Record Atlas
6 eras · 1526–2026 · 32 places

Vojvodina and the Banat frontier

Novi Sad (Újvidék), Subotica (Szabadka), Zrenjanin, Sombor. Which empire held this ground in which years — and, the part that matters, which archive that means.

Where researchers lose records here

1699–1848 — 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 — 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.

Whose archive this ground was

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 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, 1526–2026, 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.

32 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