Polish and Eastern European Genealogy: Getting Started

A starter guide to genealogy in Poland and neighbouring countries: partitions and borders, church versus civil records, the main online archives and language tips.

Research in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Czechia and Slovakia has a reputation for being difficult. It is mostly a reputation for being different: borders moved, three empires kept records in three languages, and the archives are organised by regions that no longer exist. Once you understand the map, the records are rich and increasingly online.

Understand the partitions

Between 1795 and 1918 the Polish lands were divided between Prussia, Austria and Russia. The empire that ruled your village determines the language, the record type and the archive:

• Russian partition (central and eastern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine): records in Polish until 1868, then in Russian until 1915. Civil registration by the parish priest from 1808 in a narrative format that follows the Napoleonic model.
• Austrian partition (Galicia: Kraków, Lwów, Tarnów, Przemyśl): church registers in Latin, in a columnar format, doubling as civil records. House numbers are recorded, which makes families easy to follow.
• Prussian partition (Poznań, Pomerania, Silesia): church registers in German or Latin, civil registration offices (Standesamt) from 1874, records in German.

The main online sources

• szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl: the portal of the Polish State Archives, with millions of digitised register pages searchable by archive and parish.
• geneteka.genealodzy.pl: a volunteer index of births, marriages and deaths from thousands of parishes, searchable by name and region. Start here.
• metryki.genealodzy.pl and metryki.genbaza.pl: scans of registers organised by parish and year.
• FamilySearch: microfilmed registers for many parishes, including some not yet online elsewhere.
• Matricula for Austrian and some Czech parishes; Czech regional archives each have their own portal.
• Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belarusian archives are partly on FamilySearch and partly on national portals; access varies.

Reading the records

• Russian-language records name the person, the parents, the witnesses and the village in a fixed sentence pattern. Learn the pattern and thirty words of Russian and you can read most of them.
• Latin columnar records need about forty words: natus, baptizatus, parentes, patrini, copulatus, sepultus and the months. See our handwriting and Latin guide.
• Names appear in the language of the record: Jan becomes Иван (Ivan) or Johannes, Katarzyna becomes Екатерина or Catharina. Record the name as written and the standard Polish form in your tree.

Peasant families and house numbers

Most ancestors were peasants in villages of a few hundred people. The same surnames repeat for generations, so use house numbers (Galicia), godparents and witnesses to tell families apart. Cousin marriages needed a dispensation, which is noted in the marriage record and reveals the relationship.

Jewish records

Jewish civil records were kept separately from 1826 in the Russian partition and are on the same portals, in Polish and later Russian. The JRI-Poland index (jri-poland.org) covers a large part of them.

Recording and printing

Enter places with the historical name, the parish and the modern country, for example Krzątka, parish Majdan Królewski, Galicia (now Podkarpackie, Poland). Use UTF-8 in your GEDCOM so that ł, ś and ż survive; PrintFamilyTree prints them correctly on charts and in books. And when the tree grows to hundreds of people in three villages, an all-relatives chart is the quickest way to see how the villages intermarried.