Croatian Roots

Professional Genealogical Research Services

How to Find Your Living Relatives in Croatia?

By calling them or writing to them!

There is a good chance that your close or distant relatives still reside in Croatia. A good way to start the search for your Croatian roots is to first locate them and then, with their help, try to fill in the gaps in your search.

1. Identify all persons with the same last name as is the surname of your direct ancestor from Croatia, who still reside in the place of origin in Croatia or in the nearest largest city or metropolitan area.

2. By accessing the phone directory of Croatia you should be able to retrieve a list of individuals with their phone numbers and addresses. We suggest always making a search for Zagreb, too. With its more than 1 million inhabitants, Zagreb is the largest metropolitan area in Croatia. With its strong industrial base, Zagreb has always been a target of immigrants from the rural parts of Croatia. There is a good chance that some of your distant relatives, who did not move overseas, have actually moved to Zagreb.

3. If you feel uncomfortable calling unknown people in the foreign country on the phone, explaining them your family tree and a slight chance that you may be related, write them a letter. Explain in your letter details of your origin and ask them to contact you. Give them your phone number, postal address and e-mail address. We suggest that you do write in Croatian - a letter written in English has, in our experience, much lesser chance of being answered. Croatian Roots can translate your letter in Croatian for you - our fee is $20 per page.

4. In addition to writing to persons with same last name, it is a good idea to write to a priest of the parish in the place of origin. He may recognize "the sheep that left his flock" many years ago and know the connection with people who stayed behind.

If all this seems too complicated or time consuming, you can, of course, engage Croatian Roots to search for your relatives. Search For Relatives would fall under the category of "Special Search Requests" . The quote for doing the search is clearly based on the number of letters our researcher would have to send or the number of people he or she would have to contact on your behalf. For example, to contact 20 persons in Croatia by mail, our fee is $50, which includes all postage, mailing expenses and time involved. If interested, you can inquire with specifics (surname and origin in Croatia) and we will inform you about the number of prospective contacts and give you our quote for completing this search project for you.