Record Atlas
Colombo District · Western Province · Sri Lanka · 1 volume · 1677–1990

Colombo

Colombo in Sri Lanka, also written Colombo, Western, Sri Lanka. 1 record volume covering 1677–1990, and who holds them.

Last changed 2026-09-27 · first mapped 2026-09-23 Follow what changes.

Comes out as a sheet for the reading room — what to ask for, who holds it, and every link written out in full.

This is a district, not a town — the marker sits at its centre, not at a building. Records filed at this level are usually held for the whole district.

This place

Where to begin

You know your family came from Colombo. Here is the order I would work in, cheapest and easiest first — and what to do when that runs out.

  1. Search both names, not one

    This place has been written down as Colombo, Colombo, Western, Sri Lanka. A catalogue indexed under the old name will not answer to the new one, and most people never find out they were searching the wrong word.

    Do this: search each name separately on every site below. Write the list down; you will need it every time.

  2. Start here — Images, free, but you must make an account first

  3. When you run out — and you will

    Everything above is what this atlas knows. It is not everything there is. Nine places in ten on this map have never been surveyed by anybody, so a gap here is usually our silence rather than the record's absence.

    Do this: write to the archive named in the era table for your year, even if we hold nothing for it. Then tell us what you found — a gap somebody has personally closed is the most useful thing a stranger can give this map.

Also written

Colombo, Western, Sri Lanka

If the document in your hand says one of these, this is the place it means.

Whose archive this ground was

Not yet mapped. The record regions cover Istria, the Kvarner, Carnia and Dalmatia so far, and Colombo is outside them. That is a gap in this map rather than a gap in the record — and the most useful thing anyone could fill in.

The volumes

Grouped by what it costs to look, most open first — which is the order worth trying them in.

Images, free, account needed — 1

The ground worth walking

Within 25 km — 1 place.

A register belongs to a parish, not to a village. A hamlet with no church of its own was written into the book of the church it walked to — and that book is catalogued under the other place's name. This is the ground to search before concluding a record does not exist.

Also within 25 km, nothing catalogued

Western Province

Correctly placed and unread. A gap here is this atlas's silence, not the record's — the registers may well exist and nobody has walked them.

198 volumes catalogued here

The oldest 25 are listed. A researcher is nearly always reaching back, and the rest are one click away at the provider.

The level below «a collection covers this place»: which book, for which years, and the link that opens its images. From FamilySearch's own catalogue. Nobody here has opened any of them. You can, though — mark the pages you have searched on any row below and this browser will remember where you stopped.

Other — 25

National sources for Sri Lanka, unverified

From Wikidata, CC0 — the national archive and the national library where the country has one. Nobody here has opened these. The link answered when it was asked and that is the whole of what this map knows about them. They are listed because a country with no named source at all is the worse answer: 199 of the 237 countries here had nothing but the worldwide services, which cover everywhere and therefore say nothing about anywhere.

Sources that cover everywhere

Not about Sri Lanka in particular — these reach most of the world, which includes here. They are listed after the local sources because a body that holds this ground's own paper is a better first stop than one that holds a little of everywhere's. Worth knowing they exist all the same.

  • Internet Archive Images, free, no account
    Full-text search across millions of digitised books, including parish histories, nobiliaries and local monographs that name ordinary people.
  • Arolsen Archives Images, free, no account
    The former International Tracing Service. Concentration camp, forced labour and displaced-persons records for some seventeen and a half million people, free and fully indexed.
  • BillionGraves Images, free, no account
    GPS-tagged headstone photographs. Smaller than Find a Grave but its coordinates are per-stone, which Find a Grave's often are not.
  • Find a Grave Images, free, no account
    Volunteer-photographed headstones and cemetery indexes, worldwide, with very uneven coverage. Owned by Ancestry but free to read.
  • WikiTree Images, free, no account
    A free, single shared tree with an unusually strong sourcing culture. Not a record source.
  • Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names Images, free, no account
    Names and testimony pages for victims of the Shoah, free.
  • FamilySearch Images, free, account needed
    The largest free collection of record images and indexes in the world. A free account is required, and a minority of images are restricted to Family History Centres and affiliate libraries.
  • Geni Images, free, account needed
    One shared world tree. Useful for finding other researchers on the same line; not a record source, and its assertions are only as good as their citations.
  • JewishGen Images, free, account needed
    The central Jewish genealogy resource — town-level KehilaLinks, burial and Holocaust databases, and revision lists for eastern Europe.
  • Geneanet Partly free, partly paid
    Member-contributed trees and transcriptions, strongest in France. Much is free; a Premium tier gates some search and images.
  • Ancestry Images, behind a paywall
    The largest commercial collection. Strong on the English-speaking world, censuses and immigration; weak on continental parish registers.
  • MyHeritage Images, behind a paywall
    Commercial, with a large tree network and good European newspaper and directory coverage. Search is free; opening a record is not.

FamilySearch collections that reach here

A collection is a claim over an area, not a book standing in this town — so these are ranked by how specifically they reach Colombo. A free account is needed to open the images, and some are restricted to a Family History Centre.

The whole country — 1

Worth searching, and worth knowing it is a national index rather than a local one.

See Colombo on the map →

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