Author: Polish Roots (Editorial Team)

There’s a free, volunteer-built database that has indexed nearly two million 19th-century marriage records from the Poznań region of Poland — including the full names of every party to every marriage, their parents, and their witnesses. For anyone researching Polish ancestors from western Poland, it’s…

World War II displaced more Poles than almost any other people on earth. By 1945, millions of Polish citizens were living outside Poland’s borders — in Germany and Austria as forced labourers and concentration camp survivors, in Britain and Italy as soldiers, in the Soviet…

Two free websites have transformed Polish-Jewish genealogy research more than any others. JRI-Poland has indexed millions of Jewish vital records from Polish archives. JewishGen connects those records to an ecosystem of community databases, surname searches, and researcher networks that exists nowhere else. Together, they’re the…

Before the Holocaust, Poland was home to the largest Jewish community in the world. The towns and cities of Poland — Warsaw, Kraków, Łódź, Vilna, Lublin, Białystok — contained Jewish populations that had lived, worshipped, traded, and built communities for centuries. Their records survive in…

Military service touched nearly every Polish family across the 19th and 20th centuries. Whether your ancestor served in the Russian Imperial Army, the Austro-Hungarian forces, the Prussian military, or the reborn Polish Army after 1918, there are records of that service — and those records…

At some point in every Polish genealogy researcher’s journey, they encounter a word they don’t recognise in a record they desperately need to read. This glossary exists for exactly that moment. Polish genealogical records span four languages — Polish, Latin, Russian, and German — and…

The first time you open a 19th-century Polish church register and see pages of dense, faded handwriting in a script you don’t recognise, it’s easy to feel like you’ve hit an impenetrable wall. The good news is that you haven’t — what looks like an…

Twenty years ago, researching Polish genealogy often meant flying to Warsaw, sitting in an archive reading room with a researcher’s permit, and manually requesting records one box at a time. Today, millions of those records are accessible online from anywhere in the world — many…

Two parallel record-keeping systems documented Polish lives for most of the 19th century — and knowing which one applies to your ancestor’s time and place is the difference between finding their records in minutes and spending hours searching the wrong archive. Polish civil records and…