The free finder looks simple: one search box. Behind it is a curated map of the Catholic world, drawn from the sacramental registers where your family's baptisms, marriages, and burials were written in the priest's own hand.
He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children.Malachi 4:6
The finder reaches from Ireland to Ukraine, Portugal to Mexico. Each light is a heritage. The brightest run parish by parish, straight to the register books your ancestors are written in.
Positions are illustrative. Bright counts are parishes and churches in the finder; soft counts are searchable places. Every figure is live data.
Not every heritage is equal yet. In these, we can take you to your exact parish and its own register books, one by one.
The finder was built first for Bohemia and Moravia, and it is still the deepest and most lovingly worked corner of the map, the standard everything else is growing toward.
No Czech village comes up empty. Every one of more than six thousand is known by name, so even an uncovered village is recognized and researched for you.
Parish registers are among the oldest continuous records of ordinary families. Some in the finder open before the Pilgrims sailed.
471 places already carry a documented earliest register year, and more are added with every family we research.
Borders moved, and names changed with them. The finder holds 4,272 old names and exonyms, so you can search in the spelling your grandparents used and still land in the right place.
More than twenty national and church archives hold these books. The finder knows which one holds yours.
Behind the counts are the baptism, marriage, and burial books the parish priest kept, generation after generation. Find the church your family came from, and we will help you read what was written there.