Research How-To · Genealogy websites
Most Polish records that are online are free. The difficulty is that they are spread over a dozen websites, each covering a different region, religion or record type. This is where each one fits.
The main databases
| Website | What it covers | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Geneteka | Name indexes of births, marriages and deaths from thousands of parishes | The first search for any Catholic family |
| Metryki (metryki.genealodzy.pl) | Scans of parish registers, from the Polish Genealogical Society | Viewing records found in Geneteka |
| Szukajwarchiwach | Scans published by the Polish State Archives | Browsing whole registers by parish and year |
| PRADZIAD | Inventory of vital records in state and some diocesan archives | Finding out which years survive and where |
| FamilySearch | Microfilmed and digitized Polish registers, with a catalog by place | Parishes not scanned by the Polish archives |
| JRI-Poland | Indexes of Jewish vital records from Polish archives | Jewish families from all three partitions |
| Poznań Project | Index of marriages in the former Province of Posen, 1800 to 1899 | Families from the Prussian partition |
| BaSIA | Indexes linked to scans for Greater Poland | The Poznań region, with images |
| Lubgens | Indexes for the Lublin region | Families from southeastern Congress Poland |
| Gesher Galicia | Maps, cadastral and other records of Galicia | The Austrian partition |
Finding the place first
The databases only help once you know the parish. For that you need gazetteers and maps:
- Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego, the nineteenth-century geographical dictionary, describes almost every village with its parish and district
- Kartenmeister covers places in the former German eastern provinces, with German and Polish names
- Mapster has historical maps of Poland, including the detailed military maps of the partition era
- Polish place-name lists show how many villages share the same name: often dozens
Societies and forums
The Polish Genealogical Society of America in Chicago, regional Polish genealogical societies in the United States and the Polish Genealogical Society in Poland publish indexes, journals and guides, and their volunteers answer questions from beginners. Facebook groups for Polish genealogy are also active, and members often help translate a single record.
What is not online
- Registers still held by parishes, especially in the south
- Many diocesan archive collections
- Population registers, land and notarial records, and military files
- Civil records less than 100 years old for births and 80 years for marriages and deaths
If the parish you need is not in any database, it has not necessarily been lost. It has probably just not been scanned or indexed yet.
How we can help
Where the free databases stop, Parish & Civil Record Research continues in the archives themselves, and Ancestral Village Identification finds the parish when the place name is uncertain.