Welcome!
This search engine currently features 610,150 records from 516 different data sources from the former Habsburg province of Galicia, today part of southeastern Poland and western Ukraine. The main focus is on Jewish roots in the area, though there are also some records in the database with names from other ethnic and religious groups that lived in the region.
Notes about searches
- All fields are optional. You can search by given name, by surname, or a combination of both. You can also search by house number and/or town name. You can limit your search results to a specific geographic area. And you can choose to sort your results by record addition date or by other criteria, if you like.
- Expand and contract your records. Click on the blue plus sign next to each of your search results to show all of the information about a given record, not just the primary names associated with it.
- Enable "fuzzy" searches to find more matches. Tick the box labeled "Enable 'fuzzy' searching" to use "fuzzy" searching to help find records with name and other word synonyms and misspellings, i.e. "Dawid" will match "David" and "Joesph" will match "Joseph." Note that fuzzy searches cannot be performed at the same time as phonetic surname searches.
- Use facets to narrow your search results. You can click on the links in the sidebar to focus your search on a particular "facet", or sub-set of your search results, such as record type, town, year, etc. The facets will also help give you an overview of all information associated with your search, such as the other surnames commonly attached to the surname you queried, the towns often associated with the surname, etc.
- Find phonetically similar surnames with Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching. Use the checkbox underneath the Surname field to enable or disable this capability. We recommend enabling it, so that you can find surnames that were similar but may have had an alternate spelling in the original records.
- You can use asterisks to do wildcard searches. For example, entering SCHR* in the surname field will show all surnames beginning with that string, such as SCHRANK, SCHREYER, etc. You can also use a wildcard (or even multiple wildcards!) in the middle or the end of a name, such as *WITZ or K*H*N. There is no minimum number of letters that you have to enter. Wildcards will work in the Given Name field too.
- Map that town! If your record results show a modern-day town name underlined in light blue, click that link to open a helpful map of the area in a new browser window.
Support for the All Galicia Database
The All Galicia Database is growing fast, but is only as complete as the records we have collected and transcribed to date. There is always much more to find and transcribe. If you would like help our research efforts in this region, please consider joining Gesher Galicia, or making a donation. Gesher Galicia is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and donations are tax-deductible in the United States. Thank you for your support.