Polish America · Milwaukee & Wisconsin
Wisconsin had both an urban and a rural Polish America. Milwaukee’s South Side was one of the great Polish neighborhoods of the Midwest, while farming families from the Prussian partition settled the countryside of Portage County and the west of the state.
Milwaukee’s South Side
St. Stanislaus, founded in 1866, was one of the first Polish parishes in an American city. The South Side grew around it and around St. Josaphat, whose basilica, completed in 1901, was built in part from the stone of a demolished Chicago post office. St. Hyacinth, St. Adalbert and many other parishes followed. Poles worked in the tanneries, foundries and machine shops of the Menomonee Valley and the South Side. The daily Kuryer Polski, published from 1888, was the voice of the community.
Rural Polish Wisconsin
From the 1850s onward, Polish farmers settled in Portage County, around Stevens Point and the village of Polonia, and in Trempealeau County, where Kashubian families from West Prussia founded the parish at Pine Creek. Many of these families came earlier than the city workers and from different regions, so their records are often in Prussian civil registration and German-language parish books.
Records to search
- Parish registers of city and rural parishes, and the Archdiocese of Milwaukee or the Diocese of La Crosse for closed parishes
- Wisconsin vital records: registration was incomplete before October 1907, so church records matter more for earlier events
- County records from the Milwaukee County Register of Deeds and the rural county courthouses, including land records for farm families
- Wisconsin state censuses taken between federal ones, up to 1905
- The Wisconsin Historical Society library in Madison, with newspapers, maps and naturalization indexes
For a farm family, the land records are often the best American source: the deed and the plat map show exactly which neighbors bought land at the same time, and those neighbors were usually from the same Polish parish.
How we can help
Parish & Civil Record Research covers both German-language Prussian records and Polish ones, which is what most Wisconsin families need once the village is known.