Once we have decided to join the thousands of others in beginning the journey back into the  past history of our family, we ask ourselves "What should we do first?  Where do we look for information?  How do we get it ?"  This page will answer some of these questions and is designed for those just starting out on the paper trail. Following the steps outlined below will get you pointed in the right direction.
 

                                RESEARCH RIGHT AT HAND!

CLEANING YOUR HOUSE

The first place to begin your search is right at home. You should scour your attics, cellars, junk drawers, and wherever else you keep those old papers, photographs, etc. By collecting old passports, certificates, medals, deeds, and other items that you, your parents or grandparents have hidden away for safe keeping, you will unearth basic information which may lead you to record repositories and archives. Some of the types of materials you should be looking for at home include:

     t Certificates of Birth, Marriage and Death 
     t    Obituaries and Funeral Cards
     t Naturalization Certificates 
     t Military Papers (induction, commendation and discharge) 
     t Wills 
     t Deeds
     t Old Passports
     t High School-College yearbooks
     t Diplomas
     t Old pictures (even if you don't know who's in them now, someday you will)
     t Membership records or membership cards from ethnic organizations
     t Old letters from Poland
     t Family Bible, which sometimes contains family names and information 

After you have cleaned out your house, go do the same at your aunt's, uncle's, grandparents' and cousins' homes too! 

INTERVIEWING FAMILY MEMBERS

Interview your entire family. Each member will remember different things which you can later piece together as a cohesive whole. If the family provides little or no information, try interviewing the families of old neighbors or friends. Be polite, but persistent! Let your relative talk, as sometimes their own recollections will jog their memory releasing long forgotten memories. Ask questions in the simplest of ways. If asking "who is your great uncle" does not work, try asking "who is your grandfather's brother". If your relatives do not remember the name of their ancestral village in Poland, ask them if they remember anything about the place. Perhaps they can recall a nearby large city being mentioned or can recall physical features such as mountains or lakes. Ask what languages were spoken in the home. Such general information cannot determine a specific village name but you can narrow down your ancestral region.

Also, such information can be enriching and can liven up your family's history. Keep detailed notes. If you use a tape recorder, make sure to transcribe the conversation onto paper in the event the tape breaks. What may seem unimportant now may prove to be vital later on in your research. Learn the various towns and where your ancestors resided here in the U.S. Try to get exact addresses. You can use this information when using federal and state census records. Learn the names of the churches your ancestors attended. Those will be the churches you can write to for birth, marriage and death records, in addition to finding the cemeteries in which your deceased ancestors are buried. 

And do not forget to ask about stories that they remember with regard to their families. Whether it has to do with get-togethers or holidays - every detail is important!

KEEPING RECORDS

After examining and analyzing the information you have gathered, you should devise some sort of system to keep your information organized. One way of doing this is to keep family group sheets on which you can record the vital data on the various family units you discover. In addition to recording names and dates, you should also cite the source from which you obtained the information. As your search takes you out of the home to record repositories, it is a good idea to keep a log of what records you've examined and for what time period, posting both positive and negative results. Knowing that you did not find something in a particular location is just as important as knowing if you did. It is useful because years from now your memory may become fuzzy and you may not recall if you searched in a specific place for a specific record and may unnecessarily repeat all your work. Forms for genealogical record keeping are available from many genealogical societies or bookstores which specialize in family history.

Create a filing system. Make a file for each surname and town, village, or region you are researching.  Put any information you find on that name or locality in the appropriate file for easy sorting and retrieval. 

Invest in a genealogy software program. Most are quite inexpensive and easy to use. Such programs organize all of our loose sheets of paper and notes, find possible inconsistencies in our data and create elaborate charts and reports. 

LOCAL RECORDS VITAL RECORDS

The principal source of an initial family history inquiry is vital records. These documents, which contain information on birth, marriage, death, and chronicle the life events of an ancestor, can be housed in government offices, churches and archives. The place where such records are kept, what their inception date is, and who can have access to them varies from state to state and country to country. There is not as much uniformity in the keeping of these records as one would think.

For example, in Connecticut, vital records re only open to researchers who hold a valid membership card in one of the state's legally incorporated genealogical societies, such as ours. There are no exceptions to this to this requirement. Records in Connecticut as well as the rest of New England are kept principally at the City or Town level. In contrast, most record keeping in other parts of the United States is done at the County level. Each state also has duplicate records generated by the towns and counties at the State level (but not always for the same time period). In Massachusetts, membership cards are not needed. Death records are open to the public. Marriage and birth records however, can only be viewed after a clerk checks them for irregularities. In Pennsylvania and other states, marriage records are housed in Marriage License Bureaus at the Country Court House and are open to the public, but most birth and death records are held at a central state repository. New York state imposes date restrictions on which records can be used (i.e.: they must be 50 or 75 years old, depending on the event).

The key point to remember of this section is that each state has its own laws with which you should become familiar before writing to or visiting a record office. 
 
CHURCH RECORDS 

While vital records can yield large amounts of information, they do have their drawbacks. In many cases, the Polish surnames (as well as first names) of our ancestors are twisted beyond recognition and the geographical information we need in order to go back across  the ocean is lacking. In many cases, these deficiencies can be remedied by consulting the records of a Polish parish, as a Polish speaking clergyman would have recorded names and places correctly. To locate a Polish parish in the locality where your ancestors lived, you can consult The Catholic Directory, an annual publication listing the addresses of all Roman Catholic parishes in the United States. Similar directories are published for other denominations. If you have no success, write to us, as we have compiled a listing of such parishes. Access to the baptismal, matrimonial, and death records of a church is at the discretion of the records custodian, frequently the pastor. However, the records from Roman Catholic dioceses have been filmed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS or The Mormons) including Newark, Chicago, and Buffalo, all centers of large Polish populations. (See below for information on LDS sources)

DEEDS AND MORTGAGES

One of our ancestors' first goals in the United States was to purchase a home and plot of land they could call their own.  records of their transactions are carefully recorded in Town Halls and Country Courthouses throughout the region. As with vital records, each state may exhibit a variety of places where these records may be located. While parentage or birthplaces are lacking in such records, they provide us with ownership and financial data.

VETERANS

Many state and local governments maintain offices of Veterans Affairs which may contain data on an ancestor's military service. In some states, veterans who locally filed copies of these discharge papers were entitled to certain tax abatements. Also check records of the state Adjutant General archival collections or state archives. The access to more recent discharge papers may be restricted.

PROBATE RECORDS AND WILLS

Even if your ancestor did not have a will, he or she may have a probate file which can yield unexpected finds such as the names and addresses of brothers and sisters or parents in Europe.  In some states, probate court districts are contiguous with county boundaries.  In other states, such as Connecticut, the state is divided into probate court districts.  Investigate he judicial structure of each state which interests you prior to writing for any files.

CITY DIRECTORIES

These printed lists of residents usually list the householders name, occupation and address. In 1922 or so, names of spouses were also included. Some directories list dates of death, and if a person moved, what city, state or country he moved to. Directories of this sort, published annually, can usually be found at a local public library or a State Library. As always, be careful with the spelling of Polish first and last names. 
 
VOTING RECORDS

In many states, voting records are destroyed after 5 or 10 year period. However, in other localities, especially in New England, older records may have been preserved at the places of their creation, usually in a Town Hall, or may have been transferred to a State Archive or local historical society. 

OBITUARIES AND CEMETERY RECORDS

Obituaries often contain a wealth of information both of the deceased and of their survivors, such as birthplace, birth dates, alias, addresses, etc. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, many newspapers only carried very brief one line accounts of a person's passing, unless the person was prominent or died in an accident or in some other way which would warrant greater news or coverage. In some large metropolitan areas, such as New York City, obituaries and death notices, to this day, only represent a fraction of the deaths which occur.

Because they are a valuable source, our society has maintained a collection of obituaries compiled by members dating from 1984 to the present from newspapers mainly in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Arizona, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Delaware. We also have thousands of cemetery inscriptions from over 300 Polish and non-Polish cemeteries throughout the Northeast region of the United States. Many of these have been computerized and searches can be conducted on our database page.

LIBRARIES WITH LARGE POLISH COLLECTIONS

No family history is complete without background information on the history, customs, and geography of the places and times in which our ancestors lived. Many libraries in our region have sizable collections on things Polish, some of which are: 

     t Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT 
     t Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
     t New York Public Library, Slavonic Division, New York, NY 
     t University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 
     t University of Pittsburgh, PA 
     t Yale University, New Haven, CT 

SCHOOL RECORDS 

The contents of school records, such as IQ testing or grades, is usually not public information. However, some school districts maintain school census records and other similar materials which may assist you in tracking down information on an ancestor. Yearbooks and lists of graduates are also informative sources.

RECORDS OF POLISH ORGANIZATIONS

National, fraternal organizations, such as the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, the Polish National Alliance and other similar insurance type entities, required applications. Write to the national headquarters as to the availability of such records.  Not all fraternals have retained their older records.  Some have been indexed and the indexes placed on line.

FEDERAL RECORDS 

There are several bodies of records kept by United States government offices which can assist you in gathering further data on your family.  These include:

CENSUS RECORDS 

Since 1790, a census was taken in the United States every ten years. Due to privacy restrictions, the latest available census is that for 1930. Most of our Polish ancestors arrived here between the1880's and the outbreak of World War I. Thus, the most valuable census returns for a researcher tracing a Polish family will be those of 1900, 1910, 1920 and 1930. (The 1890 census was nearly totally destroyed in a fire, only fragments remain.) Census returns typically list the head of the household, and all other persons both related and non related, residing there. Information we can learn from census records includes age, sex, address, citizenship status, birthplace (state or country specific locations in Poland are NOT provided); home ownership, and year of arrival in the United States, (in many cases a guess and not completely accurate).

The 1900 and 1920 censuses are soundexed (a classification system which converts a surname into an alpha-numeric code). The 1910 and 1930 censuses are only partially indexed and many states in the Northeast lack any sort of index. Pamphlets and publications from the National Archives explain the features of these records and indices and are available at many libraries. Census returns can be viewed on microfilm at branches of the National Archives for the entire nation. Local libraries, State Libraries and historical societies may have partial collections of census returns from their own or neighboring states.

Commercial fee-based websites such as Ancestry.com have nearly fully indexed census materials.  As with vital records, many of the Polish names are not spelled correctly. 

NATURALIZATION RECORDS

This body of "federal" records have come under federal jurisdiction only since 1906.  Before that time and in some instances for decades after, the process of naturalization (e.g. becoming a United States citizen) was a duty performed by state and local courts. Because of the multi-jurisdictional nature of these records, you may have to do some hunting to track them down. They may be located at State Archives, National Archives branches or still in the court where the naturalization took place.

There were several important documents created during the naturalization process, two of which were: Declaration of Intention - filed after a minimum of three years residence in the United States in which the immigrant declares his intention to become a citizen. Information on post 1906 records should give birthplace, name of the ship which carried the immigrant to the United States, its port of departure, and date of arrival.

Petition for Naturalization - able to be filed two years after the Declaration.  This document contains a wealth of data. In addition to the information on the declaration, the names, dates and places of birth of children are also listed, depending on the time period.  The petition number is of great importance as these records are filed by petition number. In recent years, the National Archives branches have been removing naturalization records from Federal Courts. Some courts have kept the indexes to these records, while the records themselves have been transferred. Make sure you have determined the location of the index and have obtained all petition numbers before going to do research at any Archive. In some states, naturalizations performed by state courts have been centralized in State Archives and not federal (i.e.: Massachusetts).  Most Connecticut naturalization records from both state and federal courts are located at the National Archives branch in Waltham, Massachusetts.  An index to some New York City area naturalizations can be found at www.italiangen.org.  Although immigrants were eligible to file for and complete the naturalization process five years after their arrival, most waited years, if not decades, before filing.

Another interesting point is that prior to September, 1922, wives automatically became citizens along with their husbands and will have no naturalization papers of their own prior to this date. If your ancestor never became a United States citizen but was alive in 1940, you may be able to locate the document they filed as part of the mandatory yearly registration of aliens (Alien Registration Act).  Requests must be submitted as Freedom of Information Act requests to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services in Washington, D.C. and the wait for a reply can be very long. 

                                        SHIPS PASSENGER LISTS

As with naturalization records, details of passengers debarking at United States ports were under the control of various governmental jurisdictions. Earlier records, referred to as Customs Lists, are much more sparse information wise than later Immigration Passenger lists. As one moves closer to World War I, the amount of information required on the lists increases. At the height of information gathering (i.e. post 1907), these lists contained the name, (be careful, you need your ancestor's original name in their native language. There were no Lotties, Chesters or Tillies leaving Poland), place of birth, age, marital status, and last foreign residence of each passenger. Also required was the name of the passenger's closest relative in the country of origin and the name, address and relationship of the person to whom the immigrant was traveling.

East port had its own set of lists.  The most frequent ports of entry for Polish immigrants were New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston, although New York by far processed the most passengers. Frequent ports of departure were Hamburg and Bremen in Germany; Rotterdam, Holland and Antwerp, Belgium. Most passenger lists have been microfilmed and can be consulted at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.. Some larger, public libraries and historical societies will have partial collections of lists, most often applicable to a port in near proximity (Some of these include the New York Public and Boston Public Libraries which have materials on those ports). Many of the ships lists are indexed, but there are significant gaps.

New York lists have indexes 1820-1846 and 1897 to the 1950's. There are no indexes for 1846-1896. Knowing only a year of arrival is not sufficient to conduct a search. One year of records could contain hundreds of films. The pre-1902 indexes are alphabetical (with names spelled wrong at times, be prepared to have variant spellings for your name). Post-1902 lists are soundexed but be careful. Your ancestor could be one of a hundred people with the same exact name. Check the data in the index (i.e. age for example) to focus in on the correct entry until you find the correct person. The quality of some of the microfilm is sub-standard and it may be difficult to read. Microfilm rolls of the lists can be also ordered from LDS Family History Centers and several commercial firms, such as the American Genealogical Lending Library of Bountiful, Utah). If these options are inconvenient, you may send to the National Archives for a form which will be used to process your request. If anything is found, the Archives will bill you. 

IMPORTANT NOTE:  Ellis Island itself has no records of this sort. However, a website sponsored by the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation offers an incredible searchable database with digital copies of most passenger lists from 1892 to 1924.   Their website address is: http://www.ellisislandrecords.org.  As with other documents, be careful of misspelled names, taking into account a database volunteer's misinterpretation of the usually poor handwriting. 

Another site worth mentioning is a search engine designed to specifically search the Ellis Island records using expanded search techniques. Here you can search the Ellis Island database by truncating the name or by using the soundex code. You can narrow down your search by years, ethnicity, specific boats and |ports, or other criteria. Click here to get to Stephen P. Morse's "Searching the Ellis Island Database in One Step website hosted by JewishGen, Inc.
 

                                   MILITARY RECORDS

Some early military records of both officers and enlisted men are housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.   As most Polish-Americans served subsequent to World War I, these records will not be overly useful to a researcher of Polish extraction. More recent military records can possibly be obtained by writing to: 

                                 The National Personnel Center
                                 Military Records Facility
                                 9700 Page Avenue
                                 St. Louis, Missouri 63132-5100

Please note that due to a catastrophic fire at this location in the 1970's, many records were burned. As noted earlier, many veterans of both the United States and Polish Armies filed copies of their discharge papers with local governmental bodies for tax abatement purposes. Check at your town hall or country courthouse.

The records of WWI General Haller's "Blue Army," an army of soldiers comprised of  Poles residing in the United States and Canada, have been deposited in the Polish Museum of America in Chicago and have been indexed by several Polish genealogical societies in a collaborate effort.

                                            SOCIAL SECURITY

The original application for Social Security contains the address at the time of the filing, birthdate, birthplace, parents' names and birthplaces, and place of employment. Original applications for Social Security have been microfilmed and a search of them can be made by writing to:
                                      Social Security Administration
                                      F.O.I. Officer
                                      6401 Security Boulevard
                                      Baltimore, MD 21235

A death certificate of the person whose record you desire must accompany your request. The Social Security Administration has also released its decedent file on compact disk which contains death data on persons who died between 1940 to present. The earlier portion prior to 1962 is rather spotty, however. The Social Security Death Index (SSDI) is on line and continually updated.

                                  GEOGRAPHICAL SOURCES

Because of Poland's turbulent history, the nation's administrative jurisdictions have changed many times over the past 300 years. In the late 1700's, the Polish Commonwealth, one of the largest countries in Europe, was divided between her neighbors in a series of land partitions which eventually wiped the country off the map of Europe. Polish lands in the west were seized by Prussia, eastern lands were absorbed into the Russian Empire, while Austria took the region southeastern Poland known as "Galicia". Each of the partitioning powers rearranged internal provincial and county boundaries, and in some cases, renamed towns and villages. After Poland regained independence in 1918, new provinces were created. After World War II, another reorganization took place and again in 1975. The current reorganized boundaries were instituted January 1999.

In view of all these changes, it is necessary to study the historical geography of the region of Poland where your ancestors lived. Boundaries of dioceses also underwent modification and change, the most recent being in 1992. It's important to trace the various ecclesiastical jurisdictions under which our ancestors lived as the changes may have affected the location of the records. Several gazetteers (lists of place names) will help you findyour ancestral village. A word of caution - Polish place names repeat frequently and there may be 10 pages of localities named Dąbrowa, for example. You'll need more precise information, gleaned from American records, to determine which locality is yours.

          t Skorowidz Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, 1934 - Covers the territory of the interwar
                 (1918-1939)  Polish  Republic,  including  areas  now  in  Western  Belarus and
                 Ukraine. 

          t Spis  Miejscowości  Polskiej  Rzeczpospolitej  Ludowej,  1967  -  Reflects the pre-
                 1975  administrative  division  of  the  country.  This  gazetteer is of  special 
                  importance  simply  because  the Mormons have largely used the provincial and
                  country boundaries of the time period to catalogue their collection of Polish 
                  microfilm. 

          t Wykaz   Urządowych   Miejsc   w   Polsce,   1980  -  Reflects the  country's
                 administrative  divisions  from 1975 to 1998. In addition to the above mentioned
                 sources in Polish, the partitioning powers also published similar gazetteers, many
                 of which can be ordered through Interlibrary Loan from LDS branch libraries. 

RESEARCH IN POLAND

STOP!  If you do not have the exact birthplace of your ancestor, you cannot do research in Poland.  The name of a province or nearby large city is not good enough. Many American researchers labor under the illusion that an archivist in Poland can tell them where their ancestor was born. This is false! YOU must tell the archivist where your family originated so that he can consult the proper records. Once you have determined your family's birthplace,  you have several options. 

CHURCH OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS (LDS or MORMON) MICROFILMS

Personnel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS or The Mormons) have microfilmed vital records of many Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Jewish, Lutheran and Orthodox congregations. For the most part these records were housed in State or Diocesan Archives. The bulk of these records were filmed in the 1970's and extend to records 100 years old or more at a time (e.g. 1870). Filming is still an ongoing process and those records filmed later may extend past 1870. A catalogue to available records can be consulted at any LDS Family History Center of which there are hundreds in the United States. If you find films for your locality of interest, you can rent them for use at the LDS facility. You can search their databases on line at http://www.familysearch.org.  Many Polish records, however, have not been filmed and can be found in the places listed below, if extant.

STATE ARCHIVES

Poland, like the United States, has a principal National Archive (in Warsaw) and branch archives located throughout the country. Research can be done by mail but the fees are rather steep. A successful inquiry should be concise and specific (and in Polish). Vague and ill formed requests will result in your request taking more time to complete and thus higher fees. If visiting a state archive facility, you must have written permission from the Archive.  Addresses of the branch archives can be found at the following website http://www.archiwa.gov.pl.  Most of Poland's archives have published guides to the holdings of their respective repositories. Many of these publications can be found at our Archive and Resource Center.  You can also search the state archives holdings of vital records registers on the website using the PRADZIAD database.

VITAL STATISTICS OFFICES (Urzęd Stanu Cywilnego or USC

These district level offices are supposed to contain records less than 100 years old. However, at times they may contain older records. Our Resource Center has a list of USC holdings for the 1880-1939 period. Due to recently enacted privacy laws, the USC office may require documentation or notarized statements from you before any research is conducted.

RELIGIOUS ARCHIVES

All of Poland's Roman Catholic Dioceses have archival repositories whose collections of vital records vary from excellent to poor. The archives of the Archdioceses of Poznan and Bialystok have, for example, large collections of parish records, while those of other dioceses are sparse or intermittent. Records from non-Catholic churches or from Jewish congregations in many cases are housed at State Archival repositories as the congregation which created them no longer exists. If the congregation is still functioning, contact can be made directly. 

PARISH ARCHIVES

Many parishes retain their records and have not forwarded any of them to any other state or church archival repository. Access to records at this level is entirely at the discretion of the pastors, whose predisposition to genealogical research may vary from enthusiastic encouragement to a flat refusal. Our Resource Center can provide you with the addresses of the state, religious and parish archives as we have quite an extensive collection of materials related to this topic. Most helpful is our collection of Diocesan Guides, which list each parish in the diocese and the villages which belonged to the parish. Certain number of the guides also provide brief histories of the parish and other pertinent data.  You may also visit the websites of each dioceses which frequently contain a link to the diocesan archives.

TELEPHONE DIRECTORIES

In the post-Communist era, the availability of Polish telephone books has greatly improved. Telephone directories are issued on the provincial level.  Our Archive has over half these directories. The directories assist in learning whether anyone is listed with your surname of interest in your ancestral village or region.  We also have directories for the cities of Wilno (Vilnius), Lithuania and Grodno in Belarus. When using these directories, please be aware that there are for fewer phones per-capita in Poland than in the United States and persons bearing your surname may not have a telephone.

SURNAME DISTRIBUTION DIRECTORIES

Our Resource Center houses a ten-volume set of books which lists each surname in use in Poland at the time of their publication (1990). Each entry provides the number of adult bearers of each surname and the distribution of the surname by province.  This material is also available on line a www.pgsctne.org.

LANGUAGE


Records from Poland may have be written in Polish, Russian, German, Hebrew or Latin. If planning a visit to search for relatives in Poland, knowing the language will help you immensely in exchanging stories with your family. Enroll in a Polish course at your nearby University or Adult Education Center.  In reality, a knowledge of the language is useful at the inception of the research process in the U.S. to help you identify misspelled names or effectively search ship passenger lists. The sooner you begin learning the language, the better! Several texts have been written to help you read documents of genealogical value.  Consult the www.langline.com website. 

Please see our Links page for information on the State, Federal and European Archives.