Record Atlas
Trieste · Friuli Venezia Giulia · Italy · 6 volumes · 1835–1936

Trieste

Trieste in Italy, also written Guardiella (Frazione di Trieste), Prosecco (Frazione di Trieste), Tergeste, Tergesti, Terst, Tit-li-nga-su-thit, Triestas, Triesti. 6 record volumes covering 1835–1936, 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 Trieste. 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 Trieste, Guardiella (Frazione di Trieste), Prosecco (Frazione di Trieste), Tergeste, Tergesti, Terst, Tit-li-nga-su-thit, Triestas, Triesti. 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
    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.

  3. 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.

  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.

    • Greek Orthodox Church of San Nicolò dei Greci
    • chiesa dei Santi Rocco e Sebastiano
    • San Silvestro
    • Santa Maria Maggiore

  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: matricula · ars-si · sira · familysearch · genteam · anno · dlib-si · arolsen · bundesarchiv. What each one holds and why.

Also written

Guardiella (Frazione di Trieste)Prosecco (Frazione di Trieste)TergesteTergestiTerstTit-li-nga-su-thitTriestasTriesti

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

Whose archive this ground was

Trieste 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.

YearsWho held itWhose 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.

The volumes

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

Images, free, account needed — 6

The ground worth walking

Within 11 km — 8 places · 6 parishes · 5 burial grounds. These neighbours hold 624 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

Trst · Municipality of Ankaran · Dolina · Sgonico · Municipality of Sežana

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.

1,009 volumes catalogued here

The oldest 25 are listed. A researcher is nearly always reaching back, and the rest are one click away at the provider.

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.

Other — 25

National sources for Italy, 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 Italy

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. 119 more cover Italy and are on the country page.

  • Antenati Images, free, no account Rome, Italy
    The Italian state archives' own portal. Civil registration images from 1806, free and without an account — the best national genealogy portal in Europe.
  • OpenStarts (Università di Trieste) Nobody has walked this one yet
    The University of Trieste's open repository. Worked by the Defranceski archive, which OCR'd and read the 1869 «Guida schematica di Trieste» — a city directory, which names householders street by street in years no register covers. 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.
  • 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.
  • Geneanet Partly free, partly paid
    Member-contributed trees and transcriptions, strongest in France. Much is free; a Premium tier gates some search and images.
  • Archivio di Stato di Trieste Images, free, no account Trieste, Italy — 1 km
    The state archive of Trieste, publishing civil registration images through Antenati — free, and without an account. Its own page states how far the digitisation has got and which years it covers; those differ archive by archive.
  • Archivio di Stato di Gorizia Images, free, no account Gorizia, Italy — 34 km
    The state archive of Gorizia, publishing civil registration images through Antenati — free, and without an account. Its own page states how far the digitisation has got and which years it covers; those differ archive by archive.
  • Archivio di Stato di Udine On paper, in the building Udine, Italy — 62 km
    The Udine state archive — Friuli and Carnia. Its civil registration is published through Antenati; the notarial and estate papers are not. THE OLD ADDRESS HERE WAS DEAD: asud.cultura.gov.it does not resolve at all, while cultura.gov.it does, so every reader who clicked Udine got nothing. Found by the link sweep, which is the second NXDOMAIN this directory has served — ARHiNET was the first, and that one was found by a reader.
  • Archivio di Stato di Udine — on Antenati Images, free, no account Udine, Italy — 62 km
    The state archive of Udine, publishing civil registration images through Antenati — free, and without an account. Its own page states how far the digitisation has got and which years it covers; those differ archive by archive.

Sources that cover everywhere

Not about Italy 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 Trieste. A free account is needed to open the images, and some are restricted to a Family History Centre.

The whole country — 60

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

…and 35 more.

See who held Trieste 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.

See Trieste on the map →

Everything in Italy · All 40266 places · Correct something on this page