Slovak Civil Records

LegacyUser

Carl Kotlarchik said: It would be great if you could record and post the civil records in Slovakia. Hungary began civil records in 1896 and the ones for Slovak region are in the Slovak archives. Records over 100 years old are not restricted so over 20 years of records could be recorded.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome to the community-powered public feedback forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We all share an active interest in using the resources of this site and as users, we have various levels of knowledge and experience and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and/or questions.

I recommend that you review the FamilySearch Wiki on Slovakian Genealogy: https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/... and its related pages.

Searching historical records make use of the indexes. The Slovakia research page is at https://www.familysearch.org/search/c... and shows that very little of the records for Slovakia are indexed.

As you read through the pages on Slovkia and research, if there are records that FamilySearch does not have, you should be able to find links to the sites that have the records.

Otherwise, if you are aware of records and know people in the archives, then you may want to point them toward FamilySearch's preservation services at https://www.familysearch.org/records/...

With the present pandemic, I suspect that there are no digitizing teams in the field. Before the pandemic shut most operations down, FamilySearch had over 300 teams involved with capturing and preserving historical records around the world. Once the pandemic is resolved (cures and vaccines made available), then I would hope that teams will once again be involved in cpaturing the historical records images.

LegacyUser

A van Helsdingen said: FS needs the permission of the record owners to film records, and they must have the resources to send volunteers to the archive to digitize the records.

I notice that FS has some church records from Slovakia (which according to the Wiki are in state ownership). So prehaps they are planning to digitize the civil registration records in the future. Or possibly the local government units who own the records have refused to let FS digitize them, because they make revenue from them.

If you know someone who has the power to let FS digitize these records, then you should contact Support and tell them their contact details and their position.

The pandemic has obviously disrupted the ability of FS to send volunteers around the world to digitize records. It may be into 2021 by the time they can restart again.

LegacyUser

Juli said: I suspect that issuing extracts from the civil registrations is too good a source of income for Slovakian government archives for them to ever agree to having them digitized.

LegacyUser

A van Helsdingen said: It's a similar story with the UK. Only the indexes are free and digitised; you pay per certificate to get originals.

But in Ireland they used the UK model until around 5 years ago, when they started making the originals free online. So there is hope that Slovakia could do the same.

LegacyUser

Juli said: The big difference is that there is no index for the civil registrations in question.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Some places are digitizing their records simply because the originals are too fragile to allow the public access. A number of years ago, one of the people I knew had ancestry in that part of the world and in visiting the FHL in Salt Lake City, one of the volunteers at the desk for the international floor knew this person and called him over to let him know that the local government had put their records on line. In less than a half-hour, this person had located his grandmother's birth record.

When a person visits the archives where they used to be able to access to original records, they would be pointed to a workstation where the same records that can be accessed through the internet were available.

Access is up to the local custodians and as far as FamilySearch is concerned, if the records are readily available from the custodians via the internet, I believe it is highly unlikely that FamilySearch will duplicate the material on its site.

LegacyUser

Carl Kotlarchik said: Tom, What makes you think Slovakia is digitizing their civil records? To quote you, I think that is highly unlikely.

LegacyUser

MaureenE said: Robert Raymond, Family Search employee set out some considerations in a post 13 September 2018.
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...