The Josephine and Franciscan Surveys Project

Jewish genealogists seldom tap into early population records from Galicia. Gesher Galicia has made these important sources part of our database. The names of house and/or landed property owners are searchable through the All Galicia Database on the Gesher Galicia website, offering a unique resource for tracing your family roots. We have researched 67 towns, yielding more than 56,000 records.

The Josephine survey was ordered by Emperor Joseph II in 1785 (hence, it is sometimes referred to as the Josephine cadastre). Thousands of communities in Galicia — along with those in other provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy — were surveyed, with the names, house numbers, and every plot of land recorded in specially prepared registers. To learn more about the Josephine survey, click here.

The Franciscan survey — ordered by Emperor Francis I in 1817 (and referred to as the Franciscan cadastre) — recorded Jewish names using given names and surnames. Its first phase was conducted in 1819–1822, with the Jewish landholders found in many communities. Charting cadastral maps was the survey’s new feature but detailed land measurements in Galicia did not finish until 1854. To learn more about the Franciscan survey, click here.

Access the Inventory Table of all Josephine & Franciscan cadastral survey records to see which localities and records have been researched, indexed, and made searchable on the open access All Galicia Database. Gesher Galicia members can also access scans of these records by clicking here.

References. For more details, please refer to related articles in the Galitzianer. Prior issues of the journal can be found in the Members Portal.
“Early Galician Population Surveys,” Galitzianer, March 2016, 11-14
“Research Project Updates,” Galitzianer, September 2017, 9-15

For a complete inventory listing of the Josephine and Franciscan surveys held in TsDIAL, Lviv, Ukraine, check the reference (Kiev 1965, in Cyrillic).

Questions. Please contact: info@geshergalicia.org