Finding your Polish ancestors

First, find the town and the partition

Poland did not exist as a state from 1795 to 1918. Its lands were divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and civil records were kept under the laws of each power. You need two things: the name of the town, and the partition it was in.

Before 1918, American records often describe a Polish ancestor as Russian, German or Austrian, after the empire that ruled the town. U.S. immigration statistics did the same: from 1899 to 1919 they counted Poland under Austria, Germany, Hungary and Russia.

Borders moved again in 1945, when Poland ceded its eastern territories to the Soviet Union. A town listed as Polish in the 1920s may now be in Ukraine, Belarus or Lithuania, and some of its records stayed there.

Civil registers: three systems

Russian partition. Civil registration began in the Duchy of Warsaw on 1 May 1808, under the Napoleonic Code. From 1826, in the Kingdom of Poland, the clergy of each Christian church acted as civil registrar for its members (Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Orthodox), and lay officials kept the Jewish registers. Entries were in Polish, in Russian from 1868, and in Polish again from 1918. Each register was written twice; at the end of the year the duplicate went to a court archive.

Prussian partition. Civil registry offices (Standesamt, in Polish urząd stanu cywilnego) opened in Prussia on 1 October 1874. A town had its own office; a rural office could cover one or several villages, and the mayor was usually the registrar. Records were kept in German until 1918.

Galicia (Austrian partition). There was no separate civil office. An imperial patent of 20 February 1784 gave the parish registers the status of legal documents, on standard Latin forms, and priests made civil transcripts for the state. Entries were in Latin until 1918.

After independence the three systems carried on. A single, secular civil registration for the whole country started on 1 January 1946.

• Birth: date and time, the child's name, the parents and witnesses, and in the Russian partition the baptism and godparents.
• Marriage: the bride and groom, their marital status, the banns, two witnesses and the parents' names.
• Death: name, age and occupation, two witnesses, and often the parents, the birthplace and the surviving spouse.

Read them online

The Polish State Archives publish their scans on szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl (Search the Archives), which has an English interface. In October 2026 it showed about 89 million scans from 122 institutions. Viewing is free and needs no account. The duplicate registers of parishes and civil offices are there; search by the town or parish name, then open the register for the right year.

• Geneteka, run by the Polish Genealogical Society, is a surname index of parish and civil registers: more than 47 million entries from over 4,500 parishes. Note the parish, year and entry number, then read the original scan.
• For Jewish families, JRI-Poland indexes surviving Jewish records from Poland. Searching needs a free account.
• The State Archives also point to genealogiawarchiwach.pl (Genealogy in Archives) for large collections of digitized census records.

Parish books and the former eastern provinces

The oldest parish records date from the 16th century; most parishes have books from at least the early 1700s. Catholic records were generally kept in Latin, Protestant ones mostly in German, Orthodox ones in Russian, and Greek Catholic ones in Latin, Ukrainian or sometimes Polish.

Original Catholic books are usually in the parish or the diocesan archive; books from before 1800 are generally in the diocesan archive. Parish records are still kept today, so for recent entries write to the parish itself. Many Protestant books are in the State Archives.

For the former provinces of Lwów, Stanisławów, Tarnopol and Wołyń, now in Ukraine, the Central Archives of Historical Records (AGAD) in Warsaw holds almost 8,500 books: Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish, Orthodox and others. Other books from these areas, handed over by the Soviet authorities in 1949, are kept at the Warsaw civil registry office, in its division for the Zabużańskie (beyond the Bug river) books.

Registry office or archive? The 100 and 80 year rule

Under article 28 of the Polish law on civil status records of 28 November 2014, the civil registry office (Urząd Stanu Cywilnego, USC) keeps:

• Birth registers: 100 years
• Marriage and death registers: 80 years

The periods count from the end of the year of the entry. The office then has two years to hand the registers to the State Archive. In 2026, births up to 1925 and marriages and deaths up to 1945 have passed these periods; anything more recent is at the USC, where only certain people can get a copy.

At a State Archive, research in the reading room is free and you may photograph documents with your own device. Searches by the staff, copies and scans may be charged, following each archive's price list.

Ordering a copy

For a record still at the USC, two kinds of copy exist:

• Odpis skrócony (abbreviated copy): the current content of the entry. Stamp duty 22 PLN. It can come with a multilingual standard form.
• Odpis zupełny (full copy): the whole entry as it was written, with later changes. Stamp duty 33 PLN. For family history, this is the one that reproduces the original entry.

A copy is issued to the person concerned, the spouse, ascendants and descendants (children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren), siblings, a legal representative, or anyone who proves a legal interest. You can apply in person, by post, or online through gov.pl with a Polish trusted profile or a qualified electronic signature. Any USC in Poland can take the request; if the entry has not yet been entered in the national register, it takes longer (up to 10 working days in Warsaw).

For older records, write to the State Archive that holds the register. Prices differ by archive: at AGAD, for example, a genealogical search is free when you give accurate data, and a scan costs 2 PLN. The Polish State Archives also suggest asking a Polish consulate to act as intermediary.

Write my letter in Polish

Polish emigration in numbers

By cautious estimates, about 3.5 million people left the Polish lands between 1870 and 1914. The pattern was not the same in each partition:

Brazil received more than 80,000 between 1890 and 1914, over two thirds of them in Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul.

Figures: W. Suleja, Za chlebem, Przystanek Historia, Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), 2021.

Emigration from the Prussian partition peaked in the 1880s; after 1900 most emigrants came from Galicia and the Russian partition. The date your ancestor left is a first clue to the partition.

Sources