Polish America · Cleveland
Cleveland’s largest Polish neighborhood was called Warszawa, after the Polish capital. Built around St. Stanislaus church and the mills along the Cuyahoga, it is known today as Slavic Village.
Warszawa and Slavic Village
St. Stanislaus parish was founded in 1873 and its landmark church completed in 1891. The neighborhood around Fleet Avenue filled with Polish families working in the steel mills, wire works and rail yards nearby. A second Polish area grew in Tremont, around St. John Cantius, and smaller communities around other parishes on the east and west sides. The name Slavic Village was adopted in the 1970s for the area around Warszawa, which by then had many Czech and other Slavic families as well.
Records to search
- Parish registers, held by the parishes or the Diocese of Cleveland
- Cuyahoga County Probate Court records of births and marriages, and the county’s naturalization records
- Ohio death certificates from 1908, indexed online, which give the parents’ names and the cemetery
- City directories and the collections of the Cleveland Public Library
- Polish-language newspapers published in Cleveland, with local news and death notices
Where Cleveland Poles came from
Cleveland drew Poles from all three partitions, with many from the Prussian partition in the early years and many from Galicia later. Because Cleveland was a secondary destination, many families lived first in Pennsylvania or Buffalo; the birthplaces of the older children in the census often reveal the route.
Ohio death certificates from 1908 onward are among the most useful American records for Polish families: they usually name both parents, and the informant was often a child who knew the parents’ origins.
How we can help
Immigration & Passenger Records builds the American side of a Cleveland family from Ohio, parish and naturalization records, and Parish & Civil Record Research continues in Poland.