Finding the village is often the beginning of finding the family.
For many descendants, the first question is simple: “Which village did my family come from?” LEMKO.org preserves maps, village material, reminiscences, photographs and historical resources that can help turn a family name into a place and a place into a story.
Enter the existing LEMKO.org genealogy collection and family-history material.
Locate ancestral villages and understand their relationship to the surrounding Carpathian landscape.
Personal recollections can preserve details that official records never captured.
People, villages, churches and community life preserved in the photographic archive.
Explore documentary collections that may provide historical context for a family search.
Organizations and communities can sometimes provide connections beyond the digital archive.
Write down surnames, given names, approximate dates, religion, occupations and every spelling variation you know.
Village names are crucial. Old documents may use Polish, Lemko/Rusyn, Ukrainian, Slovak, Hungarian, German or altered spellings.
Use maps, photographs, archival documents and family testimony together rather than relying on a single source.
Genealogy becomes richer when a name can be connected with a school, church, neighboring families, local customs and the landscape of the ancestral village.
That is where the larger LEMKO.org archive becomes especially useful: family history and cultural history can be explored together.
Open GenealogyOpen MapsStart with maps of Lemkovyna and record every spelling or language form of the village name you encounter.
Continue into the long-standing LEMKO.org roots material without changing its original structure.
Look for school groups, churches, family photographs, publications and archival material connected with the village.
Personal memories may preserve surnames, occupations, nicknames, neighbors and local details absent from official records.
Family movements often make more sense when placed alongside war, migration and forced-resettlement history.
Keep dates, spellings, provenance and uncertainties attached to every discovery so later generations can retrace the evidence.