Ekaterinoslav (Dnipro) genealogy records

Ekaterinoslav genealogy records are the surviving documents used to trace families from Ekaterinoslav, today the city of Dnipro and in the Russian Empire the capital of Ekaterinoslav Gubernia. The main source is metrical books, the church and synagogue registers of births, marriages and deaths kept by each religious community. Most are held in the regional archive in Dnipro.

Names and jurisdiction

The first written mention of Ekaterinoslav dates from 1776, and in 1784 Catherine II ordered the governor’s seat moved to the right bank of the Dnieper near Kodak. For a few years around 1800 (1797–1802) the city was called Novorossiysk. Ekaterinoslav Gubernia was established in 1802 with the city as its capital, and it remained so until the gubernia was abolished in August 1925. The city was renamed Dnipropetrovsk in 1926 and Dnipro in 2016.

Documents name the city Ekaterinoslav or Yekaterinoslav, Екатеринослав (Russian), Катеринослав (Ukrainian) and, after 1926, Dnipropetrovsk or Dnipro. Searching under every spelling matters, because indexes and catalogues use all of them.

Location and geography

Ekaterinoslav lies on the Dnieper in central-eastern Ukraine, and today it is the centre of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. The city had a large Orthodox population, with the Transfiguration Cathedral, whose foundation stone Catherine II laid in 1787, and parish churches such as the Resurrection, Annunciation and Dormition churches. It also had a Roman Catholic church and a large Jewish community, whose first synagogue was built around 1800. Which book holds a family’s records therefore depends first on its faith and, for Christians, on its parish, and that is the first thing to establish in a search.

Records analysis

Metrical books and revision lists are among the best sources for tracing a family. Metrical books record births, marriages and deaths year by year, and revision lists show who lived in each household, with ages, so they let you follow a family back to the years before parish registers begin. The tables below show the books found for Ekaterinoslav, church by church and year by year.

But these are not the only sources, and often not the whole story. Archives also hold secondary records, such as police and court files, property and tax records, guild and estate lists, school and military papers and petitions, and these can reveal much more about a family than a name and a date. This is where deep archival research makes the difference. We work with the main sources and with the secondary ones, because together they tell a fuller and more interesting story of the family.

Not finding something online does not mean it does not exist. Most archival records from the Russian Empire have never been digitised or indexed, so a search on popular genealogy websites can come back empty even when the documents survive in the archive. If you have already searched on your own and found nothing, that is a reason to talk to a professional, not to stop.

Drevo Research carries out comprehensive archive research across borders and archives. Tell us what you know and we will tell you what we can find.

Ekaterinoslav genealogy records by church and year

The tables show which years are available for each church and record series. Years without records are left out, so gaps are easy to see.

Vital records

Metrical books recording births and baptisms, marriages and deaths, kept separately by each religious community until 1920.

Jewish

Jewish metrical books of Ekaterinoslav have been found for almost the whole period from 1860 to 1917: births for 1860–1915, deaths for 1860–1917, and marriages and divorces for many of those years.

Orthodox

Orthodox books found for churches of the city.

Roman Catholic

Birth registers of the Ekaterinoslav Roman Catholic church survive for 1910–1914.

History and genealogy

Ekaterinoslav entered the Pale of Settlement in 1792, and its Jewish community grew from 376 people in 1802 to 40,971 by the 1897 census. The first synagogue was built around 1800, and the Great Synagogue on Jewish Street later became the Choral Temple. The city grew with industry: the first metallurgical works opened in 1832, a railway line crossed the Dnieper in 1884, the Higher Mining School was founded in 1899, and by 1904 the population had reached about 157,000.

The city saw riots against Jewish businesses in 1883 and pogroms in 1905, in which about 100 Jews were killed. For families who left or were lost, the surviving archive records are often the only trace that remains.

Also found in records and indexes as: Yekaterinoslav, Jekaterinoslaw (German), Katerynoslav, Dnipro, Dnipropetrovsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Екатеринослав, Катеринослав.