Starting a family tree in Poland: where to find the records

Among your grandmother's things is a bundle of letters with Polish stamps. The handwriting is hard to read, but one word comes back again and again on the envelopes: the name of a village. Without knowing it, you are holding the beginning of a family tree. This article shows you where to search next, and what of it is free online in Poland.

The short answer

Find the village and the parish first. Then find out which partition it was in, because that decides when the records begin and in which language. Search Geneteka for names and szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl for the scans, both free. Birth records older than 100 years and marriage and death records older than 80 years go to the state archives. More recent ones you request from the civil registry office (Urząd Stanu Cywilnego, USC), as a close relative.

Step 1: start at home, and find the village

The best sources are often in the house: letters, prayer cards, passports, emigration papers, photos with a name on the back. Ask the older relatives for the name of the village and the parish, and for maiden names. For each person, write down what you know for certain and where it comes from. A tree without sources can no longer be checked later.

If your family emigrated, the village is often written on the passenger list. Our guide on finding emigrant ancestors through the Red Star Line, Ellis Island and Canada shows you where to look.

Step 2: know your partition

From 1795 until 1918, Poland was divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Each ruled differently, so the records differ too.

Partition	Civil records from	Language
Russian (Duchy of Warsaw, later the Kingdom of Poland)	1 May 1808	Polish; Russian from 1868 until 1918
Prussian	1 October 1874	German until 1918
Austrian (Galicia)	1784, kept by the parish priests	Latin until 1918

In the Russian partition, the Napoleonic Code brought civil registration in 1808, and the Catholic parish priest usually acted as the civil registrar. That is why these records are often called civil-religious registers: kept in the parish, but as a civil record. From 1826 other faiths, such as Jewish, Lutheran and Orthodox communities, kept their own registers. In Galicia, the Catholic and Greek Catholic clergy registered the events for everyone, so the parish books served as the civil records until 1918.

Step 3: the free online sources

• Szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl is the portal of the Polish State Archives, online since 2009, with tens of millions of scans. You only need a browser, and you may download and reuse the scans unless stated otherwise. It also contains the PRADZIAD data, which tells you which archive holds the registers of which parish.
• Geneteka (geneteka.genealodzy.pl) is the free name index of the Polish Genealogical Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne). It counts more than 68 million entries from over 6,000 parishes, including parishes now in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. Search a surname, note the parish and the year, then look up the scan.

Which records are with the archive

Record	Kept by the USC for
Birth record	100 years
Marriage record	80 years
Death record	80 years

That is set out in article 28 of the Civil Status Records Act (Prawo o aktach stanu cywilnego). The years count from the end of the year the record was made, and after that the USC hands the books to the state archive within two years. For records still at the USC, a copy (odpis) is only issued to the person the record is about, their spouse, ascendants, descendants and siblings, a legal representative or guardian, or someone who shows a legal interest. You can apply at any USC in Poland, in person or by post, or online with a Polish trusted profile or e-ID. A short copy costs 22 zł and a full copy 33 zł (checked September 2026). For family history, the full copy is the one you want.

Before civil registration: the parish books

Parish registers in Poland have generally been kept since the mid-1600s, and a few go back to about 1548. Catholic registers are usually in Latin, Protestant ones in German, Orthodox ones in Russian. The original books are usually in the parish or the diocesan archive. For territories now in Ukraine, the Central Archives of Historical Records (AGAD) in Warsaw holds many registers.

A program for your family tree

Gramps is free and open source. Whichever program or website you use, make sure it exports to GEDCOM, the exchange format for family trees. If you have received or made such a file, thememorypalace.ai/gedcom shows you, for free and without an account, how many generations it covers, who the earliest known ancestor is and where the gaps are. The file never leaves your device.

From records to people

A parish entry in Latin tells you when a child was baptised, not what the village smelled like at harvest. That lives in the photos, the stories, the letters someone kept. In The Memory Palace, the family tree comes in as GEDCOM and each generation gets a place next to its photos and stories, so that names become people again.