Chapter 1 · Records in Poland · Death records
Death records of the generation that stayed in Poland are how a researcher confirms that the right family has been found. The parents named on an American naturalization file should die, decades later, in the parish the passenger manifest points to.
What a death entry contains
- Name, age at death and place of residence
- The parents’ names, for children and often for adults
- The surviving spouse, or the late one
- The informants, usually two neighbours or relatives
- In Galicia, the cause of death, written in Latin
How reliable is the age?
Not very. The age was given by whoever reported the death, and for an elderly peasant it was an estimate, often rounded to the nearest five or ten years. Use it to narrow the search for a baptism, not to fix a birth year. The names of the parents and the surviving spouse are the reliable parts of the entry.
Deaths that explain emigration
A father’s early death, a farm too small to divide among several sons, a widow remarrying: the death registers often show why one child left for America while the others stayed. Read together with land records, they turn a list of dates into a family’s circumstances.
Beyond the parish register
Cemetery registers survive for some towns, and Jewish communities kept their own burial records. Gravestones in rural Polish cemeteries rarely go back beyond the early twentieth century, because wooden crosses were the norm before that.
How we can help
Death records are part of every Parish & Civil Record Research and Family Tree Reconstruction project, used to confirm identities and close each generation.