Polish Marriage Records Online

Kyle J. Betit

Finding an ancestor’s home village or town in Poland can be a difficult job – especially because there are few large databases of Polish records to check online. Recently, however, some marriage databases have become available that are impressive and a good start on indexing Polish marriages online. Beware that the search engines on these sites vary in how they treat spelling variations. Some of them look for close spelling variations of a surname. At least one only searches for the exact spelling you enter. You can find the links I have discussed below online on ProGenealogists’s International Sleuth page http://www.progenealogists.com/genealogysleuthi.htm , where you may also find other links of interest on an ongoing basis. Many Polish marriages still need to be accessed the old-fashioned way (by searching the records of individual congregations or churches), and ProGenealogists offers a variety of services to help you with that also: http://www.progenealogists.com/services.htm . The collection of Polish marriage records on microfilm at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City is particularly vast, and our researchers are at the FHL every day.

One of the best indexes to Polish marriages online is the Poznan (Posen) Marriage Indexing Project at http://bindweed.man.poznan.pl/posen/project.php . Posen was a section of Prussia (Germany), and is now called Poznan in Polish. Poznan is now a region of western Poland. Many immigrants came from here to the United States. The Poznan marriage index online is flexible and helpful to use, and I have found some families I was looking for there. I recommend it! If your ancestors came from Posen/Poznan (or if they just said they came from Prussia), check it out since it is free and online. It covers the period from 1820 to 1899. About 426,000 marriages are included at this writing! If you find a reference you are looking for on this site, ProGenealogists can help you obtain a copy of the original record: http://www.progenealogists.com/record_search.htm .

A similar index online for Pomerania is the Pomeranian Marriage Indexes at http://www.ptg.gda.pl/index.php/certificate/action/searchM/ . This web site is maintained by the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne). About 165,000 marriages are included at this writing, with over one million records indexed total (including baptisms and deaths).

An index that includes a wider geographical area is “Index of Polish marriages until 1899,” operated by Dr Minakowski Publikacje Elektroniczne, online at http://www.przodkowie.com/metryki/en.php . This database doesn’t include very many marriages at this point (about 70,000 at this writing), but it will undoubtedly expand. You can check the list of locations/parishes that are included, and if your ancestral parish is there, it could be quite helpful. Kraków is well represented, for example. With a less common surname, searching a database like this could give a clue as to the region or even parishes where a name may have appeared.

If you are looking for Jewish ancestors, many of the Jewish marriage records from Polish archives and elsewhere have been indexed in the Jewish Records Indexing Project (JRI-Poland) at http://www.jri-poland.org . The project also includes births and deaths, so it is a must for researching Jewish ancestors who lived in Poland (or in what is today Poland). At this writing, more than 3.5 million records from 500 Polish towns have been indexed. Don’t forget that sometimes people converted from one religion to another, so you might have Jewish ancestors you didn’t know about back some generations.

Now perhaps the best for last. A large database covering all of Poland is the Geneteka web site at http://www.geneteka.genealodzy.pl/ . This site (operated by the Polish Genealogical Society – Polskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne – in Warsaw) is only in Polish, but you can translate it using Google or another translation tool. There are some 2 million entries of births, deaths, and marriages included in the database. You can search for a surname to see what regions of Poland a particular surname appeared in. Then you can search either the entire region or a single locality for records of people with particular names. I noticed that you can get different results if you use the feminine form of a surname, such as Grzybowska, rather than the masculine form, in this case Grzybowski. You might want to check both depending on your research strategy and goals. Also, this suggests the search engine is looking only for exact spellings. You may want to put in several variant spellings of your surname to see what the different results are. There are also a few localities from modern-day Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia included on this site. Again, if you find a reference you are looking for on this site, ProGenealogists can help you obtain a copy of the original record: http://www.progenealogists.com/record_search.htm .