Who Slovenes are, and why history matters for records
Slovenes are a South Slavic people whose homeland is in and around present-day Slovenia, with communities historically also in neighboring parts of Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia. For most of the period when church and civil records were created, the lands were not a country of their own. They were part of the Habsburg Empire, in crownlands such as Carniola, Styria, Carinthia and the Littoral, and later part of Yugoslavia.
For research this means:
- Older records often use German or Latin rather than Slovene, with place names in German forms.
- Records for people from border areas may be held in Austria, Italy or Croatia as well as in Slovenia. For the Italian side, see Italian genealogy research.
- Your ancestors may have been recorded as Austrian, Hungarian, Italian or Yugoslav, depending on the year.
Start with records from the immigrant side
As with most European ancestry, the key first step is to find the exact village or parish. Emigrants to the United States and elsewhere left traces such as:
- Passenger lists and naturalization papers
- Church and parish records in the immigrant community
- Obituaries and fraternal society or ethnic newspaper notices
- Census records giving birthplace in general terms
Birthplace entries like “Austria” or “Carniola” are too general on their own, so look for a parish or village name and compare it with maps of the period. Slovene place names often have German equivalents that appear in older documents.
Parish registers and archives
Before civil registration, births, marriages and deaths were recorded in Catholic parish books. The Archives of the Republic of Slovenia and archdiocesan archives hold many of these, and a number of registers have been digitized, though how much is online and how much is open to the public depends on the parish and the period. FamilySearch also has a Research Wiki page for Slovenia that lists available collections, which is a reasonable first check.
Entries typically give the child’s name, parents’ names, godparents, and often the house name or house number, which helps distinguish families sharing a surname. If you hit a wall, a local researcher or a Slovenian genealogical society can help with reading older handwriting.
Organizations such as the Slovenian Genealogy Society International support self-directed research and have projects, such as indexing of displaced persons records from after World War II, that may be useful for families who left in that period.
Names to expect
Surnames such as Novak and Horvat are widely described as being very common in Slovenia. Many family names end in -ič, -ar or -nik. Because registers were kept in German or Latin, first names may appear in those forms (Johann for Janez, for example), and spellings may differ between records of the same family. Plan to search under variants.
Emigration waves
Slovenes emigrated in several periods. A first large movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s went mostly to the United States. After the US tightened immigration quotas in the 1920s, many headed to other European countries, and after World War II some left for political reasons, going to Austria, Italy, North and South America and Australia. Knowing which wave your relative belonged to helps you pick the right records, such as passenger lists, displaced persons paperwork, or later immigration files. Cleveland, Ohio is often cited as the home of the largest Slovene community outside Slovenia.
Slovenian DNA and ethnicity questions
What is the ethnicity of Slovenians? Slovenes are a South Slavic ethnic group, as described above.
What are Slovenians genetically, and what is Slovenian DNA closest to? Population genetics studies generally find that Slovenes sit among the populations of Central and Southeastern Europe, resembling their neighbors in the Alps and Balkans, but commercial DNA tests do not give a definitive answer. Each company defines its regions differently, and estimates can label the same person as, for example, Slovenian, Croatian, Austrian or a broader Eastern European region. Treat an ethnicity estimate as an approximate hint and rely on paper records to confirm where a particular line lived. DNA matches with others who have documented Slovenian roots can be more helpful than the percentages; see how far back DNA can trace ancestry.
Common problems
- Multiple languages and spellings in a single family line.
- Place names that changed with the borders.
- Gaps, as some records were lost or damaged in wartime.
- Several families sharing a surname in the same parish.
Related guides
The records of the neighboring Kingdom of Hungary are covered in our guide to Hungarian ancestry records, and the Habsburg crownland of Galicia is covered in our Ternopil Ukraine birth records guide. For another Habsburg crownland, compare Bohemian birth records.