Mosty Wielkie was located in the old Polish province of Galacia, that became part of Austria-Hungary after the First Partition of Poland in 1772. In 1785 the Imperial government in Vienna ordered that copies of all parish registers of births, marriages, and deaths be sent to the archives in Lemburg (now Lviv). Most of the city’s residents were ethnically Ukrainian, although there were significant numbers of Polish and Jewish inhabitants as well. At that time Mosty Wielkie had two churches (and a synagogue). Most of the Ukrainian population worshipped at the Uniate Church, which though it acknowledged papal supremacy, followed the rite of the Eastern Orthodox Church; while the Poles mostly attended the the Roman Catholic church.
Starting in 2007 I began ordering and viewing the microfilms that the Mormon’s had produced. They’ve since been made available online, through the FamilySearch website. Some of the Mosty Wielkie metrical records have wound up in Poland, and these too have been loaded onto the web. Here’s where the records can be found:
| Uniate (Greek Catholic) Births 1785-1883; Marriages 1785-1844, 1873-1905; Deaths 1785-1873 | https://www.familysearch.org/search/image/index?owc=QVJ3-864%3A180600901%2C201766601%3Fcc%3D1910265 |
| Uniate (Greek Catholic) Births, Marriages, Deaths, 1872-1887, 1889-1892 | http://agadd2.home.net.pl/metrykalia/298/sygn.%20293/indeks.htm |
| Uniate (Greek Catholic) Births, Marriages, Deaths, 1894-1908 | http://agadd2.home.net.pl/metrykalia/298/sygn.%20294/indeks.htm |
| Roman Catholic Births, Marriages, Deaths 1817, 1823-1833, 1837-1848, 1851, 1853-1898 | https://www.familysearch.org/search/image/index?owc=QVJ3-8DG%3A180600901%2C201751901%3Fcc%3D1910265 |
When I learned of the availability of these records I dreaded having to deal with records written in Ukrainian. Sad to say, I neither speak nor read Ukrainian (or any other Slavic language, for that matter). Much to my amazement, I found out that these records are written, not in Ukrainian, or even German, but rather Latin!
I should add that there is another, earlier, source: the parish records of the Uniate Church in Mosty Wielkie under Polish rule, which record baptisms and a few marriage records from 1754 to 1774. (They can be found here.) These records are in various languages, but most are written in what seems to be Church Slavonic or Polish, and are written as prose rather than the tabular format of the Austrian records. I’d love help in reading these!