Record Atlas
Serbia · 1 volume · 1915–1918
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Stara Pazova, Serbia

Stara Pazova, Serbia in Serbia, also written Alt-Pasua, Alt-Pazua, Opazova, Pazua. 1 record volume covering 1915–1918, 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 Stara Pazova, Serbia. 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 Stara Pazova, Serbia, Alt-Pasua, Alt-Pazua, Opazova, Pazua. 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
    1526–1699 Ottoman Empire arhivsrbije · arhiv-vojvodine
    1699–1848 Habsburg Hungary and the Military Frontier mnl · hungaricana · arhiv-vojvodine · matricula · familysearch
    1848–1918 Austria-Hungary — the Voivodeship, then Hungarian counties mnl · hungaricana · arhiv-vojvodine · familysearch
    1918–1941 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia arhiv-vojvodine · arhivsrbije
    1941–1944 Partitioned — Hungary in the north, German Banat, Croatia in the west mnl · arolsen · yadvashem · hungaricana
    1944–2026 Yugoslavia, then Serbia — the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina arhiv-vojvodine · arhivsrbije · 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

    1526–1699, Ottoman Empire. Frontier ground, depopulated and repopulated repeatedly. Almost nothing survives as a register.

    1699–1848, Habsburg Hungary and the Military Frontier. THE TRAP, and it is the reason this region needs its own entry. The Military Frontier was administered from VIENNA by the war ministry, not from Buda by the Hungarian county — so a family in a Grenzer village has military records where its neighbours ten kilometres away have county ones. The eighteenth-century resettlement brought German, Hungarian, Serb, Slovak and Romanian colonists into the same district, each with their own parish and their own language of register.

    1918–1941, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia. THE TRAP for anyone searching by name. Hungarian-language registers to 1918, Serbian after, and the same person is written Kovács in one volume and Ковач in the next.

  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.

    • Evangelička crkva
    • Mariä-Schutz-und-Fürbitte-Kirche
    • Kirche Hl. ehrwürdige Mutter Petka Paraskeva
    • Kirche Hl. ehrwürdiger Sisoë der Große

  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: arhivsrbije · arhiv-vojvodine · mnl · hungaricana · matricula · familysearch · arolsen · yadvashem. What each one holds and why.

Also written

Alt-PasuaAlt-PazuaOpazovaPazua

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

Whose archive this ground was

Stara Pazova, Serbia sits in Vojvodina and the Banat frontier. 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
1526–1699 Ottoman Empire Arhiv Srbije · Arhiv Vojvodine

Frontier ground, depopulated and repopulated repeatedly. Almost nothing survives as a register.
1699–1848 Habsburg Hungary and the Military Frontier Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives) · Hungaricana · Arhiv Vojvodine · Matricula Online · FamilySearch

THE TRAP, and it is the reason this region needs its own entry. The Military Frontier was administered from VIENNA by the war ministry, not from Buda by the Hungarian county — so a family in a Grenzer village has military records where its neighbours ten kilometres away have county ones. The eighteenth-century resettlement brought German, Hungarian, Serb, Slovak and Romanian colonists into the same district, each with their own parish and their own language of register.
1848–1918 Austria-Hungary — the Voivodeship, then Hungarian counties Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives) · Hungaricana · Arhiv Vojvodine · FamilySearch

Hungarian state civil registration from 1 October 1895, in Hungarian, alongside the confessional registers.
1918–1941 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia Arhiv Vojvodine · Arhiv Srbije

THE TRAP for anyone searching by name. Hungarian-language registers to 1918, Serbian after, and the same person is written Kovács in one volume and Ковач in the next.
1941–1944 Partitioned — Hungary in the north, German Banat, Croatia in the west Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives) · Arolsen Archives · Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names · Hungaricana

The Novi Sad raid of January 1942 and the deportation of the Jewish population fall here.
1944–2026 Yugoslavia, then Serbia — the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina Arhiv Vojvodine · Arhiv Srbije · FamilySearch

The German-speaking population — the Donauschwaben, there since the 1720s — was expelled or interned in 1944–48. Their records stay; they do not.

The volumes

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

Images, free, account needed — 1

The ground worth walking

Within 25 km — 2 places · 6 parishes · 5 burial grounds. These neighbours hold 1 catalogued volume 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 25 km, nothing catalogued

Zemun, Serbia

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 Serbia, 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 Serbia

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.
  • Arhiv Srbije On paper, in the building Belgrade, Serbia
    The Serbian state archive. Church registers for the pre-1918 Kingdom, and the administrative record of a state that was Ottoman ground until 1878.
  • 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.
  • Arhiv Vojvodine On paper, in the building Novi Sad, Serbia
    Novi Sad. Vojvodina was Hungarian ground until 1918, so its registers are in the Hungarian series and its finding aids are in three languages — this archive is where the two filing systems meet.
  • 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.

Sources that cover everywhere

Not about Serbia 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 Stara Pazova, Serbia 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 1526 and 2026.

See Stara Pazova, Serbia on the map →

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