Getting to the Roots of Your Family - RootsWeb - Ancestry.com

• http://www.genealogienetz.de/reg/ESE/slovak.html - general information, links to maps,
societies, lists of genealogical resources.
Galicia
The lands acquired by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a result of the partitions of the Kingdom of
Poland in 1772, 1815, and 1846 became the crown land of Galicia. It reached from Krakow in the West
to L’viv in the East. Today, the Western half belongs to Poland, and the Eastern half to the Ukraine.
The population was mostly Polish and Ruthenian, with a small German minority. Most of the Germans
came from the South German areas and Austria, as well as the Sudetenland and other Germanspeaking
areas. Helpful Web sites for locating German villages:
• http://www.semanchuk.com/gen/maps/unterschutz.html - a good map showing the German
villages in Galicia
• http://www.semanchuk.com/gen/maps/UnterschutzIndex.html. - An index to the above map
The German villages were generally either Catholic or Lutheran; very few were mixed. Catholic settlers
tended to intermarry with the Polish majority. Lutherans did not assimilate as easily and thus
maintained their German language and culture intro the 1900’s. Lists of original German settlers in
Galicia are found in Das Kolonisationswerk Josefs II in Galizien by Ludwig Schneider [FHL INTL Q
943.86 W2sL, FHL INTL Film
1256477 Item 1]
Helpful Web sites:
• The Galizien German Descendants Society website http://www.galiziengermandescendants.org/
includes instructions for family history research, maps, village histories, pictures, and other
helpful material.
Very reasonably priced town genealogy books have been published on CD-Rom for many
German villages in Galicia. Purchase information is found here.
• www.galizien.org – includes extracted church records from German parishes in Western and
Eastern Galicia. Click on “Datenbanken”.
• http://www.genealogienetz.de/reg/ESE/galicia.html - Includes addresses of archives that hold
church records for the various regions.
• http://www.eegsociety.org/Home.aspx -East European Genealogical Society
• http://www.halgal.com/index.htm - includes sections on locating the ancestral town in Galicia,
using gazetteers, finding records, and others - very informative.
• http://www.lvov.us/galician-genealogy/ - Galician genealogy resources
Bukovina
Organized migration of Germans into the Bukovina began around 1775. In 1910, the Germans were the
third largest ethnic group in Bukovina, with over 20 % of the population. German colonists came from
three distinct areas: southwest Germany; the Böhmerwald area in the Czech Republic; and the Zips
mountains, now Spis county, Slovakia. German emigration from Bukovina to the United States,