Genealogy Resources

by Jochen on

Official Records and Church Records

Metryki.GenBaza.pl

This site is a little bit of a hidden gem. It's a non-profit organization that has been digitizing church records and official birth, marriage, and death records that the government kept starting 1874 ("Standesamt") at a record pace.

The filenames follow a pretty simple naming convention:

Suffix

Meaning

_ur

Birth Records

_sl

Marriage Records

_zg

Death Records

Link: metryki.genbaza.pl

Other Church Records

For me, familysearch.org has been a great resource in finding information, or at least where to look for further information as the site often doesn't include the scans. If you can find a records, highlight the "document" tab, look up the film number and then search the film number in the catalog search on the site to figure out which church it's from. Then:

Lutheran Church records can be found on Archion.de (albeit you'll have to pay a fee for one month of access).

Catholic Church records can be found on https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/.

Address Books

Starting from about 1764, the city kept address books. Initially, these books were a list of officials in high places of the government and church and sadly not all citizens. That changes in the 19th century, with good records starting in the late 1830s. These documents later turned into phone books. There's an up-to-date list of all available digitized books on genealogy.net's wiki.

Police Records

These have just recently ('22) gotten scanned by the state archives in Poland. These records are official police records and citizen registration cards starting from about the 1840s. The Allensteiner Indexierungsprojekt organized the collection on their website which can be viewed here. The list is quite long, and the card index starts at reference number 10/14/0/5/7000, which can be found towards the bottom. The collection itself is housed on the Polish Archives Szukaj w Archiwach under the series “Kartoteka.”

State Archives

A lot of information is (if you can find it) scanned or available in person in the Polish State Architeves: Szukaj w Archiwach.