Research How-To · Geneteka
Geneteka is the first place to search once you know roughly where in Poland your family lived. It is free, it has an English interface, and it indexes tens of millions of baptisms, marriages and deaths. It is also easy to misread, and a search that finds nothing does not mean the record does not exist.
What Geneteka is
Geneteka is the name index of the Polish Genealogical Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne), built by volunteers who transcribe parish and civil registers. It holds more than 45 million entries from several thousand parishes, mostly Roman Catholic, with some Lutheran, Jewish and civil registers. Each entry gives the year, the record number and the names; many link straight to a scan of the original page.
Step by step
- Open Geneteka at geneteka.genealodzy.pl and switch the language to English
- Choose the province (województwo) where the parish is today, or search the whole country if you do not know it
- Choose the record type: births, marriages or deaths
- Enter the surname, and the first name if it is not a common one
- Leave exact search off at first, so that spelling variants are included
- Narrow the results with the years, the parish or the parents’ first names
Reading the results
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| Year | The year of the record, not always the year of the event |
| Act / Akt | The entry number in that year’s register: you need it to find the scan |
| Name, Surname | The child, the couple or the deceased |
| Father, Mother, Mother’s surname | Given in birth and death indexes, often the key to the right family |
| Parish | The parish or civil registry office that kept the register |
| Remarks | Notes by the indexer, such as the village within the parish |
| Scan icon | A link to the image in Metryki, Szukajwarchiwach, FamilySearch or another site |
In the marriages index you can search for a couple by entering both surnames, which is the fastest way to confirm a pair found in American records.
Why you might find nothing
- The parish is not indexed yet, or only some years are. Check the list of indexed parishes and years before concluding anything.
- The spelling differs. Try the name without Polish letters, the Latin or Russian form, and the female form of the surname.
- The province is wrong. Parishes are listed under today’s provinces, which do not match the old partitions or the modern districts in American records.
- The event happened elsewhere. Children were baptized in the mother’s home parish or a neighboring one more often than you might expect.
From the index to the record
Always look at the original entry. The index gives names; the record gives the house number, the witnesses, the ages of the parents, the time of the event and sometimes a note added decades later. If there is no scan icon, the record is still in an archive or a parish, and the year and act number make it easy to request.
Geneteka is an index made by volunteers from handwriting in three or four languages. Treat it as a pointer to the record, never as the record itself.
Other indexes to check
Geneteka does not cover everything. The Poznań Project, BaSIA, JRI-Poland and several regional indexes cover what it does not. See our comparison of Polish genealogy websites.
How we can help
Parish & Civil Record Research goes beyond the index: we read every original entry, search the years and parishes that are not indexed, and request records that are not online.