When convenient, Contact Us via text or email with your Ancestral proof of heritage documentation which may be necessary before we can access records from archival resources such as the State Archives of Ukraine.  

Proof of heritage documentation might be a passenger manifest from the ship your ancestor originally boarded for transit to an immigration port of entry like Ellis Island in New York City;  or a naturalization record or marriage license from a town, city, state, or country that your ancestor had emigrated to.

Ancestral heritage documents will also prove useful for both sharing with civic authorities from your ancestral home village in discovering the location of an ancestral home or burial site as well as finding and communicating with any living relatives that we might encounter.

First check out our Ancestry Research Page  where we’ve provided links to some of Ukraine’s regional archive centers. Please note that you or your representative will need to be fluent in Ukrainian – so our recommendation is that you let us handle any communications on your behalf.

Next depending upon your country of origin, we recommend you contact the appropriate agency that controls immigration records or contract with a genealogical research service in order to compile a list of possible relatives.  Ancestry.com; 23andMe; MyHeritage.com; FamilySearch.org; GenealogyBranches.com;  Geni.com; Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild; JewishGen; Gesher Galicia; Ukrainian Genealogical Forum; OurPublicRecords; Library and Archives Canada; National Library of Australia; WorldGenWeb – are a few suggestions among others.

If you’re from the United States, the USA.gov’s Genealogy and Family History website;  the National Archives [NARA]; the GenealogyBank; the U.S. Census Bureau; and Ellis Island; are some options for your project.

A deposit for beginning an Ancestral Research of the State Archives is required starting at $350 USD per family and is non-refundable, plus depending upon the depth and complexity of the research process, the ultimate total for Ancestral Research fees could reach $750 USD or more.

However given the history of the region after two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the Soviet era Holodomor genocide, coupled with the ongoing Russian invasion in which both State and Church Archives have been targeted by attacks; all of which have historically resulted in a series of mass migrations from Ukrainian Ancestral homelands, a prospective client should be aware that there is no guarantee that our researchers will find any living relatives especially in ancestral villages in the Eastern Oblasts, let alone any ancestral archival records for a given ancestor.

Once you confirm you’d like to proceed, we take a 100% deposit to cover our researcher’s costs and typically finish the project within two months. The cost of a Living Relatives Research Project can range from approximately $150 to $250 USD per family. This means if our researchers in conjunction with the archivists can find only a few ancestral records or ultimately cannot find any at all, the total cost for the research services in time spent and archives accessed including the time spent by our researchers will likely be billable.

Thus it is imperative that the feasibility of implementing an Ancestral Research project with the State Archives be determined beforehand based upon any documentation that can be provided from prior research.  If deemed implausible, the archival research project will be cancelled and no fees will be levied.