How to find Lithuanian church records online

1. Find the Lithuanian name of the parish

The archive catalogue is in Lithuanian. Sorokpol parish appears there as Pavoverė, the present name of the village with the church. Święciany is Švenčionys and Podbrzezie is Paberžė. Register titles use the genitive form, for example “Pavoverės RKB gimimo metrikų aktų knyga”, the register of birth records of the church in Pavoverė.

We give the Lithuanian name of every parish we have worked in on its own page in our Parishes section. Several of them are also in the table at the end of this guide.

2. Search for the parish and the type of register

Open the EAIS search page at eais.archyvai.lt/repo-ext/search. The site may spend a few seconds checking your browser first. The flag in the top right corner switches the language.

Type the parish name in the genitive and one word from the register title: gimimo (births), santuokos (marriages) or mirties (deaths). Choose All words instead of the default Any of words. Otherwise the search returns everything that contains any one of the words: for “Pavoverės gimimo” we got more than 23,000 results, although the right registers were at the top.

A register with scans is marked Online and Image in the results. You can narrow the list by years with the From and To fields on the left.

3. Open the register and browse the pages

Clicking a title opens the record of the register with its reference (772 / 1 / 7 for our example), its years and its language. Below it is the scan viewer. The first scan is the archive's title card with the fond, inventory and file numbers.

The Index tab in the left panel of the viewer lists every scan. Our register had 112 of them, from 00000 to 00111. The Next item button moves to the next page and Zoom in enlarges the writing.

Write down the scan number together with the reference, for example LVIA 772/1/7, scan 00096. That is enough for anyone else to find the same record.

4. What a record looks like

Records from the first half of the 19th century are usually in Latin or Polish. From the middle of the century they are in Russian, in a table that runs across two pages of the register: the left page has the record number, the dates and the child's name, the right page the parents and godparents. Records from this register, with images and translations, are on our Sorokpol parish page.

If a parish register is missing, look for a copy in the deanery volumes. The parishes of the Święciany deanery have yearly copies in fond 604, inventory 37. They are listed in our Archives section.

What about epaveldas.lt?

Many guides point to the epaveldas.lt portal. The portal still works, but it says that user accounts no longer work and that its collections are moving step by step to the new ekultura.lt portal. On 22 October 2026 the epaveldas viewer showed us only the title card of register 772/1/7, while EAIS showed all 112 scans. That is why we start with EAIS.

Words from the Lithuanian catalogue

gimimo

of births (in practice the baptism register)

santuokos

of marriages

mirties

of deaths

metrikų knyga

church register

išrašai

extracts

RKB

Roman Catholic church (Romos katalikų bažnyčia)

fondas

fond, the archive collection

apyrašas

inventory

apskaitos vienetas

file, usually one register

Registers from the Vilnius region we have gone through

The church registers of several parishes in our catalogue, with the fond reference, the years and the number of scans we went through. Each of them opens in EAIS as described above.

The full list of parish and deanery registers we have worked with

Cannot find the register or read the record?

Tell us where your family came from. We will say which registers may mention them. The first assessment is free.

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