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Surname and Family Research Resources Site

Hints for searching Austrian locations via phone directory
and parish records - Part 1 (Part 2)

Based on a message by Karl Iresberger on the Austria-General Query Board at Rootsweb.com

The Austrian phone directory can be useful to locate possible relatives or a place of origin in today's Austria.

It can be found under http://www.etb.at/. There fill in these fields:

Name: (surname)
Vorname, Titel etc.: (Given name, title, ...)
Ort: (name of commune/town)
Suche starten = Go!

To search persons within the commune (town) and the whole government district (county) it belongs to, click "Erweiterte Suche" (advanced search) and after that "Ort und Umgebung" (location and surroundings) - which extends the search to the whole district. Then again click on Suche starten = Go!

[View AustriaGenWeb's more detailed directions for using the online phone directory]

Among the key data which can be seen from the phone directory are the postcode / zip code and the phone prefix / area code.

Brief description of the Austrian post code system:

The post code (zip code/ Postleitzahl) is a four-digit number beetween 1000 and 9999 which in an address precedes the name of the town.

The first digit indicates the province/state (Austria is composed of nine provinces) as specified below. The zip code numbers, by and large, ascend from East to West in two layers: 1000 to 6999 from North-East to West, 7000 to 9999 from East to South-West. The overall system is as follows:

The principle of East-West direction is complemented by a second principle: Within each province (except of Vienna and Lower Austria) the zip code numbers ascend beginning with the province capital, in a manner appropriate to the geographical shape and administrative division (into government districts) of the state in question.

The system of area codes is as follows:

Firstly, there are phone prefixes with no geographical significance, such as 0800 and all numbers like 06xx, some of which are assingned to mobile phone companies, in particular 0650, 0664, 0676, 0699, 699 and several others.

The bulk of prefixes, however, indicates the location as follows:
The phone prefixes roughly describe, in ascending sequence, a circle from North-East over South to West, then going East in the North.

If a place (of birth, origin etc) is known, in many cases genealogical data can be drawn from parish records. Austria has been an overwhelmingly catholic country for the past centuries. Thus the catholic parish records are the main key to genealogical information.
The original catholic parish records are used to be held by the parishes themselves while some diocesan archives have copies. Therefore, the affiliation of parishes with their respective dioceses is of interest.
With only a few exceptions, one diocese covers one province. The exceptions are:

• The Eastern part of Lower Austria belongs to the Archdiocesis of Vienna, the Western part forming the diocese of St.Pölten.
• The Eastern part (zip codes 63xx and part of 62xx) of North Tyrol belongs to the Archdiocese Salzburg.

The names of the dioceses correspond with the See (sometimes combined with a former See of the bishop), which is usually the province capital.

Dioceses - Bishoprics in Austria:

• Linz: (years 1819 and younger, Upper Austrian State Archives, Linz; Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv, Linz
• Salzburg (exhaustive)
• Graz-Seckau (years 1835 and younger, partly also older)
• Gurk-Klagenfurt (yes, details unknown)
• Wien: none, or not disclosed

As the city of Vienna was and still is split up in dozens of (roman catholic) parishes, finding out the right Vienna parish is a rather hopeless task (even leaving apart the problem of different ages of parishes, involving changes of parish borders ...). Similar though smaller problems appear in other major cities and towns. In cases like this, the diocesan archives may be able to direct you to the appropriate place.

Hints - Part 2 >