Record Atlas
Bosnia and Herz. · 5 volumes · 1702–1923

Metković

Metković in Bosnia and Herz., also written Portus Narentae. 5 record volumes covering 1702–1923, 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 Metković. 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 Metković, Portus Narentae. 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
    1463–1878 Ottoman Empire — the Eyalet, then Vilayet, of Bosnia arhivbih · familysearch
    1878–1908 Austria-Hungary — occupation under Ottoman sovereignty arhivbih · genteam · hungaricana · familysearch
    1908–1918 Austria-Hungary — annexed arhivbih · genteam · anno
    1918–1941 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia arhivbih
    1941–1945 The Independent State of Croatia arhivbih · yadvashem · arolsen · jewishgen
    1945–1992 Yugoslavia — the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina arhivbih
    1992–2026 Bosnia and Herzegovina arhivbih · 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.

  3. The things that catch people out here

    1463–1878, Ottoman Empire — the Eyalet, then Vilayet, of Bosnia. No parish registers as such for most of this period. What exists is Ottoman: the defter tax surveys, the sicil court registers, and the vakuf endowment records — household by household, in Ottoman Turkish, and almost none of it indexed by name.

    1878–1908, Austria-Hungary — occupation under Ottoman sovereignty. THE TRAP, and it is a filing trap. Occupied in 1878 but not annexed until 1908, Bosnia was administered by the joint Imperial finance ministry in VIENNA rather than by Austria or by Hungary. Its paper is therefore in neither national series — look in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv and in Sarajevo, not in Budapest.

    1992–2026, Bosnia and Herzegovina. THE TRAP nobody wants to write down. The 1992–95 war destroyed municipal register offices, and reconstructed registers were rebuilt from testimony and from surviving copies. A post-war extract may be a reconstruction rather than a transcription, and it is worth asking which.

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

  5. 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.

    • Crkva sv. Nikole Putnika u Metkoviću
    • Crkva sv. Obitelji u Metkoviću
    • Saint Elijah church
    • St. George Orthodox church

  6. 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: arhivbih · familysearch · genteam · hungaricana · anno · yadvashem · arolsen · jewishgen. What each one holds and why.

Also written

Portus Narentae

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

Whose archive this ground was

Metković sits in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 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
1463–1878 Ottoman Empire — the Eyalet, then Vilayet, of Bosnia Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine · FamilySearch

No parish registers as such for most of this period. What exists is Ottoman: the defter tax surveys, the sicil court registers, and the vakuf endowment records — household by household, in Ottoman Turkish, and almost none of it indexed by name.
1878–1908 Austria-Hungary — occupation under Ottoman sovereignty Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine · GenTeam.at · Hungaricana · FamilySearch

THE TRAP, and it is a filing trap. Occupied in 1878 but not annexed until 1908, Bosnia was administered by the joint Imperial finance ministry in VIENNA rather than by Austria or by Hungary. Its paper is therefore in neither national series — look in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv and in Sarajevo, not in Budapest.
1908–1918 Austria-Hungary — annexed Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine · GenTeam.at · ANNO — Austrian Newspapers Online

Registers now kept in four parallel confessional series — Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish — which is the form they keep for the rest of the century.
1918–1941 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine
1941–1945 The Independent State of Croatia Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine · Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names · Arolsen Archives · JewishGen

Jasenovac falls in these years. Yad Vashem holds names for the Jewish and Roma victims; the Serb victims are less completely recorded anywhere.
1945–1992 Yugoslavia — the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine

Registration passes to the municipality in 1946.
1992–2026 Bosnia and Herzegovina Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine · FamilySearch

THE TRAP nobody wants to write down. The 1992–95 war destroyed municipal register offices, and reconstructed registers were rebuilt from testimony and from surviving copies. A post-war extract may be a reconstruction rather than a transcription, and it is worth asking which.

The volumes

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

Images, free, account needed — 5

The ground worth walking

Within 11 km — 8 places · 6 parishes · 5 burial grounds. These neighbours hold 35 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 11 km, nothing catalogued

Vid (Metković)

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 Bosnia and Herz., 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 Bosnia and Herz.

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.

  • Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine On paper, in the building Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
    The state archive in Sarajevo. Ottoman-era defters, the Austro-Hungarian administration's own paper from 1878, and almost nothing online — this is a letter or a visit.
  • 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.
  • Žrtve rata 1941–1945 — Muzej žrtava genocida An index only — no images Belgrade, Serbia
    The Museum of Genocide Victims in Belgrade's name-by-name register of people killed in Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945 — 659,122 records, free and without an account. Searchable by given name, surname, year of birth, the MUNICIPALITY AND PLACE OF RESIDENCE ON 6 APRIL 1941, and by place, year and circumstances of death; each row also carries the parent's name, place of birth and nationality as recorded. That pre-war residence field is what makes it genealogical rather than commemorative: it places a named person in a named village on a fixed date, which is exactly what a register would give you and often the only thing that survives for these years. Counted as an INDEX — it gives structured records, not images of the documents behind them. Scope is the whole of the former Yugoslavia; the countries listed here are the ones seen in the data (Vukovar and Vinkovci, Zavidovići and Lopare, Sremska Mitrovica), so it will also answer for Montenegro and North Macedonia beyond what has been checked here. The interface is Serbian. Read from the site itself on 2026-09-29; access class confirmed by use, not assumed. HOW TO SEARCH IT WITHOUT READING A FAMILY AS ABSENT. The surname field matches EXACTLY, not as a substring: «Franceschi» returns 0 while «Defranceschi» returns 2, so a stem finds nothing and every prefixed form has to be sent as its own query. And the spellings are not interchangeable — they hold DIFFERENT PEOPLE. «Defranceschi» gives two men at Pula and Vodnjan; «Defrančeški» gives a third at Pazin and Gologorica, and neither query returns the other's records. Query the Italian, the Croatian and the diacritic-stripped forms separately and treat the results as additive. Verified by search on 2026-09-29. One more thing worth knowing: the front end races when queries are run back to back, and can paint one query's rows under another's count, so a count is only trustworthy taken one query per page load.
  • HDA — Pretraga matičnih knjiga (HR-HDA-1448) An index only — no images Zagreb, Croatia
    The Croatian State Archives' own searchable index of HR-HDA-1448, «Zbirka dopunskih mikrofilmova matičnih knjiga i popisa obitelji» — registers of ALL confessions across Croatia, plus Bosnian Catholics, from the mid-16th to the first half of the 20th century, microfilmed from originals held in state archives, church archives, parish offices, registry offices and monasteries. This answers «is this parish filmed at all» in one query, which arhinet's own row cannot: three drop-downs (parish/regiment, confession, type), then Pretraži. A row gives the period, PRIJEPIS when it is a transcript rather than the original, the holding institution, the signatura svitka (e.g. ZM-34C/681), the topografska oznaka (e.g. M-1278) and Digitalni oblik Da/Ne. Types: R births, V marriages, U deaths, S status animarum, Z confirmations, O anniversarii, I index. To order: info@arhiv.hr with place, type, period, signatura and topografska oznaka; consulted in the HDA reading room in Zagreb, max ten units a day. TWO TRAPS. First, the place box is a Telerik combo on an ASP.NET page: setting it FROM SCRIPT changes only what it displays and never commits to the server, so the search runs on an empty place and returns «Nema zapisa za pregled» — identical to a real nil. On 2026-09-29 that manufactured nine false negatives in one sitting, caught only by re-running a known-positive place as a control and watching it come back empty too. Always run that control. Second, the site itself warns that one settlement may be listed under several name forms — CRIKVENICA has four — so check every variant before calling a place absent.

Sources that cover everywhere

Not about Bosnia and Herz. 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.

See who held Metković 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 1463 and 2026.

See Metković on the map →

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