The HalGal Database
Roman Catholic Parish Records

Search the Roman Catholic church registers held at the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine, city of Lviv (TsDIAL).

Viewed in Polish and Ukrainian Transliterated Forms.

Search the HalGal Database to find out availability of your village's parish's Roman Catholic church registers in both the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv (TsDIAL) and on microfilm at the Family History Library.

Also, search the HalGal Database to find the spellings of your village or parish in Polish and Ukrainian Transliteration.  (Based on TsDIAL's Roman Catholic Consistory Inventory.)  For more spelling variations, please visit the web page Gazetteers to learn about other reference materials.

Search by PARISH FIRST.  Very few actual villages are listed in this database.  You must know your ancestral village's PARISH.  Type that PARISH name in the searchable database to find the records.  Since village records were kept at the PARISH level, this should not pose a problem for your searching.

You can also search by VILLAGE to possibly yield more results, but remember that this index is MOSTLY A PARISH INDEX. 

Also, this list is by far NOT a complete listing of all parishes in Galicia.  It is only a list of parishes that are listed in the original TsDIAL's Roman Catholic Consistory Inventory.  Still, the best and most complete listing of all locations, including parish and administrative jurisdictions, in Galicia is The Genealogical Gazetteer of Galicia, by Brian Lenius. 

There is no exact way to determine how church records for your particular parish/village may be organized.  However, you should consider the following procedure for looking up the records.

• Parish Name: Remember that church records were kept at the parish level.  This sorting is usually followed by the archivists when creating the inventory.  Keep in mind that parish jurisdictions may have changed over time.
• Village Name: It's natural to search first for your own particular village.  You should search using the correct spelling, either in Polish or Ukrainian (for the purposes of this database, please use my Ukrainian transliteration system, which is based mostly on the Library Of Congress system).  Don't assume that the spelling of your parish as found in a North American source is the correct one. Also, keep in mind that village names may have changed over time.
• Neighboring Parish/Village: Often for larger parishes, the priests used several books to cover the many villages in his parish.  Villages may have been "bundled" together in separate books apart from the main parish village.  Therefore, it's a good idea to search neighboring parishes/villages.

Finally, understand that this database is based on the catalog of TsDIAL.  If there is an error in TsDIAL's index, then that error will, unfortunately, be replicated here.

This search engine is now the ONLY way to easily determine the holdings and microfilm numbers of the Roman Catholic parish records!

Instructions

Enter either the Polish spelling without diacritic markings (no hooks or slashes or dots), 

or you can enter the Ukrainian spelling in the transliteration system I've designed to avoid duplication while allowing for reverse conversion.  Visit my transliteration style page.  For searching this database, do NOT type apostrophe ( ' ) for the Ukrainian soft sign.

Then click "OK"!