Record Atlas
Croatia · 11 volumes · 1737–1918

Kapela

Kapela in Croatia, also written Kapolna, Podravska Kapela. 11 record volumes covering 1737–1918, and who holds them.

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 Kapela. 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 Kapela, Kapolna, Podravska Kapela. 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. 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.

  3. 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.

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

  5. 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.

Also written

KapolnaPodravska Kapela

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

Whose archive this ground was

Kapela 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

The volumes

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

Images, free, account needed — 11

The ground worth walking

Within 8 km — 8 places · 5 burial grounds. These neighbours hold 27 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 8 km, nothing catalogued

Veliki Bukovec · Veliki Bukovec, Ludbreg · Sveta Marija

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.

11 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 — 4
Marriages — 3
Deaths — 6
Church Census — 1

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.

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 Kapela. A free account is needed to open the images, and some are restricted to a Family History Centre.

The whole country — 2

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

See who held Kapela 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 Kapela on the map →

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