Where Ternopil is and why its records are complicated
Ternopil is a city and region in western Ukraine. Historically it was part of Eastern Galicia, which has been under many rulers. It was part of the Austrian crownland of Galicia from the late 1700s until World War I, then part of interwar Poland, and then part of the Soviet Union and, since 1991, independent Ukraine. The city appears in older records as Tarnopol, its Polish and German form.
This matters because the language, the religion of the record keeper and the archive that holds the register all depend on when the event happened. Ancestors who said they came from “Austria,” “Galicia,” “Poland” or “Russia” may all be describing the same village at different times.
Registers before and after World War I
Under Austrian rule, births were recorded by the clergy of each religious community, not by a government civil office. Standardized columnar registers were introduced in the 1780s. Searching for a birth before World War I therefore means searching parish or community registers, and you need to know your ancestor’s religion. After World War I, the Polish state introduced civil registration, and under the Soviet Union and later Ukraine, civil registry offices (known as ZAGS) kept the records.
If you know the approximate date of birth, you can decide which period applies, as the same family can appear in a Greek Catholic register under Austrian rule and in a civil register later.
Religion and record type
- Greek Catholic (Ukrainian) registers. Many Ukrainian-speaking families in the Ternopil area belonged to the Greek Catholic Church, so these are often the key source.
- Roman Catholic registers. Polish families and some others appear here. Parishes often covered both a town and nearby villages, so look at the parish, not just the village.
- Jewish registers. Jewish births were kept in separate community registers, and some Jewish families are better traced through Jewish genealogy societies and projects, which have indexed records for Galicia.
- Other communities, such as Orthodox, Lutheran and Armenian Catholic, were smaller but may matter for specific families.
Where records are held
Records from Galicia are split among several archives. In Ukraine, the State Archives of Ternopil Oblast holds records for the region, and the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv holds a large share of the older Galician church registers. Other records, including some copies, are held in Poland. Our Galicia Austria birth records guide covers the Austrian-era system across the whole province, and Polish genealogy research covers the Polish archives. Because of this, FamilySearch and other databases can be a helpful first stop, as they may have digitized part of the collection. Our guide to Romania birth records describes how a similar split between church and state archives works in another Habsburg-linked region.
How to search
- Identify the village and parish. Records are organized by parish, so you need to find the exact place from naturalization papers, ship manifests or other immigration records. If it is not Ternopil city, check which parish served the village.
- Search the online collections. Look for Ternopil or Tarnopol collections on FamilySearch, and Jewish records on JewishGen and Gesher Galicia.
- Contact the archive or hire a researcher. For items not online, a Ukrainian-based researcher can search the registers and provide copies. Ask what the archive requires for requests and what it charges.
- Note details. Record the archive, fond, inventory, file and page for each entry.
Languages and names
Records may be in Latin, German, Polish or Ukrainian, depending on the period and church. Typical entries are formatted in columns, so learning the headings is usually enough to extract the key facts. Names appear in several forms: the same person may be Jan, Johann or Ivan, and surnames can be Polonized or Ukrainized. Village names have Polish, Ukrainian, German and Russian forms, so use a gazetteer to confirm which place you mean.
Common problems
- Records lost or destroyed in the wars of the 20th century, so some years or villages have gaps.
- Different religions in one family, such as a Roman Catholic bride and a Greek Catholic groom.
- Border and name changes.
- Access and rules in Ukraine may vary, especially for more recent civil records, so ask the archive about current rules.
Related guides
The records of this region overlap with those of Russian-ruled lands, so see Russian census records for a comparison of what survives there. For Galicia’s neighbor in the Habsburg lands, see Hungarian ancestry records.