There were thousands of towns in Galicia where Jews lived. Consult a good map, gazetteer, or book (such as those by Suzan Wynne and Miriam Weiner) to determine if your ancestral town was in Galicia.   Once you have identified your ancestral town, consult the other resources identified on this page to learn more about it. 

Administrative Districts

Record-keeping in Galicia was organized by administrative district.  Typically, a large, central town would be the seat of government, and birth, death, marriage, and other official records would be kept there. Often, a large administrative district would contain two or more sub-districts, which would collect records and send a copy to the administrative district office.  Furthermore, at various times in history, the borders of administrative districts shifted, so records from one town might be spread among several archives. 

Not long ago, the only way to locate records for a town was to determine the administrative district and sub-district that contained the town and to write a letter of inquiry to the archives there. Now, however, several surveys of available documents have been done and the results made available on the web. New records turn up all of the time, however, and it is possible that there are still “undiscovered” records in some of the regional archives. Following are resources that you can use to determine likely repositories of records and the list of known records for your town .

• Database of Eastern Galician Localities, 1919-1939, Including some Western Galician Districts. Created by Alexander Sharon and hosted by Gesher Galicia.
• Routes to Roots Federation Eastern European Archive Database -Consolidated, searchable list of current archive holdings for Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Moldova.
• Galician Administrative Districts - A list of administrative districts and their constituent sub-districts (year unknown).  (Part of the Polish Genealogical Society of America web site.)
• List of 1877 Galician Administrative Districts
• Maps
• Vital Records for Galician Towns - A database compiled from the 1900 Austro-Hungarian census that lists the locations of records for Galician towns.  Also useful for finding all towns in a particular district or sub-district. (Part of the PolishRoots web site.)

Research Groups and Town-Centered Web Sites

Once you have identified your ancestral town, look into these resources to see if there are other researchers for the same town with whom you can share information. Cooperating researchers may also help each other with obtaining copies of records.

• Gesher Galicia research groups. E-mail groups created by researches with a shared interest in a particular administrative district, sub-district, or town.
• Town-centered web sites.  Created by researchers for their ancestral towns.  These sites can contain a great deal of information - maps, surname lists, historical information - about a town.