Record Atlas
Slovakia · 0 volumes

Boťany

Boťany in Slovakia. 0 record volumes and who holds them.

Last changed 2026-10-06 · first mapped 2026-10-01 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 place

Where to begin

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

  1. Work out which country your year belongs to

    This is the step almost everybody skips, and it is the commonest reason a record that exists cannot be found. The ground did not move; the border did. A baptism here in one decade may sit in a different country's archive from one twenty years later.

    YearsWho governedWhose archive
    1000–1526 Kingdom of Hungary no archive holds this yet
    1526–1699 Ottoman Hungary and Royal Hungary no archive holds this yet
    1699–1867 Habsburg — Kingdom of Hungary mnl · hungaricana · familysearch
    1867–1918 Austria–Hungary — the Hungarian half mnl · hungaricana · familysearch · anno
    1918–1945 Hungary after Trianon mnl · hungaricana · arolsen
    1945–1989 People's Republic of Hungary mnl
    1989–2026 Hungary mnl · hungaricana

    Do this: take the year you are looking for, find its row, and note the archive. That is the one to search — not the one the village is in today.

  2. The things that catch people out here

    1526–1699, Ottoman Hungary and Royal Hungary. 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.

    1918–1945, Hungary after Trianon. 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.

  3. Find the parish, because that is where the book was

    Before civil registration, the parish priest kept the register. A village without its own church was written into a neighbour's book.

    • Reformed Church in Zsurk

  4. 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.

The archives named above: mnl · hungaricana · familysearch · anno · arolsen. What each one holds and why.

Whose archive this ground was

Boťany sits in Hungary — the Kingdom's core. Which empire held it decides which archive holds its records — and for some of these years that is not the archive you would guess.

YearsWho held itWhose archive that means
1000–1526 Kingdom of Hungary no registers survive

Before registers.
1526–1699 Ottoman Hungary and Royal Hungary no registers survive

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.
1699–1867 Habsburg — Kingdom of Hungary Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives) · Hungaricana · FamilySearch

Parish registers resume, in Latin, kept by Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Orthodox and Jewish congregations separately.
1867–1918 Austria–Hungary — the Hungarian half Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives) · Hungaricana · FamilySearch · ANNO — Austrian Newspapers Online

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.
1918–1945 Hungary after Trianon Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives) · Hungaricana · Arolsen 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.
1945–1989 People's Republic of Hungary Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives)
1989–2026 Hungary Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives) · Hungaricana

No volumes recorded here yet.

The ground worth walking

Within 12 km — 9 places · 1 parish · 5 burial grounds. These neighbours hold 5 catalogued volumes between them.

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.

Neighbours with volumes catalogued
Also within 12 km, nothing catalogued

Leles · Veľké Trakany · Poľany · Ruská · Boľ · Čičarovce · Malý Horeš

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.

The nearest parishes

A church is a parish and a parish is where a register is kept — the register of a hamlet with no church of its own is kept at the church it walked to, so the distance is the useful part. Wikidata's coverage is very uneven: 34,612 churches in England against 105 in central Istria, so a short list here means thin data and not an empty landscape. Unchecked, and only inside a mapped record region.

Where the burials are

The other end of a parish: the register records the burial and the ground holds it, and a family that left no other trace very often left a stone. These are points on a map, not record collections — from Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, nobody here has visited one, and whether the burial register survives is a question for the parish or the municipality above. Grounds OpenStreetMap has not named are here too. They used to be left out, on the reasoning that a shape with no name is not a place anyone can ask about — which cost Senj its own graveyard, 2 km away and unnamed, while a named one 7 km off was all this page would show. Being unnamed is a fact about the map data, not about the ground. Only inside a mapped record region.

National sources for Slovakia, 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.

The sources for Slovakia

National and regional sources that cover this ground whether or not anybody has walked it here — which makes them the answer, not the consolation, for a place with no volumes recorded on it.

  • Hungaricana Images, free, no account Budapest, Hungary
    The Hungarian cultural heritage portal — maps, censuses, urbaria and archival finding aids for the whole Kingdom of Hungary, not today's borders.
  • Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives) A catalogue entry only — the paper is not photographed 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.
  • ANNO — Austrian Newspapers Online Images, free, no account 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.
  • GenTeam.at Images, free, account needed 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.

Sources that cover everywhere

Not about Slovakia 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 Boťany. A free account is needed to open the images, and some are restricted to a Family History Centre.

The whole country — 3

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

See who held Boťany between 1800 and 1920 →
The jurisdiction answer — which empire held this ground, and therefore whose archive — could only be got at from the map until now. This opens it there, on 1863; drag the year from any point between 1000 and 2026.

See Boťany on the map →

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