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How to find Polish birth, marriage and death records online
A practical guide to the free indexes and scans, the languages you will meet, and the point where an online search stops. You can do a good part of this yourself.
Before you search: three things to pin down
- The place. Records were kept by parish, so you need a village or town. Many Polish villages share a name, so note the nearest larger town or the county too. “Warsaw”, “Posen” or “Galicia” on an American document often means the province, and the family lived in a village.
- The religion. Catholic, Jewish, Lutheran and Orthodox communities kept separate registers.
- The original spelling. Kovalsky was Kowalski, Yablonsky was Jabłoński, Schimanski was Szymański. Search for several variants. Women’s surnames may end in -ska where the men’s end in -ski.
Ship manifests, naturalization papers and US draft cards are the best places to find the village name.
The main free databases
| Database | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Geneteka | The largest volunteer index of Polish births, marriages and deaths, searchable by surname and province. Many entries link straight to a scan. Coverage differs from parish to parish. |
| Szukaj w Archiwach | The official portal of the Polish State Archives. Millions of scanned register pages, organised by archive, parish and year. Scans are not searchable by name, so you need the parish and the year. |
| Metryki | Scans of registers, mostly from central Poland, published by the Polish Genealogical Society. |
| BaSIA and the Poznań Project | Indexes for the Poznań region (Wielkopolska). The Poznań Project covers marriages from 1800 to 1899. |
| JRI-Poland | The main index of Jewish vital records from Polish towns. |
| FamilySearch | Filmed registers from many Polish parishes. A free account is required, and some films can be viewed only at a FamilySearch centre. |
Regional societies run further indexes, for example for Pomerania and for the Lublin region. An index is a finding aid made by volunteers. Always read the original scan: indexes contain misread names and skip details such as ages, occupations and witnesses.
Which language will the record be in?
Until 1918 Poland was divided between three empires, and each kept records its own way.
| Region | Language and form |
|---|---|
| Russian partition (Warsaw, Łódź, Lublin, Kielce, Płock, Łomża, Suwałki) | Long narrative entries. In Polish from 1808 to 1868, then in Russian until the First World War. Dates after 1868 are usually given in two calendars, 12 days apart in the 19th century. |
| Austrian partition (Galicia: Kraków, Tarnów, Rzeszów, Lwów) | Latin, in columns. Records are grouped by village and house number. |
| Prussian partition (Poznań, Bydgoszcz, Gdańsk, Silesia) | Church books in Latin or German. From October 1874 also civil registry offices, with printed forms in German. |
Why you cannot find recent records online
Polish law keeps birth records closed for 100 years and marriage and death records for 80 years. Until then they stay in the local civil registry office (Urząd Stanu Cywilnego) and are released only to the person concerned and close family. After that they move to the State Archives, where they are gradually scanned.
Places that are no longer in Poland
If your family came from what is now western Ukraine, Belarus or Lithuania, part of the registers is kept in Warsaw, in the Central Archives of Historical Records (AGAD) and in the civil registry archive for the former eastern territories. The rest remains in the archives of those countries.
When an online search stops
- The parish is not indexed, and you would need to page through scans in Russian handwriting.
- The register exists only on paper in an archive or in a diocesan archive.
- The record is younger than the 100 or 80 year limit.
- Two families of the same name lived in the same parish, and the records need to be told apart.
That is the work we do. A $49 Records Check tells you which records exist for your ancestor before you decide on anything larger, and our sample report shows what a finished search looks like.
Sending the form is free. We reply within 2 business days.