Resources for Polish Genealogy

Poland is a country which has been coveted by its neighbors for centuries, who sadly all too often succeeded in their territorial gains. This was facilitated by Poland’s lack of natural barriers to invasion, with the exception of the Carpathian Mountains to the south. Poland’s territory on the Nizina Środkowoeuropejska — the Central European Plain — has shifted many times since the Polish Golden Age of the 16th century, most recently in 1945 following World War II. For genealogists, this means navigating a maze of place names and languages!

A note about Polish diacritical characters

The Polish alphabet has extra letters you won’t find on an English-language keyboard:

Ą/ą, Ć/ć, Ę/ę, Ł/ł, Ń/ń, Ó/ó, Ś/ś, Ź/ź, Ż/ż

Tip: copy/paste any of these letters you may need in a database search!

An excellent overview of the Polish alphabet and how letters and dipthongs are pronounced is available on the culture.pl website; there’s even a multimedia presentation on the topic.

And typeit.org has a helpful online Polish module to obtain Polish characters without a Polish keyboard.

Keep in mind that some databases will process accented and diacritical characters as variants of a plain Latin letter, and search for the variants, while others may only return hits if the correct Polish letters are specified.

A timeline of Poland

The dozens of wars which Poland has experienced over the past three centuries generated a worldwide Polish diaspora sometimes called Polonia. It is estimated about 20 million people outside Poland have Polish ancestry, half of whom live in the United States. Although emigration started in the 1820s, there was a great wave of emigration in the 1870s, culminating in a huge influx through New York 1900-1910. Many Polish émigrés were Jewish. Since 2004 when Poland joined the European Union, about 1 million Poles have left for other European countries to find work.

• 1385 Beginning of the Jagiellonian dynasty, union with Lithuania.
• 1506-1648 Złoty Wiek Polski, the Polish Golden Age of the Renaissance
• 1569 The Union of Lublin creates Pierwsza Rzeczpospolita, the First Polish Republic; the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth reaches its apogee over the following century.
• 1648 The Cossack Khmelnytsky Uprising.
• 1655-1660 The Second Northern War; the Swedish Deluge.
• 1700-1721 The Great Northern War.
• 1772 First Partition of Poland.
• 1791 The Constitution of 3 May 1791, the first modern European constitution.
• 1793 Second Partition of Poland.
• 1794 The Kościuszko Uprising.
• 1795 Third Partition of Poland; the Polish state ceases to exist.
• 1806 Great Poland Uprising; the Duchy of Warsaw created the next year by Napoléon.
• 1815 The Congress of Vienna redraws borders and creates the Congress Kingdom of Poland under Russian rule.
• 1830 The November Uprising.
• 1918 Second Polish Republic founded, followed by several years of wars and plebiscites to settle borders including the Greater Poland Uprising in Poznań (Posen).
• 1939 Nazi Germany and the USSR invade, conquer, and partition Poland.
• 1939-1941 Many Polish Jews under Soviet control are deported east to the USSR; most survive.
• 1939-1945 The Holocaust in Poland under German control: 3 million murdered, nearly all of the Jewish population, who had lived there since the 12th century.
• 1940 The Katyn massacre: Soviet forces exterminate 22,000 Polish prisoners of war; military officers, police officers, and intellectuals.
• 1943 The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Jews fought a hopeless battle against the Nazi SS.
• 1944 The Warsaw Uprising.
• 1945 The Potsdam Agreement transfers previously German territory to Poland, establishing the western border of Poland on the Oder–Neisse line. Pomerania, Upper and Lower Silesia, East Prussia, Gdańsk (Danzig) pass to Poland, except for the Kaliningrad enclave to the USSR. Polish territory east of the Curzon Line goes to Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. The Polish People’s Republic, a satellite state of the USSR, is founded.
• 1989 The Solidarność (Solidarity) opposition, led by Lech Wałęsa, wins parliamentary elections; end of communist rule and the founding of the Third Polish Republic.
• 1990 The German-Polish Border Treaty is signed with reunified Germany, settling the issues pending since 1945.

Polish genealogy resources

• Geneteka has indexed civil and parish records from Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Bielorussia.
• The Polish State Archives site has a portal in English and offers a fabulously useful interactive map of regional archives. Click on one, the zoomable map will show you the areas covered by each archive.
• Szukaj w Archiwach is the site for digital archives of the Polish National Archives and presents the data from the Integrated Archive Information System (ZoSIA), where the state archives and other institutions make materials available and store digital copies. See the Archives in Poland page and the database of municipalities (use Polish letters in searches).
• Serwis heraldyczno-genealogiczny is an older site featuring a family name database which shows districts where the name appeared in 1998.
• Mapa.Szukacz.pl is an interactive map of Poland (and Europe!) which can be very useful for finding the current country and province of a town or village which is currently or formerly in Poland. Hint: type the name of a town in Latin letters, the system will spell it correctly in Polish, ready to be pasted into a database such as szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl!
• FamilySearch. This free site run by the LDS church, part of any genealogist’s toolbox, has a wiki page about Poland Genealogy with a table of online Polish genealogy records and a section about locating a town of origin.
• Ancestry.com, Geneanet’s parent company, has a number of Polish collections available. New collections, in collaboration with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), include “Jewish Survivors in Poland, 1945-1947”, “Central Committee of Jews, 1944-1950”, and “Lwów, Poland, HeHalutz Organization Regional Branch Records, 1934”.
• Geneanet has about 4.8 million Poles indexed thanks to our partnership with FamilySearch (restrict search to Poland on this page), with other resources of interest to the Polish researcher. Here’s a memorial in France for 56 Poles who died in June 1940 defending the French town of Damprichard in the Doubs département (county), a memorial visited by the Polish Ambassador. Here are scans of Schindler’s List, from a private collection. And here are 79 cemeteries in Poland, part of our Save Our Graves project documenting cemeteries, for example this monument in Radoszyce, Swietokrzyskie, with the names of 43 deportees from the town. If you find archival records in German, see our article “Resources for German Genealogy” for tips about transcribing those. And remember, our dynamic name heatmap feature will show you the concentration of first and last names throughout the world, drawn from our members’ 1.8 million family trees.
• Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD), the Central Archives of Historical Records, is the oldest public Polish archive. A contact page in English is here.
• From Shepherds and Shoemakers is a blog by Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz, an expert in Polish genealogy, with many resources of interest to researchers with Polish roots. Start out with her article, “A Beginner’s Guide to Polish Genealogy, Revised Edition”. Look over her Gazetteers for Polish Genealogy page and her Maps for Polish Genealogy page. And sign up for one of her webinars!
• Archiwum Państwowe w Warszawie, the State Archives of Warsaw, has several databases of interest, such as businesses registered there in the interwar period. There are orientation pages in English, such as this overview of archival resources and a contact page.
• The Polish Center for Holocaust Research, in Polish and English, has a searchable database of over 43,000 people.
• JewishGen has a searchable Poland collection with over 2.7 million records.
• Cyndi’s List is always worth a visit to check out links; here is Cyndi’s Poland/Polska page.
• Slupca Genealogy focuses on Slupca County, Wielkopolskie Province, about 70km east of Poznan.
• Archiwum Państwowe w Olsztynie is the State Archives of Olsztyn site in the Warmian–Masurian Voivodeship. See this search engine.
• The Genealogical Society of the Częstochowa Region site publishes articles and how-tos related to genealogy in this southern region. In Polish.
• The Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling of the University of Warsaw has a searchable digitized version of all 15 editions from 1880 to 1914 of “Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego i innych krajów słowiańskich” (Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and Other Slavic Countries), packed with information about towns and villages. Each page has a download button, in plain text and as a TIFF image file (which you may want to convert to PNG or JPEG format for sharing).
• Genealogy in Archive – Kuyavia and Pomerania (Kujawsko-Pomorskiego), an EU-financed project with the State Archives in Torun and Bydgoszcz, offers 3.8 million document scans with over 150,000 names indexed.
• Portal rodziny Szpejankowskich i Szpejenkowskich is dedicated to the descendants of Marcin Szpejankowski, born in 1773 in the parish of Strzyga.
• The Pomeranian Genealogical Association (Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne) has over 6 million records available.
• Zarząd Cmentarzy Komunalnych w Warszawie (ZCK), Warsaw’s Municipal Cemetery Board, has a searchable database.
• The Poznan Project‘s goal is to transcribe the 19th century marriage records from the historic Greater Poland (then Prussian Province of Posen) into a searchable online database.
• Kartenmeister is a useful resource for identifying village and town names in formerly German administrated areas.
• The Diocesan Archives in Tarnów site is well worth a visit if you have roots in that city.
• The Yiddish Book Center’s Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library has a searchable database of nearly 11,000 books; some were written after the Holocaust, with lists of victims.
• American genealogical societies can put you in touch with genealogists in your state and provide expertise and orientation for your research.
  • Polish Genealogical Society of America (PGSA)
  • Polish Genealogical Society of New York State (PGSNYS)
  • Polish Genealogical Society of Massachusetts (PGSMA)
  • Polish Genealogical Society of Michigan (PGSM)
  • Polish Genealogical Society of Minnesota (PGSMN)
  • Polish Genealogical Society of Connecticut and the Northeast (PGSCTNE)
  • Toledo Polish Genealogical Society
• Grobonet is a nationwide search engine for cemeteries with nearly 6 million burials indexed.
• PolishRoots is a free site pointing to Polish genealogy resources, which publishes an e-zine called Gen Dobry! An issue archive goes back over two decades. Some features require free signup.
• The Polish Museum of America in Chicago has some interesting images online, but they are grossly watermarked and serve only as a reference when visiting the museum.
• The Anglo-Polish Society, based in Bristol in the UK, is a resource for Polish culture in the West Country and has an informative page about tracing Polish family ancestry.
• Jamiński Zespół Indeksacyjny (Jaminsky Indexing Team), based in Augustów, has a search engine for indexed records as well as a useful compilation of where parish registers are available.
• The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a search engine for its collections.
• JRI-Poland is a US-based nonprofit association with volunteers worldwide, focused on Jewish history and culture in Poland. There are over 6 million records available, over 2.5 million images, and 1,900 towns and villages documented. Parts of the archive are available at ancestry.com, Geneanet’s parent company.
• Polskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne is an active site with many resources and a discussion forum. Free signup.
• Archiwa Państwowe is the official site of Archiwum Państwowe w Przemyślu, the State Archives of Przemyśl in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship.
• The Cmentarz W Kolnie site has searchable burial register indexes as well as a useful overview of how cemeteries developed in Poland. In Polish.
• Projet Kurpie has over half a million records from the Ostrołęka Voivodeship (now part of the Masovian Voivodeship).
• The Polish Government has an online database of vital records registrars in municipalities throughout Poland.
• The Union of Jewish Communities in Poland hosts the Foundation for Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland project, which has a list of 118 indexed cemeteries with photos.
• Facebook groups. If you use this platform, you may know that some groups have experts who can save you a lot of time by guiding you to records, while other groups can assist you with translations or transcriptions. Visit groups such as Polish Genealogy, Genealogy in Poland, Tracing the Tribe – Jewish Genealogy on Facebook, Polish Genius, Polish Genealogy Helper, and Genealogical Translations. Always follow each group’s rules, and remember that group participants are volunteers!
• The FB Polish Genealogy Group Aid (#FBPGG) website is a treasure trove of useful information concerning Polish genealogy.
• Mogily.pl is a cemetery database site.
• The Lubelskie Korzenie (Lublin Voivodeship Roots) portal is an actively updated site with nearly 9 million records from 800 parishes in the region.
• Wojak.genealodzy.pl has indexes of over 42,000 soldiers, most from Galicia, who served in the Austro-Hungarian forces through the 19th century until 1920. In Polish.
• The Polish American Historical Association, founded in 1942 by Polish exiles, is devoted to the study of Polish American history and culture. Of particular interest: memoirs and documents of the Polish diaspora, see the “Objects that speak” section.
• Gesher Galicia is a non-profit organization carrying out Jewish genealogical and historical research on Galicia, formerly a province of Austria-Hungary and today divided between southeastern Poland and western Ukraine. The Galician Town Locator is very useful and membership opens access to archival images.
• The BaSIA Project has indexed over 6 million documents from the past 300 years.
• Philip Semanchuk has a Genealogy page on his family’s personal website which is full of useful information and links. Of special interest: the Bukowsko Triangle.
• Debbie’s Photos of Poland has Polish phone listings and records and is well worth a visit.
• Metryki.Genbaza.pl has offered images of archival records for over twenty years and its founder has located a new site administrator. In English, Polish, and German.

Did we miss any resources? Please let us know in the comments! And don’t hesitate to ask for help in our forums. Geneanet members are helpful and questions are monitored by support!