Chapter 1 · Records in Poland · Birth & baptism
The baptism register is the oldest continuous record most Polish families have. One entry names a child, both parents, the mother’s maiden name, the godparents and often the house the family lived in. For many American families it is the first document that proves the village was the right one.
What a birth or baptism entry contains
- The child’s name and the date of birth and of baptism, which are often different days
- The father’s name, age and occupation, and the mother’s full maiden name
- Two godparents, frequently an uncle, aunt or grandparent of the child
- In Galicia, the house number, which ties generations of one family together
- Marginal notes added later: a marriage, a legitimation, sometimes an emigration
Three partitions, three kinds of register
Where your family lived between 1795 and 1918 decides what the page looks like. In the Russian partition, parish priests kept civil-religious registers from 1826 in long narrative paragraphs, in Polish until 1867 and in Russian from 1868. In Galicia, the Austrian partition, entries are in Latin columns from 1784. In the Prussian partition, the parish books are in Latin or German, and from October 1874 every birth was also registered at the state civil registry office, the Standesamt, on a printed German form.
The guide to the four record languages shows each format in detail.
Where the registers are today
Under Polish law, birth records older than 100 years pass from the local civil registry office to the state archives. Younger ones stay at the registry office and are released only to direct descendants who can prove the relationship. Parish duplicates often sit in a diocesan archive, while the original book may still be in the parish office. Records of parishes now in Ukraine or Belarus may be in Warsaw, in Lviv or in a regional archive across the border.
Searching online
- Geneteka, the index of the Polish Genealogical Society, covers millions of baptisms by name, parish and year
- Szukajwarchiwach, the portal of the Polish State Archives, publishes free scans of many registers
- Metryki.genealodzy.pl holds scans of parish books not yet on the state portal
- FamilySearch has filmed large parts of the Catholic and Lutheran registers
An index gets you to the page; it does not read it for you. Indexes also skip entries, misread surnames and cover some parishes completely and their neighbours not at all.
If a baptism cannot be found where the family said it should be, the parish is often wrong, not the year. Villages without a church belonged to a parish several miles away.
How we can help
Parish & Civil Record Research searches one parish’s registers for your family, generation by generation, and delivers each entry as an image with a full translation. If you already know the parish, the name and the year, Single Document Retrieval obtains one entry.