Start Here
You have a name and a village. Here is the first hour.
No training, no subscription, no trip to an archive. Everything below is free and can be done from a kitchen table.
Write down every version of the name
Before you search anything. The surname as your family says it, as a German clerk would spell it, as a Hungarian or Czech clerk would, and in Cyrillic, where an H becomes a G. Helman, Hellmann, Hilman, Gelman. Then do the same for the town, which has probably had three names and two countries.
Search the mother’s maiden name too
This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the one that finds people. Across much of Subcarpathia and Galicia, marriages were religious only and unrecognised by the state, so children were registered under their mother’s surname with the father acknowledged in the margin. My grandmother appears in no civil record as a Helman. She is a Landó. If a search under the family name returns nothing, the name is usually the problem, not the archive.
Search the Arolsen Archives
Free, no account needed, and the largest collection of Nazi persecution records in the world. collections.arolsen-archives.org. Try each spelling in turn, and search the town as well as the person, because a village name brings back neighbours whose cards may name your family on them.
Search Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names
yvng.yadvashem.org. Pages of Testimony were filled in by relatives, so they carry parents, spouses, ages and hometowns that no camp record has. They also show you who else was looking, which is how you find living cousins.
Find the civil registers for the town
For this region, JewishGen holds indexed births, marriages and deaths, and the 1921 census. This is where a family stops being a rumour and becomes a household: seven children, with dates and a house number.
Then work outward, not inward
If the person you want left no record, trace the people around them. Cousins, neighbours, anyone from the same village on the same transport. Survivors generate paperwork and the murdered often do not, so a family’s record frequently survives inside the file of the relative who lived. Two of the three men whose photographs are on this site were cousins whose names my family had never heard. They arrived because I kept reading a list.
Two rules that matter more than any database
A name written five ways across five countries is one person, not five problems. Treat variation as expected noise. Reject a match on a divergent parent or a divergent place, never on a divergent spelling.
Hold a conclusion only where independent kinds of record agree without contradicting each other, and check every link against the original document rather than an index entry. Where the evidence supports probable rather than proven, say probable.
If you get stuck
Write to me. I read everything, and if I can point you at the right collection I will. sgrajews@stanford.edu
