Romanian passport by descent: recovering your ancestor's records from Ukraine, Moldova and Romania

Descent is proven through the ancestor, not through you. Your American or Israeli birth certificate establishes exactly one link in the chain, your own. Every link above it was registered where the family used to live, which today usually means a civil registry office or a state archive in Ukraine, Moldova or Romania. Where the ancestor has died, or the entry is older than roughly seventy-five years, an ordinary birth extract is not issued at all; instead, an archival certificate is drawn from the original register book. Once obtained, both kinds of document need an apostille (the international certification that makes a public document valid abroad) and a sworn translation into Romanian before Romania will accept them.

The rest of this article explains where these records are held, which document to ask for, and how the work is done in practice.

This guide is also available in Hebrew: איפה מסמכי הסבים מבסרביה ובוקובינה

Why your own documents are not enough

Many families start with a folder of their own documents: passports, birth certificates, sometimes a parent’s certificate as well, all official and often apostilled. These are useful, but they do not answer the question the Romanian authorities are asking.

That question is not who you are. It is whether a particular person, born in a particular place at a particular time, was a Romanian citizen, and whether an unbroken line of births connects that person to you. Your own documents cover the last step of that line. The earlier steps were recorded in another country, in another language and under another state, so the evidence for them has to come from there.

Where are your ancestor’s records held?

Families often remember their ancestors as coming from “Romania”, and the present-day map shows a different country. Both can be correct, because the borders changed during the twentieth century.

An ancestor born in Bessarabia was born in Romania as it existed between the two world wars. Those register books are now held by the civil registry and the National Archives of the Republic of Moldova. An ancestor born in Bukovina was also born in Romania at the time, but the books are now in Ukraine, largely in the Chernivtsi regional archive. Ancestors from Transylvania, Banat or the old Kingdom are recorded within present-day Romania.

The same applies to families who left Romania itself. Many emigrated before 1989, a large number of them during the Ceaușescu years, and took another citizenship abroad. Their children and grandchildren can also apply for Romanian citizenship. Which article of the law applies depends on how the citizenship was lost, as explained in Article 10 or Article 11. Their birth and marriage records are held by the town hall where they were registered in Romania, or by the National Archives if the register is more than 100 years old.

Emigration did not remove any of these entries. A family that left in the 1920s, or under Soviet rule decades later, left the register book behind. The book stayed where it was and passed from the registry office to the state archive once its retention period ended. This is why the record of a birth in 1907 is very often still there today, even though it is now far from the family that needs it.

Why the certificate you expected may not exist

When a registry replies that it cannot issue a birth certificate, many families assume the record is lost. In most cases it is not lost; it is simply held by a different institution and issued as a different document.

An extras de naștere — a birth extract — is issued by a civil registry office for living people and recent entries. For someone who died long ago, or for an entry from before the 1950s, the registry no longer holds the book, so it has nothing to extract from. What can be obtained instead is an archival certificate, produced from the register book by the archive that now keeps it.

These are two different documents, issued by different bodies through different request procedures. A request sent to the wrong institution, or asking for the wrong document, is the most common reason a family is told that “the archive has nothing.” In practice the archive often holds a great deal, and the key is to ask it for the document it is able to issue.

What if the birth entry really is gone?

Sometimes the entry has genuinely not survived. Books were burned or evacuated, some were lost in 1940 or 1944, and in some places the parish that kept them no longer exists.

Even then, a line can usually still be built, because a person’s life leaves more than one record. Marriage entries name both spouses’ places of birth and their parents. Death entries record age and origin. Military registers, church records, census returns, school registers and residence records all place a named person in a particular place at a known date. Several such documents that are consistent with one another can establish what a single missing certificate would have established on its own.

This approach takes longer, and it does not always succeed. It does, however, often allow a case to continue where a missing birth certificate would otherwise have stopped it.

Why the names do not match, and why that is normal

A surname may be written one way in a Romanian register in 1931, another way by a clerk at a port of arrival, and a third way on an Israeli identity card. A date may be recorded by the old calendar in one document and by the new one in another. A village may have had three names and belonged to two countries.

None of this means something is wrong with your family’s paperwork. It is what happens to records that cross borders and alphabets. What matters is that the differences are resolved on paper, through the records themselves and, where necessary, through a formal correction, rather than explained in an accompanying letter. The reason is practical: the authority makes its decision on the documents in the file, so the documents themselves need to show that they refer to the same person.

Why we obtain the records ourselves

Requests are written in Ukrainian, Romanian or Russian. Each one must be addressed to the specific institution that holds the book, name the exact document being requested, and come from someone entitled to receive records about a deceased person. That entitlement is usually proven with documents from further down the same family line, which is why the work follows a set order and cannot simply begin in the middle.

Obtaining the records ourselves also means that we know the origin of every document in the file. This matters because, since March 2026, Ukraine’s apostille register shows the scanned document alongside the apostille, so the two can be checked against each other. When we request a record directly from the institution that holds it, we know exactly which document the apostille is attached to.

What does it cost, and how long does it take?

Record recovery is priced per document: the cost depends on the archive, and we quote it per record before we start, with the apostille included in the quoted price rather than added afterwards.

We do not give a date for when records will arrive, because each archive works to its own timetable and response times vary. What we do tell you before any work begins is which records your case needs and where they are held.

Where to start

The starting point is whatever the family already has, however incomplete: names as they were actually spelled, places as they were called at the time, approximate dates, and photographs of any surviving documents, such as a page from a passport, a marriage certificate or a letter with an address on it. Even a name and a decade can be enough to establish whether there is a case. What that first check covers, and what it means if the answer is no, is explained in verifying whether you qualify.

The requests themselves are made by a representative on the spot, under a power of attorney you sign where you live. If the family’s records are spread across several countries, birth certificates from Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, Kazakhstan and Romania explains which country holds which record. If you are not sure whether your ancestor was a Romanian citizen at all, the dates and the map usually answer it, as shown in was your grandparent a Romanian citizen?

If you have not yet worked out which of the three legal positions applies to you, begin with whether you may already be a Romanian citizen. That question is answered by dates, and you can start on it yourself. If the chain did break, Article 10 or Article 11 explains how far each route reaches and why the place of birth decides it.