Matricula Online Church Record Portal

Introduction
The website Matricula Online is a free portal for online images of European church records. It is interdenominational and reaches across geographic borders. Currently, the site provides access to records from several German Catholic dioceses, many parts of Austria and Luxembourg, and a few records from Poland, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

To access the records
•Go to Matricula Online

•Click on “Continue to Matricula”

•The “Welcome” page provides three options for searching:

o “book” icon

o “world” icon

o magnifying glass” icon

The "book" icon
The “book” Icon leads to a map that shows areas for which books are available. The number of parishes is listed in white on a red circle. The countries are listed on the right. Either image can be used to access online records. The red dot on the map leads to a listing of the parishes available for the respective area. If the list is long, each click brings up a more detailed map with subdivisions, such as regions, then deaconries, and eventually the individual parishes. A click on the parish name brings up the record inventory. This approach can be useful when doing an area search.

The list on the right is generally easier to use.

o  Click on the country, i.e. “Deutschland”

o  Choose the diocese. The numbers on the right show how many parishes are included in each collection. Some archives have only posted a few records so far. The Vechta archive with Catholic records for the Southern part of Oldenburg is the most recent addition [March 2019].

o  Click on the diocese name to bring up the alphabetical list of parish towns

o  Click on the parish

o  The parish page includes an itemized list of all available parish registers. Each book gets a line. Included are camera icon = access to images, book icon= descriptive metadata, archival identifier, record type, and dates covered.

o   Images may not be available for that entire time period due to rights-to-privacy restrictions.

o  Also included on the page are some historical details, sometimes a photo of the church building and links to a current Google map and a historical map.

The "world" icon
The “World” icon is used to search for parishes using a map that shows all the regions for which records are available. The map continues to expand until it shows individual parish markers. Clicking on the marker brings up the parish page with the itemized listing of the church books.

The "magnifying glass" icon
The “magnifying glass” icon searches a built-in gazetteer that is especially useful for finding specific parishes. For instance, if an index entry states that the child was born in the “Gebäranstalt “ [birthing hospital] in Alservorstadt [part of Vienna, Austria], a search for “Gebäranstalt” in this gazetteer brings up three entries. Two of them are linked to the Alservorstadt section of Vienna: a hospital parish and one that extends beyond the hospital. A click on the gazetteer listing brings up the parish page. Only localities for which records are found on Matricula are included in the listing.