Eastern Europe

Lost Russian & Ukrainian Families  Find ancestors in the former USSR - Russian and Ukrainian Research

Genealogy Indexer - Research in Central and Eastern Europe and Jewish research

GeneaNet - Good for Eastern European research and much more including links to trees, other sources.  Some free some pay

Genetika  - Polish records of Births, Marriages and Deaths, Parish records

Hungaricana - Information and databases for all things Hungarian

Jewish Gen - the website for all Jewish research

The Miriam Weiner Routes to Roots Foundation - Jewish Research in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania.


Sources in their original language (Russian).  If you don't read Russian this article in Lost Russian & Ukrainian Families gives useful information on translations to English

Yandex.ru is the most popular search engine based in Russia. It has posted more than 2.5 million records online from the Central State Archive of the City of Moscow, Joint State Archive of the Orenburg Region and State Archive of the Novgorod Region here and the records are transcribed along aside.  Those who don’t know Russian can easily use this database by downloading a web browser translator app such as Google Translate. These images cannot be found on an English-language genealogy website.

The Great Inventory database has more than 550,000 listings of fonds (sets of records) at archives in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania. The listings from Ukrainian archives for the regions of Zhytomyr, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi and Chernihiv were recently added to the database.

The Central State Archives of Moscow Region has introduced two important databases. One has more than 95,000 indexed records from the registry offices, which have been documenting births, marriages, divorces and deaths since the 1920s. The database provides the following information: date of event, place of event, parents of individual documented and the exact file location within archives. The second database is indexed records of births, marriages and deaths from parish books. There are almost 20,000 people in this database.

Evacuated Children– About 1,500 children from boarding schools in Moscow and the Moscow region are documented in this database. These children were evacuated during World War II  from 1941-1945 to the Komi-Permyak National District. The database provides the following information on the children: year of birth/age, gender, place of residence before evacuation, place of relocation, parents’ information and exact file location within archives.

The State Archive of Oryol Region has created a searchable database, Participants in the Oryol-Kursk Battle, with more than 900 soldiers documented. The database, introduced in July, has the full name, birth year, birthplace, residence, awards and exact file location within archives, in addition to photos of some soldiers. The information also can be viewed in an alphabetical index.

Lists of settlements in the Vyatka province, Kirov Province, 1905– The database can be searched by village names and other criteria through advanced searches. The results will identify the exact location of villages by neighborhood and parish and where village records are located within the Central State Archive of Kirov Region.

The State Archive of Kemerovo Oblast– The archive has opened an online portal for its scanned records, which can be viewed for free after completing  registration. Scanned records are listed here but they must be viewed in the portal.

Electronic local history encyclopedia of the Lipetsk Region– The information on villages is organized by alphabetical order. Users can find the sources of information in the State Archive of Lipetsk Region from the database.

The State Archive of Ivanovo Region has the goal of uploading more than 300,000 pages of records online this year on its electronic archives portal. The list of digitized records can be found here.

The State Archive of Tomsk Region is maintaining a database of evacuees of World War II that can be searched.

The State Archive of the Altai Republic has digitized metric books from Maima of the Gorno-Altai Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church for 1875-1899. The project involved more than 3,000 sheets of records.  This effort is part of a bigger project to digitize about 29,000 sheets of records (mostly birth, marriage and death records) for the archive’s electronic database of records that is still in the works.

The State Archive of the Altai Republic has updated its database of more than 4,000 citizens of the former USSR citizens who were relocated to the region during WWII. The database has Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Estonians. Citizens came as far as Latvia, Leningrad  (Saint Petersburg) and Kursk.

The Romanian Genealogical Society has good information on what is available for researching in this area and has a facebook page as well.