What are Civil Registers?

Civil registers present the facts of an individual's life. As such civil registrations that comprise the vital records of births, marriages, divorces, and deaths, are an excellent source of accurate information on names, dates, and important events.

The concept of civil registration became a force in European and world record-keeping following the French Revolution. During the first half of the 19th century, movements for civil registration arose in Romania and Moldova but were not always consistently implemented until the second half of the 19th century. Most of these civil records began to be kept in the 1860s and continue through to the present day. These records can be found at municipal archives and the national archive, although most have not been digitized.

Romania as a modern country came into being in 1859 and immediately began keeping a census, conducting one about every 10 years. The individual states that now comprise Romania, such as Wallachia and Transylvania, occasionally ran censuses beforehand, but without standardized regularity.