Last changed 2026-09-30 · 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 place
Where to begin
You know your family came from Jawornik Ruski. Here is the order I would work in, cheapest and easiest first — and what to do when that runs out.
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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.
Years Who governed Whose archive 1200–1340 Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia no archive holds this yet 1340–1772 Poland — the Crown lands
agad · familysearch 1772–1918 Austria — Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria
agad · szukajwarchiwach · familysearch · anno · jewishgen 1918–1939 Poland — Second Republic
szukajwarchiwach · agad · geneteka 1939–1945 German and Soviet occupation
arolsen · yadvashem 1945–2026 Poland west of the San; Ukraine east of it
szukajwarchiwach · agad · familysearch 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.
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The things that catch people out here
1772–1918, Austria — Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. 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'.
1939–1945, German and Soviet occupation. Galician Jewry is destroyed in these years. Arolsen and Yad Vashem hold what the parish registers stopped recording.
1945–2026, Poland west of the San; Ukraine east of it. 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.
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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.
- Saint Demetrius church in Jawornik Ruski
- Kapliczka w Żohatyniu
- Saint Michael Archangel church in Siedliska
- Cerkiew św. Dymitra w Piątkowej
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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: agad · familysearch · szukajwarchiwach · anno · jewishgen · geneteka · arolsen · yadvashem. What each one holds and why.
Whose archive this ground was
Jawornik Ruski sits in Galicia. Which empire held it decides which archive holds its records — and for some of these years that is not the archive you would guess.
| Years | Who held it | Whose archive that means |
|---|---|---|
| 1200–1340 | Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia | no registers survive Before registers anywhere. |
| 1340–1772 | Poland — the Crown lands | Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD) · FamilySearch Roman Catholic registers in Latin, Greek Catholic in Cyrillic, kept by each parish. |
| 1772–1918 | Austria — Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria | Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD) · Szukaj w Archiwach · FamilySearch · ANNO — Austrian Newspapers Online · JewishGen 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'. |
| 1918–1939 | Poland — Second Republic | Szukaj w Archiwach · Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD) · Geneteka |
| 1939–1945 | German and Soviet occupation | Arolsen Archives · Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names Galician Jewry is destroyed in these years. Arolsen and Yad Vashem hold what the parish registers stopped recording. |
| 1945–2026 | Poland west of the San; Ukraine east of it | Szukaj w Archiwach · Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD) · FamilySearch 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. |
No volumes recorded here yet.
The ground worth walking
Within 25 km — 5 places · 6 parishes · 5 burial grounds. These neighbours hold 8 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.
- Leszczawa Dolna12.8 km1 volume
- Leszczawa Górna13.7 km5 volumes
- Grąziowa21.7 km2 volumes
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.
- A burial ground ↗ unnamed in OpenStreetMap 0.8 km OpenStreetMap
- Cmentarz w Jaworniku Ruskim ↗ 0.9 km Wikidata
- Cmentarz w Borownicy ↗ 3.2 km OpenStreetMap
- A burial ground ↗ unnamed in OpenStreetMap 5.1 km OpenStreetMap
- A burial ground ↗ unnamed in OpenStreetMap 5.3 km OpenStreetMap
2 volumes catalogued here
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.
- Births (народження) 1784-1830 v. 201-4A/6064 ↗ 1784–1830 Greek Catholic
- Births (народження) 1830-1849 v. 201-4A/6065 ↗ 1830–1849 Greek Catholic
National sources for Poland, 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.
- National Archives in Kraków ↗ national archive answered with an error
- National Digital Archives ↗ national archive
- Polish Central Archives of Historical Records ↗ national archive did not answer this checker
- National Library of Poland ↗ national library
The sources for Poland
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.
- Szukaj w Archiwach Images, free, no account Warsaw, Poland
The Polish state archives' scans, free and without an account. Covers ground now in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania as well as Poland. - Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD) A catalogue entry only — the paper is not photographed Warsaw, Poland
Warsaw's archive of the old Republic — the metrical books of the Polish partitions, including eastern Galician parishes now in Ukraine. Catalogued here; the scans are published through Szukaj w Archiwach. - Bundesarchiv A catalogue entry only — the paper is not photographed Koblenz, Germany
The German Federal Archives. Civil and military administration of the Prussian provinces, the wartime records, and the card indexes of the expelled — much of it for ground that is no longer German. - Matricula Online Images, free, no account Passau, Germany
Diocesan parish registers photographed and served free, without an account. Austria and much of Germany and Poland; the Italian entries are South Tyrol. - Archiwum Państwowe w Bydgoszczy Nobody has walked this one yet Bydgoszcz, Poland
The Polish state archive for the Kuyavian-Pomeranian voivodeship, holding the civil registers of the former Prussian registry offices of the region, Szubin among them. IT ANSWERS LETTERS AND WILL SHARE SCANS: three e-mails in September 2026 were each answered within about eight days, in Polish, over the Director's signature with a named case officer. It points first at genealogiawarchiwach.pl for what is already digitised, and then supplied a 103-scan volume that is NOT on that portal, shared from its own OneDrive. TWO HOLDINGS FACTS IT STATED BY LETTER THAT NO ONLINE CATALOGUE SHOWS: the metrical books of the Jewish religious community of Szubin survive ONLY for 1820-1847; and the alphabetical death indexes (skorowidze zgonów) of USC Szubin Miasto survive ONLY for 1874-1878 and 1894-1924, with nothing between. An archivist there will also read a difficult line from a register on request and say plainly where the reading is uncertain. - 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. - Geneteka An index only — no images Warsaw, Poland
A volunteer index of Polish parish registers, by surname and parish. An index only — it points you at the scan rather than showing it. — NOTE: the service was answering HTTP 500 on 16 September 2026. Its parent society, genealodzy.pl, is up; the index may be back by the time you read this. - Genealogia w Archiwach Nobody has walked this one yet Poznań, Poland
A Polish state-archives portal of scanned metrical books — civil registration from the Prussian partition (1874 on), duplicates of Roman Catholic parish registers from before that, and population and registration books from 1837. Separate from Szukaj w Archiwach and run by its own archives. Secondary sources say the scans are free and need no account; NOBODY HERE HAS CONFIRMED THAT, because the site is a Vaadin application that renders nothing without JavaScript, so it is marked unsurveyed rather than taking a blog's word for what it costs. SCANS ARE SERVED BY A LORIS IIIF IMAGE SERVER and can be read in place without downloading: /loris/<id>/<x,y,w,h>/<width>,/0/default.jpg returns an arbitrary region at up to TWICE native resolution, which is enough to settle a difficult hand. info.json returns 403 while image requests succeed, and anything above 2x returns a bare 404. The viewer's own canvas is tainted, so the tile server is the route and screenshots are not. THE PORTAL WILL NOT OPEN A UNIT BY ITS SIGNATURE: a scan's modal id resolves only inside the current search result set, so a neighbouring scan cannot be reached by guessing an id. The route that works is to open any scan's modal, click 'View the document' to expose the unit's own scan list, click Show on the scan wanted, and take the new Loris id from the network log.
Sources that cover everywhere
Not about Poland 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 Jawornik Ruski. A free account is needed to open the images, and some are restricted to a Family History Centre.
Worth searching, and worth knowing it is a national index rather than a local one.
- Poland, Church Books, 1568-1990 ↗ 1568–1997 5,179,396 records 300 km
- Poland, Tarnow, Roman Catholic Diocese Church Books, 1612-1900 ↗ 1612–1900 671,409 records 300 km
- Poland, Lublin, Roman Catholic Church Books, 1784-1964 ↗ 1784–1964 310,044 records 300 km
- Poland, Radom, Roman Catholic Church Books, 1587-1966 ↗ 1587–1966 101,352 records 300 km
- Poland, Częstochowa Roman Catholic Church Books, 1226-1950 ↗ 1226–1950 0 records 300 km
- Poland, Evangelical Church Books, 1700-2005 ↗ 1700–2005 0 records 300 km
- Poland, Gliwice, Roman Catholic Church Books, 1599-1976 ↗ 1599–1976 0 records 300 km
See who held Jawornik Ruski 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 1200 and
2026.
See Jawornik Ruski on the map →
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