Austria Genealogy

Guide to Austria ancestry, family history, and genealogy: birth records, marriage records, death records, census records, parish registers, and military records.

Country Information
Austria is landlocked and in a strategic location at the crossroads of central Europe bordering the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Italy, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. The major river is the Danube. As a result of wars and political realignments, the internal and external boundaries of Austria have changed several times. German is the official language.

Getting Started


Finding Your Ancestors' Town in Austria

 * Genealogical records are organized by geographical locality. Civil registration (government birth, marriage, and death records) and church records (christenings/baptisms, marriages, and burials) were kept at the local level. To search these records, you must know the town where your ancestors lived.
 * If you do not know your ancestors' town, follow the advice in the Wiki article, Austria Finding Town of Origin, to search a variety of records that might provide that information.

If You Know the Town, Next Use the GenTeam Gazetteer

 * Details about the town will also help:
 * the county of that town,
 * where the closest Evangelical Lutheran, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, etc. parish church was (depending on their religion),
 * where the civil registration office was, and
 * if you have only a village name, you will need the name of the larger town it was part of.

GenTeam is an online gazetteer that covers the current countries of Austria, Czech Republic, and Slovenia (most of the area belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire). It gives former (German) and current names of locations, the name of the parish, the beginning year of the records, and the archive that holds the records. It will also give details on earlier parishes the locality belonged to. It then links to the website of that archive.
 * Tutorial: GenTeam Gazetteer Online - [[Media:1-Genteam_Gazetteer-Instruction.pdf|Instruction]], [[Media:2-Genteam_Gazetteer-Activity.pdf|Activity]], [[Media:3-Genteam_Gazetteer-Answer_Key.pdf|Answer Key]]

This is an example of a typical parish record entry that you will see:'''

Austria Clickable Map
The boundaries of Austria have changed over time. Your ancestor may have said he was from Austria, but actually he may have come from any of the countries that once belonged to the Hapsburg Monarchy or Austro-Hungarian Empire. Therefore, see also Research in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

More Austria Research Tools
Research tools can include resources that assist in locating correct records to search and determining the correct locality to search in. Below are links and Wiki articles to research tools in Austria.


 * Information System Austrian National Library - Special link collection for genealogy (55 links, Page in German)
 * Austria Genealogy links
 * Austria GenWeb
 * Beginners Guide to Austrian Jewish Genealogy
 * Burgenland Bunch
 * Displaced Persons' (DP) Camps Table of Contents
 * GenTeam Gazetteer