Polish Immigration · Where Poles settled
Polish immigrants went where the work was: to the mills, mines, stockyards and factories of the Northeast and the Great Lakes. Knowing the pattern helps you find records, because each community built its own parishes, societies and newspapers.
The first settlements
The first permanent Polish settlement in America was Panna Maria in Texas, founded in 1854 by Silesian families led by Father Leopold Moczygemba. Other early farming communities grew in Wisconsin, around Polonia and Stevens Point in Portage County, and in Minnesota, where Kashubian families from West Prussia settled in Winona. Most of the later immigrants, though, went to cities and industrial towns.
The great industrial centers
| Area | Main Polish neighborhoods | Work |
|---|---|---|
| Chicago | Polish Downtown, Back of the Yards, South Chicago | meatpacking, steel, factories |
| Detroit and Hamtramck | Poletown, Hamtramck | automobile plants, especially Dodge Main from 1914 |
| Buffalo | Broadway-Fillmore, around St. Stanislaus | railroads, steel, grain mills |
| Milwaukee | the South Side, around St. Josaphat | tanneries, foundries, breweries |
| Pittsburgh | Polish Hill, the Strip District, mill towns on the rivers | steel |
| Cleveland | Warszawa, now Slavic Village | steel, wire and rail |
| Northeastern Pennsylvania | Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Nanticoke, Shamokin | anthracite coal mining |
| New York and New Jersey | Greenpoint in Brooklyn, Jersey City, Bayonne, Passaic | docks, refineries, textile mills |
| New England | Chicopee, Holyoke, Ware, Webster, New Britain | textile mills and hardware factories |
| Baltimore | Fells Point, Canton | canneries, docks, shipbuilding |
Why chain migration matters
People rarely emigrated alone. A man from a village would write home about a job, send a prepaid ticket to a brother or cousin, and neighbors would follow. The result is that many American communities drew heavily on a few regions of Poland, and sometimes on a few villages. If you know the town where your family first settled, other families from the same parish probably lived on the same street.
The anthracite region
The coal towns of northeastern Pennsylvania drew Poles from all three partitions, alongside Lithuanians, Slovaks and Ukrainians. It is also where the Polish National Catholic Church was founded in 1897 in Scranton by Father Franciszek Hodur. If your family belonged to a PNCC parish, its registers are held separately from the Roman Catholic ones.
Finding your family’s community
- Find the family in the census closest to their arrival, and note the address
- Identify the nearest Polish parish, which may not be the nearest Catholic church
- Look for local Polish newspapers, fraternal lodges and cemeteries
- Check the passenger manifest for the name and address of the relative they were joining
A family that moved between mill towns may have left records in three or four parishes. The baptisms of the children often trace the route.
How we can help
Immigration & Passenger Records traces the family’s movements in America through census, parish and naturalization records, and follows the chain back to the relatives who came first.