Ancestors in Lemberg (Lviv) and Czyczkow/y

Question

My great-grandfather was born in Lemberg, Galicia (now Lviv, Ukraine). However, I am unsure how to proceed to further back in the family tree. I have written to the archives in Lviv which hold the records, however I have never heard back. The family name: Mühlgay and my great-great-grandfather's hebrew name: Mordechai (likely not his legal name) are all that I have to go on. I know that Mordechai Mühlgay's father was R' Yoshke (likely Josef or Jozef) of Czyczkow, a local religious leader, however I have little else. What information is available about my ancestors?

Although I am not giving the name of my great-grandfather, I will say that he and his brothers were born over the span of the late 1880s-1890s and that they moved to Fürth, in Bavaria, at some point of the latter decade.

Answer 1

The good news is that over 100,000 Jewish birth, marriage, and death records from Lviv (Lwow, Lemberg) have been transcribed and put online for free searching in Gesher Galicia's All Galicia Database:

http://search.geshergalicia.org/

The bad news is that I don't see anyone there named "Mühlgay". Could your great-grandfather have had a different surname before he moved? Although, note that the transcribed birth records don't go much past 1871 yet; they're still being worked on by volunteers, and it's possible your family moved to Lviv after that date. And it's also possible that they lived just outside Lviv and said they were "from" Lviv, in the same way that someone born in a small suburb might refer to themselves as being from the nearby city, if they were referring in conversation to their general area of birth.

I would join the JewishGen and/or Gesher Galicia e-mail mailing lists and post your queries there, with dates or years of birth, if you know them. The mailing lists are free, and full of very helpful folks.