Polish America · Buffalo
Buffalo’s East Side was one of the largest Polish communities in America, built around the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood and its churches. Poles worked in the railroad yards, the grain elevators and, after 1900, the steel mills of nearby Lackawanna.
Broadway-Fillmore
St. Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr, founded in 1873, is known as the mother church of Buffalo’s Polonia. The neighborhood around it grew rapidly, with St. Adalbert, Corpus Christi, Transfiguration and other Polish parishes following. The Broadway Market, opened in 1888, still anchors the district. As families prospered many moved east to Cheektowaga, Sloan and Depew.
Records to search
- Parish registers, held by the parishes or by the Diocese of Buffalo for closed parishes
- City of Buffalo vital records, from the city registrar, and the New York State vital records index at the New York State Archives
- New York State censuses of 1905, 1915 and 1925, taken between the federal ones, which record citizenship status and years in the United States
- Naturalization records from the Erie County courts and the federal court
- Cemeteries such as St. Stanislaus Cemetery in Cheektowaga, where many East Side families are buried
Where to research
The Buffalo and Erie County Public Library holds city directories, maps and Polish-American newspapers. The Polish Genealogical Society of New York State, based in the Buffalo area, has indexed many parish and cemetery records. Buffalo also had its own Polish-language press, including a daily paper, whose death notices are valuable when the English papers say only “born in Poland”.
Where Buffalo Poles came from
Buffalo drew heavily on the Prussian partition in the early years and on Galicia and the Russian partition later. Chain migration was strong: families from the same group of villages often settled on the same East Side streets and married in the same parish.
New York City and the rest of New York State kept vital records separately. For Buffalo, start with the city registrar and the state index, not the New York City archives.
How we can help
Immigration & Passenger Records assembles the Buffalo side of a family from parish, census and naturalization records, then Ancestral Village Identification finds the parish in Poland.