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 Turke. Here is the order I would work in, cheapest and easiest first — and what to do when that runs out.
-
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 1500–1784 Inner Austria — Carniola, Styria, Carinthia
matricula · ars-si · sira · familysearch 1784–1809 Austria — Joseph II's register reform
matricula · ars-si · genteam · familysearch 1809–1813 The Illyrian Provinces ars-si · sira · familysearch 1813–1918 Austria — the Duchy of Carniola and Lower Styria
matricula · ars-si · sira · anno · dlib-si · genteam 1918–1941 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia
ars-si · sira · dlib-si 1941–1945 Partitioned between Germany, Italy and Hungary
arolsen · bundesarchiv · ars-si 1945–1991 Yugoslavia — the Socialist Republic of Slovenia
ars-si · sira · dlib-si 1991–2026 Slovenia
ars-si · sira · matricula · dlib-si · 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.
-
The things that catch people out here
1813–1918, Austria — the Duchy of Carniola and Lower Styria. 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.
1918–1941, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia. 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.
1945–1991, Yugoslavia — the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. 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.
-
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: matricula · ars-si · sira · familysearch · genteam · anno · dlib-si · arolsen · bundesarchiv. What each one holds and why.
Whose archive this ground was
Turke sits in Carniola and the Slovene lands. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 1500–1784 | Inner Austria — Carniola, Styria, Carinthia | Matricula Online · Arhiv Republike Slovenije · SIRAnet · FamilySearch Catholic parish registers in Latin, kept by the parish, from the later sixteenth century where they survive. |
| 1784–1809 | Austria — Joseph II's register reform | Matricula Online · Arhiv Republike Slovenije · GenTeam.at · FamilySearch 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. |
| 1809–1813 | The Illyrian Provinces | Arhiv Republike Slovenije · SIRAnet · FamilySearch French civil registration for four years, in the Napoleonic form, before the Habsburgs take it back. |
| 1813–1918 | Austria — the Duchy of Carniola and Lower Styria | Matricula Online · Arhiv Republike Slovenije · SIRAnet · ANNO — Austrian Newspapers Online · dLib.si · GenTeam.at 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. |
| 1918–1941 | Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia | Arhiv Republike Slovenije · SIRAnet · dLib.si 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. |
| 1941–1945 | Partitioned between Germany, Italy and Hungary | Arolsen Archives · Bundesarchiv · Arhiv Republike Slovenije Three occupiers, three filing systems, and the deportations of Slovene families from the German zone. |
| 1945–1991 | Yugoslavia — the Socialist Republic of Slovenia | Arhiv Republike Slovenije · SIRAnet · dLib.si 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. |
| 1991–2026 | Slovenia | Arhiv Republike Slovenije · SIRAnet · Matricula Online · dLib.si · FamilySearch SIRAnet searches the finding aids of all six regional archives at once, which is the single most useful thing about Slovenian research. |
No volumes recorded here yet.
The ground worth walking
Within 13 km — 9 places · 5 burial grounds. These neighbours hold 14 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.
- Podstene6.1 km2 volumes1858–1913
- Kuželj6.1 km5 volumes1780–1926
- Brod na Kupi9.9 km4 volumes1730–1905
- Crni Lug11.2 km3 volumes1858–1905
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.
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.
- Groblje Turke ↗ 0 km OpenStreetMap
- A burial ground ↗ unnamed in OpenStreetMap 0.9 km OpenStreetMap
- A burial ground ↗ unnamed in OpenStreetMap 4.6 km OpenStreetMap
- A burial ground ↗ unnamed in OpenStreetMap 4.7 km OpenStreetMap
- A burial ground ↗ unnamed in OpenStreetMap 5.1 km OpenStreetMap
National sources for Croatia, 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.
- Croatian State Archives, Zagreb ↗ national archive
- The State Archives in Dubrovnik ↗ national archive
- National and University Library in Zagreb ↗ national library
The sources for Croatia
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. A country-wide body is listed whatever the distance; a provincial archive is a claim over its own province, so those are the nearest ones. 12 more cover Croatia and are on the country page.
- 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. - ARHiNET — Croatian State Archives A catalogue entry only — the paper is not photographed Zagreb, Croatia
The Croatian State Archives, and through it the national register of archival fonds — which archive holds which fonds; the paper itself is almost all unphotographed. THE OLD LINK HERE WAS DEAD. This row pointed at arhinet.arhiv.hr, which no longer resolves at all — NXDOMAIN on Google's and Cloudflare's resolvers both, not a timeout or a redirect, so every Croatian researcher who clicked ARHiNET on this map got nothing. hais.arhiv.hr resolves to 161.53.80.20 and serves NOTHING ON EITHER PORT 80 OR 443 — tested 30 September 2026 with curl, which is the difference between a service that is down and one that is refusing us: the host answers DNS and nothing is listening. NOTE ALSO that hais was described here as ARHiNET's "successor"; that is not established by anyone who has checked, and a family archive that repeated it had to withdraw the claim. www.arhiv.hr is a DIFFERENT machine, 161.53.80.7, it works, and it is NOT the fonds register — neither the word ARHiNET nor HAIS appears anywhere on it in either language. What it does carry is the live register search, provider hda-mk-search. So this row points at a working site that answers a different question; the national fonds register currently has no working address known to this atlas. NOTE: the same site DOES carry a working register search — see provider hda-mk-search — which indexes the microfilmed register collection HR-HDA-1448 and answers whether a given parish was filmed. That is a separate tool from the fonds register described above, and it is the one to reach for first when the question is about matične knjige. - 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. - HR-HDA-883 — Zbirka matičnih knjiga (Hrvatski državni arhiv) On paper, in the building Zagreb, Croatia
The Croatian State Archives' own collection of ORIGINAL parish registers — distinct from HR-HDA-1448, which is microfilm of registers held elsewhere, and from the register search at provider hda-mk-search, which indexes 1448 and not this. Covers parishes of the Zagreb archdiocese, the Đakovo-Srijem and SENJ-MODRUŠ dioceses, Orthodox parishes of the Gornji Karlovac eparchy, and others. A published inventory lists it parish by parish with date ranges: Angelika Milić, «Zbirka matičnih knjiga u Hrvatskom državnom arhivu», Arhivski vjesnik 60 (2017), 251-311, https://hrcak.srce.hr/194831. A machine-readable extract of those holdings exists — 2,503 volumes across 357 parishes, 1585-1947, as parish/confession/type/date-range — held by the Defranceschi family archive and available on request. IT IS DELIBERATELY NOT COMMITTED HERE: this atlas's own licence gate is right that a dataset dropped into data/ becomes something the atlas must publish and disclose on /data/, and whether to take on a source with no stated publisher licence is the atlas's decision, not a contributing archive's. THE DATE CUT IS THE IMPORTANT THING AND IT IS NOT ARBITRARY: a decision of the NRH Ministry of the Interior of 13 May 1949 required every register with entries UP TO 1860 to be handed to the competent archive, while those from 1860 onward stayed with the state registry offices that needed them in daily work. So a parish that appears here ending in 1858 has not stopped keeping records — anything after 1860 is simply somewhere else, normally the matični ured or the parish. That single rule explains a great many apparent gaps across Croatia. - Digitalna zbirka HAZU Nobody has walked this one yet
The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts' digital collection — its library's scanned scholarship, including the Starine series. Worked by the Defranceski archive for Klen's edition of the 1425 Urbar of Petar Pilos. Secondary sources that quote primary ones. Not yet surveyed. - 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. - Hrčak Images, free, no account Zagreb, Croatia
The portal of Croatian scientific journals, free and full-text. Local history articles here routinely name and date ordinary families. - NSK digitalna — Nacionalna i sveučilišna knjižnica Images, free, no account Zagreb, Croatia
The National and University Library in Zagreb's digital portal: Croatian newspapers and periodicals, browsable and free. ANNO covers this ground in German for the Habsburg years; this is the Croatian-language press, which is where a family is named in its own language. The oldest run — Stare hrvatske novine — is served from dnc.nsk.hr over http, which the portal links to; the portal itself is https and is the entry point recorded here. The newspaper archive itself is listed separately as nsk-stare-novine. - IstriaNet Nobody has walked this one yet
A volunteer-built reference on Istria — history, bibliography and the AMSI series index. Worked by the Defranceski archive for the bibliography of Camillo De Franceschi's writings. A guide to where the scholarship is, not a register. Not yet surveyed. - 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 Croatia 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 Turke. 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.
- Croatia, Church Books, 1516-1994 ↗ 1515–1994 7,007,772 records 70 km
- Croatia, Delnice Deanery Catholic Church Books, 1571-1926 ↗ 1570–1926 233,088 records 70 km
See who held Turke 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 1500 and
2026.
Everything in Croatia · All 40266 places · Correct something on this page