Record Atlas
7 eras · 1463–2026 · 180 places

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Mostar, Tuzla. Which empire held this ground in which years — and, the part that matters, which archive that means.

Where researchers lose records here

1878–1908 — 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 — 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.

Whose archive this ground was

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 rings are approximate — deliberately. They exist to shade which filing system a place fell under, not to adjudicate a border. A place near a ring's edge should be checked against both neighbours.

See the whole span, 1463–2026, on the map →

The map takes a range, and a range that crosses one of the rows above is where records get lost: the family never moved, and the archive on the far side of the handover will tell you it holds nothing.

180 places on this ground

2 FamilySearch collections reach this ground

Ranked with the regional ones first — a collection for a province is usually a better lead than a national index, though the national index is often where a name is actually written down. A free account opens the images.

All record regions · The map