Polish Ancestors: Partitions, Parish Records and Free Indexes
Poland didn't exist as a country for more than a century, so your ancestor may have been recorded as Russian, Prussian or Austrian. How to find the right parish, and the free indexes and archives that make Polish research possible.
Millions of Americans have Polish ancestry, mostly from immigrants who arrived between the 1870s and the 1920s. Polish research has a reputation for difficulty: the country was partitioned among three empires, records were kept in four languages, and borders moved after both World Wars. But Polish archives have put enormous numbers of records online, and volunteer projects have indexed millions of them for free.
Understanding the partitions
From 1795 to 1918, Poland was divided among three empires, and each kept records differently:
- The Russian partition (central and eastern Poland, including Warsaw): civil-religious registers, kept by parish priests as civil registrars from 1808. Written in Polish until 1868, then in Russian until about 1917.
- The Prussian (German) partition (western and northern Poland, including Poznań and Pomerania): church records, plus German civil registration from 1874. Written in Latin, German or Polish.
- The Austrian partition (Galicia, in southern Poland and western Ukraine): church records in Latin.
On American records, your ancestor may be listed as born in "Russia," "Germany," "Prussia" or "Austria." Each points to a different partition, and to different archives.
Step 1: Find the village and parish
Look for the village name in passenger lists, naturalization papers, church records of Polish-American parishes, draft cards and obituaries. Then use a gazetteer to identify the parish that served the village. In rural Poland, records were kept by the parish, which might cover a dozen villages.
Free indexes and archives
- Geneteka, run by the Polish Genealogical Society, indexes tens of millions of births, marriages and deaths from parishes across Poland, searchable free. It often links directly to images.
- Szukajwarchiwach ("Search in archives"), the Polish State Archives' portal, has millions of record images online free.
- The Poznań Project indexes 19th-century marriages from the former Prussian province of Posen.
- FamilySearch has filmed and digitized many Polish parish and civil records.
- JRI-Poland indexes Jewish records from Poland. See Jewish Ancestors from Eastern Europe.
Reading the records
- Polish and Russian-language records from the Russian partition are written as paragraphs. Once you learn the standard phrasing, you can find names, dates, ages and parents quickly.
- Latin records in Galicia and parts of Prussian Poland use columns. See our Latin word list.
- Russian records use the Cyrillic alphabet and often give two dates, one in the Julian calendar and one in the Gregorian. See Old Dates.
Free translation help is widely available in online Polish genealogy groups.
Polish names
- Surnames change endings for women: Kowalski becomes Kowalska, Nowicki becomes Nowicka.
- Records often record a woman's maiden name along with her married name.
- Polish letters like ł, ś, ż, ź and ą are often dropped or changed in American records: Łukasz became Lukasz or Lucas, Wójcik became Wojcik or Woycik.
- Given names were translated: Wojciech to Albert or George, Józef to Joseph, Stanisław to Stanley.
Polish-American records
Polish immigrants built strong parish communities in American cities. The records of Polish-American Catholic parishes, often kept in Polish or Latin, may give the exact village of birth. Polish-language newspapers, fraternal organizations such as the Polish National Alliance, and cemetery records can also help.