GDAŃSK; the registers mostly stayed and are catalogued under the Polish names, so a search for the German one finds nothing at all.

Church of Ireland registers from 1634 where they survive; Catholic registers almost nowhere before 1750. The penal laws are the reason, and they are a records fact as much as a political one.

The Catholic parish registers begin in earnest — the National Library's microfilms are free and cover nearly every parish. Protestant marriages registered from 1845.

Civil registration of all births, marriages and deaths from 1864, free and photographed on IrishGenealogy.ie. The 1901 and 1911 censuses survive in full and are free at the National Archives.

THE TRAP. On 30 June 1922 the Public Record Office in the Four Courts burned with almost every Irish census before 1901, most Church of Ireland registers deposited there, and the wills. Researchers are still told to «look for the census» — there is no census to look for. What survives is what was never sent in: the Catholic parish registers, PRONI's copies in the north, Griffith's Valuation, and the Tithe Applotment books. Start there, not with the census.

Kept by the parish minister, and kept unevenly: some parishes run from 1553 and some begin in 1820. A gap in the OPRs is usually a gap in the keeping, not a lost volume.

THE TRAP, and it is a pleasant one. Scottish statutory certificates carry far more than English ones — a marriage names both mothers including maiden surnames, a death names both parents. The 1855 registers name more still, because the first year was over-ambitious and then cut back. If your family is Scottish, do not settle for an index entry.

Parish registers in Latin and German, kept by the parish, in a Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed patchwork that survived the annexation.

État civil from 1792 in French, in the standard French decennial-table form. Free and photographed at all three departmental archives.

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.

French again, and the local law kept several German-era provisions, which is why Alsace-Moselle still has its own civil code today.

Annexed outright rather than occupied. The malgré-nous conscriptions and the expulsions fall here; Arolsen holds names for the camps and the forced labour.

Catholic and Lutheran registers in Latin and German, kept by the parish.

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.

Standesamt civil registration from 1 October 1874, in German, alongside the church books.

THE TRAP, again and worse. The 1921 plebiscite and the partition that followed cut Upper Silesia in two, and Těšín was cut a third way. Three archives now hold what one parish produced.

Auschwitz is in this region, in what the Germans had annexed as Ost-Oberschlesien. Arolsen and Yad Vashem hold the names.

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.

Lutheran parish registers from the seventeenth century where they survive, kept in German by a Baltic German clergy over an Estonian- and Latvian-speaking peasantry.

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.

Civil registration begins, and the 1935 Latvian census is a full household listing. Baltic German names are Estonianised and Latvianised in these years, by choice and by campaign.

The 1941 and 1949 deportations, and the Umsiedlung that took almost the entire Baltic German population to the Reich in 1939–41. If the family was German-speaking and disappears around 1939, it did not die; it was resettled, and Germany holds the file.

Estonia's Saaga is free and complete enough to be startling; Latvia's Raduraksti needs only an account.

Church registers in Latin, kept by the parish, as before the partition.

The Napoleonic Code arrives, and with it civil registration — kept by the parish priest acting as a civil registrar, in a long narrative paragraph rather than a column. These are the most informative Polish records there are.

The Napoleonic long-form register continues, in POLISH from 1826 and in separate volumes per denomination. Jewish civil registers begin as their own series in 1826 and are the single best source for Jewish Poland.

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.

Polish again.

The ghettos, the camps and the near-total destruction of Jewish Poland fall here. Yad Vashem and Arolsen are the name sources; the Polish civil registers of these years are often the only paper a person left.

Registers pass to the state archives after 100 years for births and 80 for marriages and deaths; anything more recent is at the local Urząd Stanu Cywilnego and is not online.

Catholic parish registers in Latin, kept by the parish, from the later sixteenth century where they survive.

From 1784 the registers become a state instrument in a fixed columnar form, with house numbers. That house number is the key to the Franciscean cadastre and to the land records, and it is the most under-used field in Habsburg genealogy.

French civil registration for four years, in the Napoleonic form, before the Habsburgs take it back.

Registers in Latin and German; the parish keeps the original and the diocese holds a copy, which is why a burned parish is not always a lost record.

THE TRAP. The 1920 border left a quarter of the Slovene population inside ITALY — the Julian March, from Gorizia to Postojna — where their records were kept in Italian and their names were Italianised by decree. A Slovene family from Idrija or Postojna is filed under Italy for these years.

Three occupiers, three filing systems, and the deportations of Slovene families from the German zone.

Civil registration is taken from the church and given to the municipality in 1946. Registers after that date are at the občina, not the archive.

SIRAnet searches the finding aids of all six regional archives at once, which is the single most useful thing about Slovenian research.

No parish registers as such for most of this period. What exists is Ottoman: the defter tax surveys, the sicil court registers, and the vakuf endowment records — household by household, in Ottoman Turkish, and almost none of it indexed by name.

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.

Registers now kept in four parallel confessional series — Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish — which is the form they keep for the rest of the century.

Jasenovac falls in these years. Yad Vashem holds names for the Jewish and Roma victims; the Serb victims are less completely recorded anywhere.

Registration passes to the municipality in 1946.

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.

Frontier ground, depopulated and repopulated repeatedly. Almost nothing survives as a register.

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.

Hungarian state civil registration from 1 October 1895, in Hungarian, alongside the confessional registers.

THE TRAP for anyone searching by name. Hungarian-language registers to 1918, Serbian after, and the same person is written Kovács in one volume and Ковач in the next.

The Novi Sad raid of January 1942 and the deportation of the Jewish population fall here.

The German-speaking population — the Donauschwaben, there since the 1720s — was expelled or interned in 1944–48. Their records stay; they do not.

The most completely recorded population in the early modern Americas. Catholic parish registers were kept in DUPLICATE from the start — one copy to the parish, one to the civil court — so a burned parish is very rarely a lost record. Continuous from 1621.

The conquest changes the sovereign and not the registers. The Quebec Act of 1774 left French civil law and the Catholic Church in place, and the parish register goes on being the civil register, in French, in the same duplicate form.

Still the parish register doing civil duty, and still in duplicate. The Drouin microfilms photographed the lot.

From 1994 the Directeur de l'état civil registers births, marriages and deaths, and the three-and-a-half-century run of parish registers as civil records ends. Records after 1994 are not in the archives.

Catholic parish registers from Port-Royal, thin and interrupted — the colony changed hands between France and England seven times before 1713.

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.

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.

Acadians permitted to return, to different land. The Loyalist influx after 1783 doubles the population again and brings a second body of American records with it.

Provincial civil registration from the 1860s onward, each province on its own timetable.

The frontier was carved out of Croatia and Slavonia and put under the war council, not the ban. Catholic registers begin after Trent where a parish survived at all; the Orthodox settlers granted the Statuta Valachorum kept their own. Very little of either survives from before 1700.

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.

The frontier was wound down over thirty years and abolished by degrees; the regimental series end at different dates in different districts, which is why a family can vanish from one series a decade before its neighbours do.

The frontier is incorporated into Croatia-Slavonia and its ground finally files like everywhere else: civil registration from 1895, county and parish series thereafter.

Parish registers continue; the state registers of 1895 onward are held by the registry offices and pass to the state archives after a century.

Records of these four years are scattered and incomplete, and much of the Orthodox parish record of this ground was destroyed with the communities that kept it.

Church registers were gathered into the state archives; civil registration is with the matični ured of each municipality.

ARHiNET is the catalogue of the Croatian state archives and is the place to establish what survives before writing.

Before the state counted anybody, the churches did: the DTB books — doop, trouw, begraaf — kept by the Reformed church, and separately by Catholic, Lutheran, Mennonite and Jewish congregations. They are in the provincial and municipal archives, not in one national series, and a family that changed church changes book.

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.

Civil registration continues unbroken and is indexed almost completely on WieWasWie, free. The population registers from 1850 are the other half of it: they follow a household from address to address, which is how a family is traced between the ten-yearly certificates.

The civil registers survive; the population registers were used to find people, and the Amsterdam registry was bombed by the resistance in 1943 for that reason. Arolsen holds the records of those deported.

Certificates become public after 100 years for births, 75 for marriages and 50 for deaths, so the open end of the series moves forward every January.

Parish registers were ordered in 1645 and most begin considerably later; what survives before 1700 is thin and local. They are at the Rigsarkivet and free to read as images on Arkivalieronline.

From 1814 every parish keeps TWO registers, the minister's and the parish clerk's, held separately — so a fire or a gap in one is very often survivable in the other. This is the single most useful fact about Danish records and it is rarely mentioned.

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.

The censuses of 1787, 1801, 1834, 1840, 1845, 1850 and onwards are digitised and indexed, and they are the fastest way into a Danish family before the registers are readable.

Norway was governed from Copenhagen and its parish registers follow the Danish pattern; the oldest surviving book is from the 1620s and most parishes begin after 1688. All of it is free, photographed and largely indexed on Digitalarkivet.

The union did not move the paper: Norwegian records stayed Norwegian throughout and are at the Riksarkivet in Oslo and the eight regional state archives. The censuses of 1801, 1865, 1875, 1891 and 1900 are complete and free.

Parish registers remain the civil record until 1983. The emigrant lists from the ports — Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim — are on Digitalarkivet too, and they are where a family that left for America stops being Norwegian and starts being American.

The church law of 1686 is why Swedish research works. It required every parish to keep births, marriages and deaths AND the husförhörslängd — the clerical survey, a household-by-household record of who lived where, re-made every few years, with literacy and moves noted. No other country in Europe has anything like it at that date.

The great emigration: roughly a fifth of the population left, most for America, and the parish out-migration books record where each of them said they were going. That line is usually the only bridge between a Swedish parish and an American county.

Civil registration passed from the church to the state in 1991; the parish books run to that date. Riksarkivet's own images are partly free and partly behind a subscription, which is why this ground is not coloured as open.

Finland was not a Swedish possession but a part of Sweden, so the 1686 church law and its communion books apply here too and Finnish parish records are as good and as early as Swedish ones.

Russia took Finland in 1809 and changed almost nothing about how it kept records: the Lutheran parishes went on keeping the same books in the same way. A researcher who assumes Russian imperial record-keeping here will look for the wrong thing.

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.

Parish registers are the civil record until 1999. The National Archives' own service is free; the Genealogical Society's index of it is the usual way in.

Trent required parish registers from 1563 and Portuguese parishes obeyed early, so the baptism books of the north can reach the sixteenth century. They are held by the DISTRICT archives, one per district, and digitised district by district on DigitArq rather than in one national series.

The religious orders were dissolved in 1834 and their archives went to the state, which is where monastic and diocesan material sits today. Parish registers continue as the only record of a birth.

Civil registration begins with the Republic in 1911 and is compulsory from then; before it, there is no state record and the parish book is the record. Registers pass to the district archive after a hundred years, so the open end moves each year.

Parish registers begin after Trent and the good ones reach the sixteenth century. They are the ONLY record of a birth for the next two hundred years — there is no state register behind them.

The sovereign changes and the record-keeping does not: the parish goes on keeping the book. A researcher looking for an Austrian imperial series for these years is looking for something that was never created.

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.

Fifteen years under The Hague, and the civil registers run unbroken through them. Material of these years can sit on either side of a border that did not exist yet.

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.

The civil registers continue under occupation. The deportation and forced-labour records of these years are a separate series and largely elsewhere.

Eupen-Malmedy passes from Germany to Belgium in 1920, so a family from that ground has German civil registration before it and Belgian after, and the paper did not all follow the border.

Arolsen holds the records of those deported from this ground.

Registers pass to the State Archives once they are old enough to be public, so the open end of the series moves forward year by year; check the current threshold with the repository rather than assuming it. Statbel publishes surnames by commune, which this atlas carries and which nothing else here has at that grain.