Volhynia is historic region in Central and Eastern Europe and a part of the Polish Borderlands. It straddles between south – eastern Poland, parts of south-western Belarus, and western Ukraine.
At www.wolyn-metryki.pl/Wolyn/indexEn.php you will find a search engine for vital records from Roman Catholic parishes of the Dioceses of Luck and of Lviv. It interlinks with scans from archival units no. 436 and 301 available on Central Archives of Historical Records in Poland website (see more about CAHR and navigating the webiste in a previous post)
The database contains more than 100 000 entries and is constantly growing.
How to use the database?
- go to www.wolyn-metryki.pl/Wolyn/indexEn.php
- type in your research criteria in the fields provided; it works well with partial names and surname
- the results will show up in a table starting with deaths, followed by births and marriages. In most cases you will find a link to a scan at www.agad.gov.pl (CAHR website)
- if no link is attached to the record – you may try to find a corresponding scan directly in the CAHR database using the signature, page and act numbers provided in the result line
Tips:
- check http://www.wolyn-metryki.pl/joomla/zawartosc to see which years and towns have been indexed so far
- try various spellings of the surname as they may have been misspelled – besides Polish and Latin, the records are in Russian and Ukrainian
- if you still cannot find what you look for, fill only the town field and within the results identify the surnames that look similar to the one you are searching for
- here http://www.wolyn-metryki.pl/joomla/spisy-parafian-index you will find Liber Status Animarum transcriptions from XIX and XX centuries for various Vohlynian parishes