Type your ancestral village to find a likely parish and an archive to explore. The place is a starting point; the records establish your family's connection.
Villages, family names, and Old World spellings of parishes all work, accents optional. Rough spellings appear under "Did you mean."
Keep exploring the archives yourself, or bring us what you have already found. Our research packages help establish the family connections; our family books give the story a form you can share.
One small box sits on top of something vast. The finder reaches across 19 Catholic geographic heritages and more than 25,000 places, and over 15,000 parishes open straight to the Catholic sacramental registers where your ancestors were baptized, married, and buried, some kept since before 1600.
Parish priests recorded baptisms, marriages, and burials in sacramental registers. Surviving books can connect generations, and many are digitized today. This finder uses your village, town, or parish to suggest churches and archives to investigate. Coverage and surviving dates vary by place.
Some collections have name indexes; others require reading the registers page by page. A place match alone does not identify an ancestor. Compare names, dates, relatives, and residence against the evidence you already hold. See how we present records and their evidence →
Enter your family's village, town, or parish, in its Old World spelling if you have it. The finder covers Catholic parishes across the Catholic world: Bohemia and Moravia, the German and Austrian lands, Ireland and Scotland, Poland, Italy, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Croatia and Slovenia, Belgium and the Netherlands, Portugal with the Azores and Madeira, Spain, Mexico, recusant England, French Canada (Quebec and Acadie), and Greek Catholic western Ukraine, with more being added. Everything it returns is built on the Catholic sacramental registers, the baptism, marriage, and burial books the parish priest kept, which are what make deep family history possible. It points you to the parish that served your place and to the archive that still holds those registers. If you only know a surname, the finder shows where about a hundred common Czech family names cluster in the old country, and for any other name, tell us in the form and we will map it for you.
Yes, and that is the heart of it: these are the Catholic sacramental registers, the priest's own baptism, marriage, and burial books. Bohemian and Moravian registers are digitized and free at the Czech state regional archives; German and Austrian parishes are inventoried on Matricula Online; Irish registers are filmed by the National Library of Ireland; Scottish Catholic registers are on ScotlandsPeople; Polish records are indexed on Geneteka and held by the state archives, with former-German Silesian parishes on Matricula; and Italian sacramental registers rest with the dioceses, some on Matricula, alongside free civil records on the Portale Antenati. The newer heritages follow suit: Slovak registers filmed on FamilySearch, Lithuanian books on ePaveldas, Hungarian ones on Hungaricana, Slovenian parishes on Matricula, Portuguese registers free at Portugal's national and district archives, the Torre do Tombo among them, Mexican registers filmed parish by parish on FamilySearch, and French Canada's Drouin Collection, whose registers reach back to 1621. Belgian parish registers to 1796 are digitized on AGATHA, the portal of the Belgian State Archives, free to view with an account, and Dutch baptism, marriage, and burial books rest with the regional archives, indexed across them on Open Archieven. The one sparse exception is England, where the penal laws meant few Catholic registers survive; those that do are gathered in Findmypast's Catholic Heritage Archive. Most of these books are not indexed by name (the Drouin Collection and FamilySearch's Mexican collection are happy exceptions), so you open the register by parish and year, which is where the real work begins.
Coverage today spans 24 Czech and Moravian districts and more than 1,600 churches, chosen for where Nebraska Czech families came from, plus more than 13,000 German and Austrian parishes. Four collections run just as parish-deep: the full Irish Catholic parish collection, about 1,142 parishes, each with a direct link to its sacramental register microfilms at the National Library of Ireland; a Slovenian layer of about 650 parishes, each with a direct link to its registers on Matricula Online; a Calabrian layer of about 105 parishes of the Diocese of Reggio Calabria and Bova, each with a direct link to its registers on Matricula; and a Quebec and Acadian layer of more than 400 parishes whose registers have been kept since 1621. The Scottish, Polish, Italian, Slovak, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Croatian, Belgian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Mexican, and Ukrainian entries are mostly dioceses, regions, and parish towns: pointers to the right archive, from which we pinpoint the exact parish with you. English Catholic coverage is deliberately sparse because the surviving records are: the penal laws left few mission registers, so we list the recusant missions and gentry chapels that kept books, with pointers for the rest. No Czech village should come up empty: the finder knows all 6,000 and more municipalities, so a place outside the covered districts is still recognized, named by district, and we research its parish for you free. If a name finds nothing at all, the spelling may have drifted; tell us in the form and we will find it.
Yes. This free tool shows the likely parish for a place. Confirming that your own line runs to that parish, reading the handwritten sacramental registers by hand, and binding the whole story into an heirloom family history is the work we do together.