Beginning Polish Genealogy

Family historians researching in Poland and Ukraine have to deal with gaps in records that could make progress next to impossible. Thanks to genetic genealogy, we can bridge those gaps. Geographic clues from your matches might get you looking in the right direction. This session includes some DNA success stories, based on geography and backed by documented research. It also offers pointers on how to get more value from your tests.

Discover online records for German-speaking ancestors from Brandenburg, East Prussia, Pomerania, Posen, Silesia, and West Prussia. Despite some record loss for these geographic areas, hundreds of years of church and civil records can be found in archives in Poland, Germany, and the US, using the search strategies in this presentation.

This lecture will describe the ways to use various resources available through MyHeritage to find information about ancestors originating in Poland and to find relatives that still may live there. Zbigniew will focus on a unique resource: family trees uploaded by individual users from Poland. In most cases, they started a few years ago at the beginning of a big wave of popularity of family history research. The concern about privacy was not that strong yet so thousands of people uploaded their information and made it available through MyHeritage making it a unique source that is not available anywhere else. Learn the strategies for using this kind of information, its advantages, and possible traps.

The presentation will cover Polish cemetery online databases - portals and websites that include information about burials from all over Poland. Kinga will show you how to use these and explain what is the most common information that you may find there.

Yes, it has been possible to be born in one country, get married in another, and die in a third -- without ever leaving your home. The boundaries in Eastern Europe have been redrawn many times over the years, presenting challenges for modern-day genealogical researchers. But this phenomenon has not been confined to that area; even Canada has seen at least 50 boundary revisions between its provinces and territories. When jurisdictions have changed, it is especially important to learn how to interpret and record information.

Metrical registers (BMD) are the most important sources for finding information about our ancestors. But what to do if the records for our hometown do not survive or are available, but to a very limited extent? The lecture will present the possibilities that exist for Polish genealogy, among others: censuses, address and registration books, official / court / school documentation, commune files, town / land books and yard documentation and many others together with the institutions of their storage.

The main aim of the presentation is not just showing you the Polish genealogy databases, but also insight on how to look for Polish ancestors. Step by step we will check the most useful websites in the context of Polish political and social history.

With more information available online, it is often possible to find key records for your Eastern European ancestors in free and subscription databases. Learn about the various record sets available, how to access them, and how to overcome privacy and language issues and other research roadblocks.

While church registers are the most popular and useful sources for tracing most Eastern European ancestors, and civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths provide even more details, there are other record groups to be searched that may prove useful, especially in the absence of church and vital records for...