Sometimes our profession simply requires historical knowledge and luck…
We were asked by a German partner office to find inheritance-entitled descendants of a German-speaking woman from Galicia.
Since the archive conditions in the formerly easternmost crown land of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy are catastrophic and the processing times sometimes exceed 1 year, the chances were relatively poor of finding inheritance-entitled persons within a reasonable time. However, we knew that 99% of the formerly German-speaking population of Galicia emigrated after World War II primarily to Baden-Württemberg, Hesse as well as to the Austrian federal states of Upper Austria and Salzburg.
In a name bearer search in the telephone book, in which we limited the search to the mentioned regions, brought 2 entries and we found within a very short time the son of the nephew of the deceased in Salzburg, who was himself still born in Galicia and had to leave the country in 1945 after the invasion of the Red Army.
