With thanks to KarenHob@aol.com for the information below. Elaine ************************ I have a copy of a reply from the War Archive to a query about a World War I Hungarian / Slovak soldier. The reply ways that they now will only do 1/2 hour of research free. After that it costs 28 Euro per 1/2 hour. They estimate that looking at all of the applications for medals, citations for individual soldiers ( the soldier in question had a medal) and all of the casualties, missing and POW reports for that regiment will take 1 1/2 hours. The fee is the same even when nothing is found. There is an additional estimated charge of 20 EU for copies if anything is fourd. The letter includes a copy of a "Recherche-Auftrag" that lists the specific records that will be searched which is supposed to be signed and sent to them with payment if the client wants to go ahead with the research. Results will take up to 8 weeks to collect and mail. In the past there have always been instructions to transfer funds to their bank account with the account number but this time there are none. There is no mention of how the payment should be made or whether they will accept a personal check in the US$ or any other currency equivalent. There is a possibility there are instructions for payment at their website. The LDS has WW I casualty records in their regimental Kirchenbuch. But some of them are also associated with hospitals that were near the front on which a given regiment was fighting. This complicates research because you have to know the names of the hospitals to find them in the LDS films. That means knowing which ones were nearest to the front...their locations are in the title details and a Place Search should find them if you know the names of all places within 30-50 miles of the front. Another complication is that regimental Kirchenbuch only list the deaths that were reported to the regimental staff. Deaths in the field had to be reported by any survivors -- IF there were any. Hospital deaths did not always get reported to the regiments. Some men whose deaths in the field were not reported were carried as missing for quite some time before a death report might show up in a regimental Kirchenbuch. So a man could have died in 1916 but the death listing might be mixed in with the 1917 records in the regimental Kirchenbuch. (That is true for any war Austria fought). There are campaign maps for WW I on the Internet that show what army groups were in which general area at a given time. Find them with searchwords: USMA Great War Atlas That search also lists a number of other hits that are well worth investigating. To learn which army group on a campaign map included a specific regiment look at the Orders of Battle at the Austro-Hungarian Army web site built by Glenn Jewison. Use his name to search for it. Jewison also has a chart of the dispositions of each regiment in 1914 at his web site. It tells whether any battalions were detached for service on the southern or Italian fronts while the rest of the regiment was on the Eastern Front. Explore Jewison's site carefully. Some of the biographies of regimental commanders also include a short history of where the regiment was fighting under a commander. If the commander's name is a blue link on the order of battle be sure to click on it. If an ancestor was in a regiment that had a detached battalion that widens the search for hospital locations unless there is family lore indicating that he was in Italy or Serbia. I am reading Hans Pölzer's "Drei Tage am Isonzo" and it is about the 9th Jägers moving off the Eastern Front and down to Italy to replace a Hungarian unit that was nearly destroyed at a position there. So there are some units that served on more than one front -- another complication if one wants to find death records. All of this means that some of this research takes real expertise. At this time I believe the war archive is the only place where one can find out where an ancestor's battalion served during the entire war. The LDS has a lot of WW I records on film but they are not yet in their library catalog - except a lot of the Kirchenbuch (death records). They are putting them in the catalog as fast as they can do so but it may be a very long time before all of them are there. At the moment there is a problem with the permission to use certain WW I films from the archive which may take a while to clear up. The war archive has links or information for two research organizations in Vienna who will do research including Felix Gudacker's group whose reputation is well-established and one other -- Adler, a group established more than 50 years ago. There are also some personnel employed by the archive who will do private research during their free time. A new genealogy research service that includes some historians as well as archivists has just put up a web site. Go to: http://historiker.at and click on the Austrian flag. At present the site is in German only. Click on Unser Team on left of first page for the list of people doing this work. There is no mention of fee structure but there is an Edress for the group. The LINKS at that website are for Archives in the Republic of Austria and South America and to various historical institutions at various universities. Karen