Searching for an Austrian ancestor begins with a few surprises. There is no national index where you can look up a person by name, most of the history sits in church books rather than in state files, and the state began recording births, marriages and deaths only in 1938 and 1939. Austrian Roots explains how that system works and how to find the book that holds your family. It is written for people holding a passport, a prayer card or a DNA result, and it relies on city and archive pages, FamilySearch and official ministry pages, with a date on anything that can change.
Four facts to know before you search
- Civil registration is recent. According to FamilySearch, civil registration of births and deaths began throughout Austria on 1 January 1939 and of marriages on 1 August 1938, so for earlier events the church records are the source.
- There is no central name register. Both FamilySearch and the City of Vienna say so, which means you need the parish or the office, not just the name.
- Religion decides who holds the book. The City of Vienna says registers before 1938 were kept by the religious communities, which still hold them in their own archives.
- Catholic registers may name other faiths. FamilySearch notes that until 1849 Catholic priests had to record people of other denominations in their registers, so a Lutheran or Jewish ancestor may appear in a Catholic book before that year.
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Start a free MyHeritage trial to build your family tree and search historical records and other family trees as you work through these guides.
Pick your starting point
Who holds the books — church registers on Matricula, civil records, and the state, provincial and Vienna archives.
Open the map → CitizenshipWhether you qualify through your ancestors, including the Section 58c route for descendants of the persecuted — start here.
Check eligibility → DNAChoosing a test for Austrian roots, reading ethnicity estimates, and using matches to break through brick walls.
Compare tests →New to this? Start with our first-weekend guide — what to do in your first two days of research.
Want the whole picture? Read the complete Austrian genealogy guide — which door holds your record.
The six sections
Church books on Matricula, civil records at the Standesamt, the state and provincial archives, the Kriegsarchiv, and Vienna’s records.
Crown Lands & ProvincesEach Austrian province and the old Habsburg lands — Bohemia and Moravia, Galicia and Bukovina, Burgenland, South Tyrol and beyond.
Names in Austrian RecordsWhat Austrian surnames mean, farm names (Hofnamen), spelling variants, maiden names, the 1787 Jewish name decree, and noble titles.
Austrian CitizenshipWho qualifies by descent, the Section 58c route for descendants of the persecuted, the paper chain, and citizenship at birth.
DNA Results ExplainedChoosing a test for Austrian ancestry, reading ethnicity estimates, Y-DNA and mtDNA lines, and using matches to break brick walls.
Roots Trips to AustriaPlanning a trip around the records, visiting the archives and your ancestral village, finding graves, and writing ahead in German.
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Check my eligibility →What we cover, and where we point elsewhere
We focus on families from the Austria of today, from Vienna and Lower and Upper Austria to Styria, Carinthia, Salzburg, Tyrol, Vorarlberg and Burgenland. Many families who called themselves Austrian lived elsewhere in the Habsburg lands, in what are now other countries, and their records are in those countries’ archives. When a question belongs there, we say so.
How the site is run
Austrian Roots is independent. We cite official pages and primary sources, date the facts that change and mark what we could not verify. Some pages carry affiliate links, explained in our affiliate disclosure, and the about page describes how guides are built.
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