Chapter 1 · Records in Poland · Land & notarial
Peasant families owned, inherited, divided and sold land, and each of those acts produced paper. A notarial deed in which a departing son sells his share of the farm to his brother is a record of emigration with a date, a destination and the whole family named.
Notarial deeds
In the Russian partition, notaries recorded sales, leases, marriage contracts, wills and inheritance agreements from the Napoleonic period onward. Each deed names the parties, their relationships and often their ages. Deeds are filed by notary and year, so finding one means knowing which notary served the district.
Mortgage and land registers
Mortgage registers, księgi hipoteczne, record the ownership of each property over time, with every change of owner and every debt secured on it. For a family farm, they can span most of the nineteenth century.
The 1864 enfranchisement tables
When peasants in the Russian partition received ownership of their land in 1864, commissions drew up tables of every holding and its owner, village by village. These tables are a census of landholding families at a single moment, and they place your ancestor on a specific farm.
Galician cadastral surveys
Austria surveyed Galicia for taxation in the first half of the nineteenth century, producing maps of every field and house plot with the owner’s name and house number. Combined with the house numbers in parish registers, they show exactly where a family lived.
Court records
Inheritance disputes, guardianship proceedings for orphaned children and property cases all passed through local courts. They are rarely indexed and almost never online, and that is exactly why they are worth searching.
How we can help
Land, notarial and court records are part of STANDARD50 and PREMIUM100 projects, where the goal is a family’s circumstances as well as its names and dates.