A volunteer index · Warsaw, Poland · An index only — no images
Geneteka
A volunteer index of Polish parish registers, by surname and parish. An index only — it points you at the scan rather than showing it. — NOTE: the service was answering HTTP 500 on 16 September 2026. Its parent society, genealodzy.pl, is up; the index may be back by the time you read this.
https://geneteka.genealodzy.pl/ ↗
Last checked 2026-09-22. Tell us if this has changed.
The ground it holds
Record regions whose registers are filed here, and for which years.
- 1918–1939 Poland — Second Republic
- 1945–2026 Poland — Wielkopolska and Kujawy-Pomerania — THE TRAP. The German place names are gone, and the catalogues are in Polish. Schubin is SZUBIN, Bromberg is BYDGOSZCZ, Posen is POZNAŃ. The registers mostly stayed where they were and are held by the Polish state archives — but they are catalogued under the Polish name, so a search for Schubin returns nothing while the books sit in Bydgoszcz.
- 1918–1939 Poland — Second Republic
- 1945–2026 Poland — West Pomerania and Pomerania — THE TRAP, the same one as Posen. Stettin is SZCZECIN and Danzig is GDAŃSK; the registers mostly stayed and are catalogued under the Polish names, so a search for the German one finds nothing at all.
- 1918–1939 Divided — East Upper Silesia to Poland in 1922, the rest German; Těšín split with Czechoslovakia — THE TRAP, again and worse. The 1921 plebiscite and the partition that followed cut Upper Silesia in two, and Těšín was cut a third way. Three archives now hold what one parish produced.
- 1945–2026 Poland, and Czech Silesia in the south — THE TRAP that catches everyone. The German population was expelled and the place names changed wholesale — Breslau is Wrocław, Waldenburg is Wałbrzych, Gleiwitz is Gliwice. Records made in German before 1945 sit in Polish archives under Polish names. Search the German name for the record and the Polish name for the archive.
- 1795–1807 Russian Empire — the third partition
- 1807–1815 Duchy of Warsaw
- 1815–1868 Kingdom of Poland, in personal union with Russia
- 1868–1918 Russian Empire — the Vistula Land — THE TRAP. From 1868 the registers are written in RUSSIAN, in Cyrillic, and they stay that way until 1918. The same parish, the same priest, the same form — in an alphabet most researchers cannot read and most indexes transliterate inconsistently. A family that seems to end in 1868 has not ended.
- 1918–1939 Poland, restored
- 1945–2026 Poland
No places here yet
This map knows Geneteka covers PL, but nobody has walked its catalogue into the shelf. That is a gap in this map, not a gap in the record. Help fill it →