Finding the Family of a Holocaust Survivor
This is one of the few searches in the world that is served by great institutions rather than by scattered public records. Five archives hold almost everything that survives, they hold different things, and they answer different questions. Knowing which one to open first is most of the work. Knowing what none of them hold is the rest.
The Short Version
Decide first which of two searches you are on. One asks what happened to a person who was taken; the other asks who is alive now and related to you. They use different archives and they end in different places. Then get the town, not the country. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum says plainly that most records are organized by town rather than country, and a country name alone will not start a search. Search Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names before anything else if you are looking for living relatives – a Page of Testimony usually names the person who filed it, and two Pages for the same victim filed by two different relatives is how families have found each other. Search the Arolsen Archives’ online collection yourself before you submit an inquiry, because the archive says so itself and its inquiry queue runs to months. Expect the name to be spelled several ways and to change at the border; expect the town to have changed country. And treat an empty result as an empty result, not an answer – whole categories of people were never written down. This page is general information, not legal advice, and no archive – and no firm – can oblige a living relative to want to be found.
Watch: Which Archive Answers Which Question
The order to work in, and why the free search you run yourself usually beats the inquiry you file.
Short video overview
Two Different Searches Wear the Same Sentence
“I am trying to find my grandmother’s family” can mean two entirely different pieces of work.
One of them looks backward. It asks what happened to the people who were taken: where they were held, when they were transported, whether anything at all was written down, and where they are buried. That search ends in a document, or in the confirmed absence of one, and its archives are the archives of persecution.
The other looks sideways and forward. It asks who else survived, who else got out, and who is alive today carrying the same great-grandparents. The person you are looking for may be seventy years old, live in New Jersey, and have no idea you exist. That search starts in the same archives, because the archives are how you establish who the family was, and then it leaves them, because no Holocaust archive tracks the living.
Almost every guide to this subject covers the first search and quietly assumes it is the whole subject. If what you actually want is the second – a cousin, a half-sibling, the branch that reached America in 1947 – the work has two halves and only the first half is archival. The mechanics of tracing a family sideways rather than upward are set out in our guide to finding the living descendants of an ancestor’s brother or sister; what follows here is the part that is particular to this history.
Write down what you already have, in the shape the archives want it
Before you open anything, put on one page every fragment you hold: names in every spelling anybody ever used, including nicknames and maiden names; a birth year, even an approximate one; and above all the town. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s guidance for its own Registry researchers asks for exactly that list – full name including maiden names or nicknames, date of birth with an approximate year accepted, and town and country of residence before the war or of birth – and it says in terms that requests carrying only a surname or only a country will be limited to database searches. Its stated reason is the one fact that reorganizes this entire subject: most records are organized by town, not by country.
The Museum also explains, in its own published answer to a question families ask it constantly, why a country is close to useless as a starting point. Borders moved. Someone who arrived in the United States as an Austrian citizen in 1910 could, on today’s map, have come from Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, Poland or part of the former Yugoslavia. A family that always said “we were Austrian” may have lived their whole lives in a town that has been in three countries since. If the town name is genuinely lost, recovering it – from a naturalization petition, a ship manifest, a headstone, a burial society, a synagogue record – is the first job, ahead of every database on this page.
Five Institutions and What Each One Actually Holds
The whole task, compressed: match your question to the collection that was built to answer it.
These are not five versions of the same list. They were assembled by different bodies, for different reasons, at different times, and the differences are the reason people spend months in the wrong one. Each block below describes only what the institution says about itself on its own site. The first four are named here without links, because we link out only to government and university sources; each is easy to reach by name in any search engine. The fifth is a United States government archive, so it is linked. A sixth organization, the American Red Cross, appears on every list of resources for this subject and needs describing accurately rather than repeating; it comes after the five, because what it currently offers is not a collection of records.
Two practical points about Arolsen that its own pages make and almost nobody repeats. The first is that you should search the online collection yourself before you file an inquiry, which is the archive’s explicit advice, and the reason is in its published figures: it recorded 32,148 inquiries in 2025, answers them in order of receipt, and states an average processing time of five months and a maximum of thirteen. Survivors’ own requests may be prioritized. Filing an inquiry for something already sitting in the free search costs you most of a year.
The second is that Arolsen publishes what it covers, by category, and it is more specific than “the Holocaust”: imprisonment in concentration camps, ghettos, labor camps and Gestapo prisons; forced labor; displaced persons; children and young people, including records of transports and admissions to children’s homes; and gravesites, where the archive gathers death certificates, grave registers and burial records that it notes are often a family’s only route to where someone was buried. On forced labor it is candid about a limit that matters: its holdings are primarily about civilians compelled to work inside the German Reich, and there are hardly any records on forced labor in the occupied territories.
The Meed Registry is the resource most relevant to anyone hoping to reach a living person, and it comes with a rule that deserves respect rather than resentment. The Registry is deliberately not published online, and the Museum does not give out survivors’ addresses or telephone numbers. What it will do is check the Registry for you if you write with the names and your postal address, and mail you copies of any matches. We will come back to how it handles a request for contact, because that mechanism is the single best model in this subject for how a first approach ought to work.
Here is why Yad Vashem matters far more than its billing as a memorial database suggests. A Page of Testimony is often the only surviving record that a particular human being existed at all – and it is also a record of somebody living. The form asks who is submitting it and how they were related. That means the database is not only an index of the dead; it is an index of the surviving relatives who came forward, each stamped with a date and a relationship.
Yad Vashem publishes a case that shows the mechanism working exactly as it can work for you. Klara Blaier and Hannah Katz were sisters, sent to different relatives in Hungary as children, who last saw each other in 1944. Both survived camps and death marches. Both made aliya in 1948. Both raised families in Israel roughly 45 miles apart, and each spent decades believing she was the only member of her family left alive. In January 2005, Hannah’s granddaughter Merav Zamir went to check on the Page of Testimony she had submitted in 1999 for her great-grandmother, Sheindl Weiss – and found a second Page of Testimony for the same woman, filed in 1993 by a daughter named Klara Blaier. The sisters were reunited after 61 years. Note carefully what Yad Vashem says happened next: Merav contacted Yad Vashem, and Yad Vashem assisted the families in making contact. The institution mediated. It did not hand out an address.
The practical instruction that follows is simple and it is the highest-yield thing on this page. Search the Central Database for every murdered relative you can name, and then read the submitter details on every Page you find. If a Page for your great-uncle was filed in 1957 by a cousin you had never heard of, you have just found a branch of your family – and a date and a place to work from.
The Aufbau database deserves singling out for anyone chasing the American side of a family. Aufbau was a newspaper in New York, and between 1944 and 1946 it printed survivor names for readers who were, overwhelmingly, refugees and immigrants already in the United States searching for the people they had left behind. A name in that set is a name that was being looked for from America, at a specific moment, in print. It is one of the very few sources that connects the European record to the American reader directly. The JewishGen Family Finder is worth the same attention for a different reason: it is a live register of who else is researching your surname and your town right now, which means it is one of the only places on this list where the person on the other end of a search is alive and wants to be contacted.
Set your expectations of NARA correctly and it will serve you well; set them wrongly and you will lose a month. NARA is not a name index of victims and does not present itself as one. It is where the American paper trail lives – what US officials recorded, prosecuted, seized and admitted. For a family search it earns its place at two specific moments: when you need the evidentiary record of a particular camp, and when the search crosses the Atlantic and becomes a question about immigration, naturalization and resettlement. That second moment is where most searches for living American relatives actually get solved.
The Red Cross, described accurately
The American Red Cross is named on every list of Holocaust tracing resources, and it once ran a dedicated Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center. What its website presents today is Restoring Family Links: a free, confidential international tracing service run jointly with Red Cross and Red Crescent societies worldwide, offered regardless of nationality, race, religion, citizenship or immigration status, reached through an International Reconnecting Families Inquiry Form or the national helpline on 844-782-9441. Read its published criteria before you build a plan around it, because they are written around present-day separations: the program describes families separated internationally by conflict, disaster, migration or humanitarian emergency, asks that ordinary channels have been tried first, and asks that the person inquiring be a relative who had been in direct contact with the sought person before the crisis occurred. We could not find a Holocaust-specific intake on the Red Cross site as it stands, and we are not going to tell you that the service has ended, because we could not confirm that either. Call the helpline and ask what they currently accept. That is a five-minute question with a definite answer, and it beats either of the assumptions circulating online.
What the Archives Cannot Tell You
The most important section on this page, and the one the rest of the internet leaves out.
A search that returns nothing feels like an answer. It is not one. The records that exist are the records a bureaucracy chose to create, and the Nazi administration created paperwork in order to manage people it was holding – which means that the more completely a person was destroyed, the less likely it is that anything was written about them. This is the cruelest structural fact in the subject and it is the one a family most needs to hear before they conclude that a grandmother’s whole village left no trace because it was somehow their fault for searching badly.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum publishes the specifics for the collection it holds, and they are worth reading slowly. The International Tracing Service Digital Archive does not contain the names of people who were murdered on arrival at camps and killing centers – though deportation lists from France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands are usually available. It does not contain the names of those murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that operated behind the Eastern Front. It does not contain those who died on the death marches, though other records made before their deaths may survive. It does not contain those who died at the time of arrest. And it does not contain those who were hidden, except for some postwar material.
The Museum is equally direct about the geography of its coverage: the material is generally more thorough for people deported from Western Europe than for those living in Eastern Europe at the start of the war, and the collection holds records from only a very small number of ghettos. Read those two sentences against a map. A family from Amsterdam or Salonika may leave a documented trail; a family from a small town in what is now Ukraine or Belarus may leave almost nothing, not because the archive is incomplete in some fixable way, but because the killing there was done without paperwork.
The Museum’s published answer to the question “why isn’t there a database of victims” says the same thing at the level of the whole subject: the complicated and fragmentary nature of the historical documents prevents the possibility of any complete database of the names and fates of each individual victim. Yad Vashem, from the other direction, states that some one million victims remain unidentified even after seventy years of collecting names.
What to do instead of concluding nothing exists
Three moves, in this order. First, search under the town rather than the person. Yizkor books, ghetto registrations, community lists and deportation lists are organized by place; a person invisible under their own name may appear on a list of who lived on a particular street. Second, search sideways. If nothing survives for your great-grandmother, something may survive for her brother, and his record will name her. Persecution records routinely capture next of kin, birthplaces and prewar addresses, which is exactly the material a family search needs even when it is attached to the wrong person. Third, look for the records made after liberation rather than during the war – displaced persons registrations, aid organization files, emigration paperwork – because those were made by people trying to help, and they were made with the survivor sitting in the room answering questions.
One further caution about absence. Some records are not missing; they are simply somewhere else. Arolsen states plainly that it holds no records on soldiers of the former German Army or on expellees and refugees from the former eastern territories of the German Reich, and points those inquiries to the German Federal Archives; that questions about prisoners of war, civilian detainees or civilians deported by the Red Army belong to the German Red Cross Search Service; and that indemnification claims by Jewish victims of Nazi persecution belong to the Claims Conference. Being told an archive has nothing is not the same as being told nothing exists. Ask which archive would have it.
Why the Name You Were Given Is Rarely the Name in the File
Four writing systems, a dozen clerks, three countries and a deliberate change on arrival.
Every search in this subject runs into the same wall, and people take it personally when they should treat it as an ordinary condition of the material. A single person can appear across the records under six or eight spellings, none of which is wrong. A name written in Hebrew or Yiddish characters had to be rendered into Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, German and eventually English orthography, and each of those languages makes different choices about the same sounds. The same man is Chaim, Haim, Hayyim and Chajim. The same woman is Rivka, Riva, Rifka and Regina. A surname with a sibilant in it – anything with sz, cz, sh, zh, tsch – will have been spelled a different way in every country the family passed through, and the German records will have Germanized it.
On top of transliteration sit the everyday realities of how names were used. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services publishes an unusually frank list of why the name on an immigration record so often is not the name a family used, quoting an internal instruction from 1952: “We know from experience that records of entry of many aliens into the United States contain assumed or incorrect names and other errors.” The reasons it enumerates are all mundane, and every one of them is common in this material: a nickname; a true name misspelled; a stepfather’s surname rather than a natural father’s; a mother’s maiden name rather than a father’s surname; a maiden name rather than a married name; or a name used according to local custom, such as taking the father’s given name as a surname, or the name of the farm. The full discussion is on the USCIS Genealogy Program’s page on immigrant name changes.
That same page dismantles the story almost every American family tells about its name. The version where a clerk at Ellis Island could not understand the immigrant and simply invented a surname is, in the agency’s own assessment, seldom supported by research. Passenger lists were not created at Ellis Island at all – they were created abroad, starting near the immigrant’s home at the point the ticket was bought, by a clerk who almost certainly spoke the language. What actually corrupted names was repetition: each leg of a journey generated another transcription and another chance to alter a spelling, so, as the agency puts it, the more direct the route, the less likely the name changed. And the inspector at the port was under instructions not to change a name or identifying detail unless the immigrant asked or the record was demonstrably wrong. The practical consequence is useful rather than merely corrective: if you are hunting a spelling, work backward along the route, because the version closest to home is likely the most faithful.
Names that were changed on purpose, and towns that moved
Then there are the deliberate changes, which in this history carry particular weight. People who survived changed their names to sound less Jewish, or less German, or less foreign; some had already changed them during the war in order to live under false papers, and kept the false name afterward because it was the name their liberation documents carried. Women married and vanished under a new surname, sometimes twice. Children who were hidden were given other families’ names and sometimes never got their own back. None of that is evasion. It is the residue of trying to stay alive, and it should be searched as a fact about the records rather than treated as concealment. The general problem of following a family across a surname change is covered in our guide to tracing relatives who immigrated under a changed surname.
Places move too, and they move in two directions. A town changed country – the Museum’s own example runs a single 1910 Austrian citizen across eight possible modern states – and a town also changed name, sometimes more than once, as sovereignty and language changed. Search a place under every name it has held, and use a gazetteer built for this purpose rather than a modern map; JewishGen’s Communities Database exists precisely to resolve one town across its variant names and spellings. A search that fails on a town name has often failed on the wrong century’s map.
One last habit, and it is the one that separates people who finish these searches from people who circle them for years. Record every variant you encounter, with the document it came from, and search all of them every time. Not one canonical spelling with alternates in a footnote – a working list, used in full, in every database, every session. The archives themselves are built for this: JewishGen’s search offers phonetic and fuzzy matching precisely because exact matching fails on this material. Our wider method for breaking a stalled line is set out in working a genealogy brick wall with skip-tracing technique.
Which Door for Which Question
Match the question you are actually asking to the collection built to answer it.
| If you want to know | Start here | What it will not do |
|---|---|---|
| Whether a murdered relative is commemorated anywhere, and who commemorated them | Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, reading the submitter details on every Page of Testimony | Give you a submitter’s current address, or cover the roughly one million victims Yad Vashem says remain unidentified |
| What happened to a person in custody: camp, transport, forced labor, DP camp, burial | The Arolsen Archives’ free online collection, then its free inquiry service if that fails | Answer quickly – Arolsen states a five-month average and a thirteen-month maximum – or cover people killed without paperwork |
| Whether a survivor registered themselves in the United States, or is reachable at all | The Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, by written request | Be searched online, or release any address or telephone number to you |
| Whether a specific town, ghetto, transport or camp list names your family | JewishGen’s Holocaust Database component sets, its Communities Database and translated Yizkor books | Substitute for an archive’s original documents, or hold the same records twice over |
| What the US Government recorded: liberation, prosecution, refugee policy, resettlement | NARA, including the Presidential Library holdings on refugees and displaced persons | Function as a name index of victims, which it has never claimed to be |
| Who is alive today, where they live, and how to reach them | Public-records research on the living side, starting from the name and place the archives gave youWhere we fit | Come first – without the archival name and town there is nothing to research |
Six rows, and the first five are free. That ordering is not modesty; it is the actual sequence. Five of these collections will answer a family question at no cost, and the sixth only becomes useful once they have produced a name, a town and a date to work from. Anybody who sells you the sixth before you have run the first five is selling you a search with no starting point.
The Crossing to the American Side
Where a European record becomes an American family, and which US series carries which years.
For most people reading this in the United States, the search has a hinge in it. Everything before the hinge is European and archival. Everything after it is American and, in records terms, comparatively well lit. The hinge is the moment somebody boarded a ship or a plane, and the paperwork of that moment is what connects the two halves of the search.
Two things happened at that hinge that are easy to miss. Survivors were registered as displaced persons before they went anywhere – the Allies encountered, by the Arolsen Archives’ account, between ten and twelve million people who were no longer in their countries of origin, and the DP registrations, camp records and aid organization files generated in those years are unusually rich for family research because they were compiled from interviews with the person themselves. A DP record often carries a prewar address, a birthplace, surviving relatives, an intended destination and the name of a sponsor in the receiving country. That sponsor’s name is frequently the American branch of the family. Arolsen holds substantial DP material and warns, accurately, that not every individual DP document survives.
The five US record series, and which one covers your years
On the American side, the single most useful and least known resource is the USCIS Genealogy Program, a fee-for-service program that provides access to historical immigration and naturalization records of deceased immigrants. It is authorized to release five series, and the dates are the whole game – pick the wrong one and you will be told the file does not exist when in fact you asked the wrong archive. The program and its request forms are described at the USCIS Genealogy Program’s own page.
Alien Registration Forms (AR-2) – approximately 5.5 million registration forms completed by every non-citizen aged 14 and over who was living in or entering the United States between August 1, 1940 and March 31, 1944. This is the series that covers the branch of the family that got out before or during the war, and it is a snapshot of where they were living in America at that moment.
C-Files – naturalization certificate files, covering naturalizations in federal, state, county and municipal courts, overseas military naturalizations and certificates of citizenship.
Registry Files – documenting the creation of arrival records for people who entered before July 1, 1924 and for whom no arrival record could later be found.
Visa Files – original arrival records for immigrants admitted for permanent residence under the Immigration Act of 1924.
Requests run on Forms G-1041 for an index search and G-1041A for the record itself.
Read the AR-2 dates against the A-File date and a useful pattern appears. A family that fled early and a family that survived and emigrated afterward are in two different filing systems, twelve months apart at the boundary. A single family can sit in both: a brother who left in 1938 and registered on an AR-2 in 1940, and a sister who survived and arrived in 1949 with an A-File. Where that is the shape of your family, finding one is often how you find the other, because a later arrival’s paperwork commonly names the earlier arrival as the sponsor or the relative already resident.
Alongside those sit the ordinary immigration records – passenger manifests, declarations of intention, naturalization petitions – which for this period carry more genealogical detail than people expect, including places of birth, last foreign residence, the name and address of the nearest relative left behind, and the name and address of the person the arrival was joining. Our guide to tracing a relative who immigrated to the United States covers how those series fit together in general; the point specific to this history is that for a survivor, the “nearest relative in the country you came from” field was often left blank or filled with a name that meant something terrible, and the “person you are joining” field is therefore doing double duty as the only family link on the page.
One more bridge worth naming, because it runs the other way. Aufbau, the German-language newspaper published in New York, printed survivor names in 1944 to 1946 for a readership of refugees already in America looking for the people they had lost. JewishGen’s Holocaust collection includes that set – over 33,000 names. A relative appearing in Aufbau is a relative whose survival was announced to America in print, at a known date, in a city. That is a starting point a records researcher can actually work with.
And where a DNA test has already produced a match that neither of you can place, that is a different discipline layered on top of this one; the mechanics of turning a match into a documented relationship are in our guide to identifying a DNA match through records research. We would only add one caution particular to this subject: endogamous communities produce inflated relationship predictions, so a match labeled “second cousin” in a Jewish family tree may sit several degrees further out, and the label needs documentary confirmation before anybody is told they have found family.
When a Survivor Chose Never to Say
How the institutions themselves handle a first approach, and why they built it that way.
Some families do not know their own history. Some know a fragment and have never been able to ask about it. And some survivors decided, deliberately and for their own reasons, that their children would not be told – not the towns, not the names, not what happened, sometimes not even that they were survivors at all. Children have found out from a tattooed forearm, from a stranger at a funeral, from a box opened after a death. This is common enough that the Arolsen Archives describes it on its own inquiry page: often, it writes, survivors or relatives of victims could not or would not talk about Nazi persecution, sometimes family secrets were involved, and it is after a parent or grandparent dies that descendants feel the strongest need to find out.
If that is your situation, the archives are on your side and no permission is required to search them. The care is needed at the other end – the moment you approach a living person. And the striking thing, once you look, is that the institutions in this field have all arrived at the same answer independently.
The model the institutions built
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum will not publish its Registry and will not give out a survivor’s address or telephone number, and it says why: to protect the privacy of the survivors and their families. What it offers instead is a mediated channel. The Registry will act as a third party and forward a message on your behalf, through a Third Party Contact Form. Before you complete it you are asked to email the Resource Center to confirm the person is registered and that the Museum has current details for them. Registry staff then review the message before deciding whether to forward it at all. And then the sentence that ought to be printed above every search of this kind: the decision to respond is strictly voluntary and up to the survivor.
Yad Vashem handled the Blaier-Katz reunion the same way. The granddaughter who found the second Page of Testimony did not receive an address; she contacted Yad Vashem, and Yad Vashem assisted both families in making contact. Two institutions, two countries, the same design: find the connection freely, deliver the approach through someone who can be refused.
That design is worth copying even when no institution is involved, because it protects the thing you actually want. A letter that arrives through a museum carries an implicit assurance that the sender is real and the claim has been looked at. A cold telephone call to an eighty-nine-year-old, from a stranger asserting a family relationship, is indistinguishable from the most common script used to defraud elderly people – and the recipient’s family will treat it that way, correctly.
Writing the first approach
If you do write directly, write in a form that leaves the other person in control. Send a letter, not a telephone call: a letter can be read twice, shown to a son or daughter, and answered in a week or never. Say who you are and how you believe you are related, in one paragraph, with the document you are relying on named. Say what you are hoping for and keep it modest – information about a name, a photograph, a town. Say explicitly that no reply is needed and that you will not write again unless invited, and then honor that. Do not send a DNA kit unasked. Do not arrive in person. Do not contact the person’s children first in the hope they will apply pressure. If the answer is silence, the answer is silence.
And be prepared for the answer to be a refusal that has nothing to do with you. A survivor may not want to reopen any of it at ninety-one. A descendant may have been raised in a family that converted, or assimilated, or spent seventy years not discussing this, and may not want the identity that arrives attached to your letter. They are allowed. A relative who does not want to be found is not a puzzle to be solved harder, and a search that treats a refusal as an obstacle has stopped being family research.
Six Mistakes That Cost People Years
Each of these is avoidable, and each of them is made constantly.
Filing an inquiry before searching yourself
The Arolsen Archives tells people to search its free online collection first, and its own published figures say why: 32,148 inquiries in 2025, answered in order, averaging five months. The free search is instant.
Searching by country instead of town
Most of this material is filed by community. A country name gets a database-only search at best, and borders moved so much that the country in the family story may not be the country in the record.
Reading a Page of Testimony and stopping at the victim
The submitter block is the living lead. Who filed it, when, from where, and claiming what relationship – that is a branch of the family identifying itself on a dated form, and most people never scroll to it.
Treating an empty result as a finding
People murdered on arrival, killed by the Einsatzgruppen, lost on death marches or hidden are largely absent from the ITS material by the Museum’s own account. Silence in the file is not evidence about a life.
Searching only the spelling your family uses
Four alphabets and six national orthographies produced a name with many faces. Keep a working list of every variant with its source document, and run all of them in every database, every time.
Telephoning a very elderly relative out of the blue
An unexpected call claiming kinship is also the shape of the most common fraud aimed at older people. Write, route it through an institution where one exists, and let the reply be optional.
Where a Records Firm Fits, and Where It Must Not
We are the American half of this, after the archives have done the European half.
We ask which archives you have already run
Yad Vashem, Arolsen, the Museum’s Registry, JewishGen. If a free institutional route is still open, we say so and you keep your money. Most people who write to us have not yet read the submitter details on a Page of Testimony.
We work from the archival name and place
A town, a spelling, a birth year, a sponsor named on an arrival record. From there we build a documented identity in the United States out of public and lawfully licensed sources, with the record behind each step attached.
We say how confident we are, in words
Where the archival half has given us a name, a town and a date, the American side usually comes back within 24 hours – with a plain statement of where the evidence thins. On a search carrying this many name variants, an unqualified answer would be a false one.
The approach stays yours to make
We do not write to your relative, telephone them, or announce a family connection on your behalf. Where a museum or archive offers a mediated channel, that channel is better than anything we could do, and we will point you at it.
The Lines We Hold on This Subject
Set out in full, because on this history a vague boundary would be worse than none.
We are a public-records and skip-tracing research firm, working since 2004. . We run no surveillance, we approach nobody’s door, and we do not follow people. We are not historians of this period either, and this page does not pretend otherwise: everything above describes what five named institutions publish about their own collections, and where a question is genuinely historical – what a document means, what a camp abbreviation stands for, whether a transport list is complete – the archive that holds the record is the authority, not us. Arolsen even publishes a guide for decoding the abbreviations in its own documents, which is a better answer than any summary we could write.
Every search we run has a stated, permissible purpose, and we establish yours before any work starts. Where a source is regulated – motor vehicle data under the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, financial identifiers under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – we use it only where a permissible use genuinely applies, and we write down which one. We do not use pretext, and on this subject the point is sharper than usual. Nobody here telephones a synagogue, a burial society, a museum, an archive or a relative pretending to be someone else, and we will not pose as a family member, a researcher for an institution, or anyone acting on an archive’s behalf in order to open a door. That deception would be contemptible here in a way that goes beyond the ordinary objection to it, and we will not coach you through it either. We do not reach into private financial account contents – no balances, no statements, no transaction records – and we do not obtain anybody’s medical records.
We are not a consumer reporting agency, and nothing we produce is a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. That matters here because family searches sometimes travel next to money: a restitution or compensation claim, an estate, an heirship question. Our work may not be used to decide employment, credit, insurance underwriting, tenant screening or housing, a license or a government benefit. Those decisions require a consumer reporting agency and the disclosure, authorization and adverse-action machinery the Act builds around them, and where that is what someone actually needs we decline the work and explain why. On compensation specifically, the Arolsen Archives points indemnification claims by Jewish victims of Nazi persecution to the Claims Conference, and the Museum’s Registry will search for documentation to support a claim while stating plainly that it cannot advise on the claim itself. Both are better addresses than ours.
Now the decline that matters most on this page. A family-reunion story is one of the most sympathetic reasons a person can give for wanting somebody found, which is exactly why it is worth examining rather than accepting. A request framed as reconnecting a family gets more scrutiny at intake here, not less. We ask who is asking, what the documentary basis for the claimed relationship is, whether contact has been sought and refused before, and whether any court order exists. There are several situations where we stop. Where the person sought is elderly and the approach carries any financial dimension – an inheritance, a claim, a signature needed, an introduction to an adviser – we treat that as an elder-exploitation risk and we do not proceed on a family story alone. Where a relative has already declined contact, through an institution or directly, a second route around that refusal is not work we will do. Where the search looks like an estranged family member, a former partner, or anyone else using a genealogical frame to reach a person who removed themselves – including a person protected by a state address confidentiality program or a protective order – we decline, and we do not refer the work on to somebody else. People live where they live, and someone who is hard to reach is frequently hard to reach on purpose. If you are the person who does not want to be found and you believe you are being traced, speak to a victim-services advocate or to the court that issued your order.
And the boundary this whole page rests on: no living relative owes you a response. Not a meeting, not a letter back, not a photograph, not a DNA sample, not an explanation. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum will review a message before forwarding it and then leaves the reply entirely to the survivor; Yad Vashem introduced two sisters by asking both families rather than by handing over an address. Those institutions have been doing this longer than anyone, and that is the standard they settled on. Everything on this page is general information rather than legal advice; archival access rules and privacy provisions change; and where you need a ruling rather than a research answer, ask an attorney in the relevant jurisdiction.
The People Who Write to Us About This
Rarely lifelong genealogists. Usually somebody who found a document in the last month.
Grandchildren
A grandparent has died and the questions nobody was allowed to ask have outlived them.
Survivors themselves
Very elderly, often searching for a sibling or cousin, and given priority by the archives for that reason.
People holding one document
A DP camp card, a ship manifest, a certificate in a language nobody in the family reads.
Unexpected DNA matches
A close match with an unfamiliar surname, and a shared tree that stops at a destroyed town.
Estate and heirship researchers
A probate matter where the missing heirs are a European family that scattered in the 1940s.
Second and third generation
Adults who learned late that a parent was a survivor and are starting from almost nothing.
The second group is the one that changes how we handle a request. When a survivor is doing the searching, the clock is real, and the institutions recognize it – Arolsen states that it may prioritize an inquiry where a survivor is the person asking, and the Museum gives priority to survivors, their families and families of victims when its staff search the ITS archive. If you are searching on behalf of an elderly parent, say so in the first line of the inquiry rather than the last. It is not a courtesy; it is a routing instruction. If your immediate need is simply to assemble what is known before anyone can be found, our guide to building out a family tree around a missing relative covers that groundwork.
What We Will and Will Not Say to You
We will not promise that a relative exists, because on this history that is not a promise anybody can honestly make, and the archives themselves say so before we do. What we will do is tell you at the outset whether the free institutional routes are still open to you, because a great many people who write to us should be running a name through Yad Vashem and Arolsen for nothing instead of hiring anyone. When we do take the work, every conclusion arrives with the record it rests on and a plain sentence about how confident we are – and where the evidence will not carry an answer, you get told that, rather than a guess dressed up as a finding.
Questions Families Ask at the Start
I have a name but no town. Where do I start?
Recovering the town is the first job, because most of this material is organized by community rather than by country. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s own research guidance asks for full name including maiden names and nicknames, a date of birth with an approximate year accepted, and town and country of residence before the war or of birth – and states that requests carrying only a surname or only a country are limited to database searches. Look for the town in American paperwork first: a naturalization petition, a ship manifest, a death certificate, a Social Security application, a headstone, a burial society record. Only then go to the archives.
Can I search the survivor registry online, or get a survivor’s address?
No to both, by design. The Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Holocaust Survivors is not published on the internet in order to protect the privacy of survivors and their families, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum does not release addresses or telephone numbers. What it will do is check the Registry if you write with the names and your postal address, and mail copies of any matches. For contact, the Registry can act as a third party and forward a message through its Third Party Contact Form after staff have reviewed it – and the decision to respond is strictly voluntary and up to the survivor.
Why is there no single database of Holocaust victims?
Because the surviving documents will not support one. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum states that there is no single list of victims and survivors of Nazi persecution, and that the complicated and fragmentary nature of the historical documents prevents any complete database of individual names and fates. What exists instead is a set of large partial collections built from different sources – Yad Vashem’s names database, the Arolsen holdings, the Museum’s own database, JewishGen’s compilation – each strong where another is weak. Searching one and stopping is the most common error on this subject.
How do Pages of Testimony help me find living relatives?
A Page of Testimony records a murdered person’s details, and it also records who submitted it and how they were related – which makes Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names an index of surviving relatives as well as of victims. Yad Vashem publishes a case in which a granddaughter checking the Page she had filed in 1999 for her great-grandmother found a second Page for the same woman, submitted in 1993 by a daughter nobody in her family knew had survived; Yad Vashem then assisted both families in making contact and two sisters were reunited after 61 years. Read the submitter block on every Page you find.
What do the Arolsen Archives hold, and how long does an inquiry take?
Arolsen, founded by the Allies in 1948 as the International Tracing Service, says its collection carries information on more than 17.5 million victims and survivors of the Nazi regime, covering imprisonment, forced labor, displaced persons, children and young people, and gravesites. Its online archive is free and holds more than 40 million documents. Its tracing service is also free and it reports supplying information in more than half of inquiries – but it recorded 32,148 inquiries in 2025, answers them in order of receipt, and states an average processing time of five months with a maximum of thirteen. Search the online collection yourself first; the archive advises exactly that.
The name is spelled six different ways. Which one is right?
Probably all of them. A name written in Hebrew or Yiddish characters had to be rendered into Polish, Russian, Hungarian, German and English spelling conventions, and each language made different choices. On top of that, US immigration records commonly carry a nickname, a misspelling, a stepfather’s surname, a mother’s maiden name or a name used by local custom – the USCIS Genealogy Program enumerates all of these. Keep a working list of every variant with the document it came from, run all of them in every database, and use the phonetic and fuzzy matching the archives provide instead of exact matching.
What if the survivor never talked about it, or the family does not want to be found?
Both are common and they are different problems. Not being told is ordinary: the Arolsen Archives notes on its own inquiry page that survivors and relatives often could not or would not talk about Nazi persecution, and that descendants frequently begin searching only after a parent or grandparent has died. Searching the archives needs nobody’s permission. Approaching a living person is where care belongs – write rather than telephone, route the approach through an institution where one exists, say plainly that no reply is needed, and accept silence as an answer. Nobody is obliged to respond, however genuine the relationship.
How do I find the American descendants once I have a name?
Through the crossing. Displaced persons registrations and postwar aid files often name a sponsor or relative already in the United States, and that name is usually the American branch. On the US side the USCIS Genealogy Program releases records of deceased immigrants in five series, and the dates decide which one applies: A-Files cover immigration records created or consolidated since April 1, 1944 and are the postwar-arrival series, while approximately 5.5 million AR-2 alien registration forms cover non-citizens aged 14 and over in the country between August 1940 and March 1944 and catch the family who got out earlier. Naturalization petitions and manifests carry the rest.
Have a Name, a Town, or a Sponsor on an Arrival Record?
That is the point at which the European half of this search becomes an American one, and where records work earns its keep. Send us what the archives gave you, or put the situation to our team – and if you want to see the wider practice this sits inside, it is our skip tracing and public-records research. If the archives have not been searched yet, we will say so and send you back to them first.
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