Record Atlas
7 FamilySearch collections · 8 archives · 685 places · 1226–2005

Poland

Where the records of Poland are, who holds them, and what it costs to look. 6,262,201 indexed records reachable through FamilySearch alone.

Where to start in Poland

4 of the 6 checked sources here can be opened tonight. 2are free images with no account. 1 needs a free account. 1is an index with no images. 2are catalogue cards or paper in a building — a letter, not a click. On top of that, 9 worldwide services reach Poland without a subscription.

2 more institutions are listed here and have never been checked — nobody has opened them, written to them, or found out what they hold. They are on the map as grey because that is what they are, and the honest reading of this page is 4 known-open, 2 unknown.

Write to Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD), Bundesarchiv, Szukaj w Archiwach for what is not online. FamilySearch has 7 collections covering it, running 1226–2005, 6,262,201 indexed records. 8 pieces of this ground are mapped for jurisdiction, so the atlas can say whose archive held it in a given year.

685 places placed, 8 volumes walked. Open Poland on the map, or tell us what is missing.

Whose archive this ground was

Record regions mapped in Poland — which empire held the ground, and therefore which archive holds its paper.

The archives

  • Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD) catalogue Warsaw, Poland

    Warsaw's archive of the old Republic — the metrical books of the Polish partitions, including eastern Galician parishes now in Ukraine. Catalogued here; the scans are published through Szukaj w Archiwach.

  • Archiwum Państwowe w Bydgoszczy unsurveyed Bydgoszcz, Poland

    The Polish state archive for the Kuyavian-Pomeranian voivodeship, holding the civil registers of the former Prussian registry offices of the region, Szubin among them. IT ANSWERS LETTERS AND WILL SHARE SCANS: three e-mails in September 2026 were each answered within about eight days, in Polish, over the Director's signature with a named case officer. It points first at genealogiawarchiwach.pl for what is already digitised, and then supplied a 103-scan volume that is NOT on that portal, shared from its own OneDrive. TWO HOLDINGS FACTS IT STATED BY LETTER THAT NO ONLINE CATALOGUE SHOWS: the metrical books of the Jewish religious community of Szubin survive ONLY for 1820-1847; and the alphabetical death indexes (skorowidze zgonów) of USC Szubin Miasto survive ONLY for 1874-1878 and 1894-1924, with nothing between. An archivist there will also read a difficult line from a register on request and say plainly where the reading is uncertain.

  • Bundesarchiv catalogue Koblenz, Germany

    The German Federal Archives. Civil and military administration of the Prussian provinces, the wartime records, and the card indexes of the expelled — much of it for ground that is no longer German.

  • Genealogia w Archiwach unsurveyed Poznań, Poland

    A Polish state-archives portal of scanned metrical books — civil registration from the Prussian partition (1874 on), duplicates of Roman Catholic parish registers from before that, and population and registration books from 1837. Separate from Szukaj w Archiwach and run by its own archives. Secondary sources say the scans are free and need no account; NOBODY HERE HAS CONFIRMED THAT, because the site is a Vaadin application that renders nothing without JavaScript, so it is marked unsurveyed rather than taking a blog's word for what it costs. SCANS ARE SERVED BY A LORIS IIIF IMAGE SERVER and can be read in place without downloading: /loris/<id>/<x,y,w,h>/<width>,/0/default.jpg returns an arbitrary region at up to TWICE native resolution, which is enough to settle a difficult hand. info.json returns 403 while image requests succeed, and anything above 2x returns a bare 404. The viewer's own canvas is tainted, so the tile server is the route and screenshots are not. THE PORTAL WILL NOT OPEN A UNIT BY ITS SIGNATURE: a scan's modal id resolves only inside the current search result set, so a neighbouring scan cannot be reached by guessing an id. The route that works is to open any scan's modal, click 'View the document' to expose the unit's own scan list, click Show on the scan wanted, and take the new Loris id from the network log.

  • Geneteka index Warsaw, Poland

    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.

  • GenTeam.at Vienna, Austria

    Volunteer indexes to the Habsburg lands — Vienna's parish registers, Jewish records, school and guild lists. Free with an account, and it reaches ground the church portals do not.

  • Matricula Online free Passau, Germany

    Diocesan parish registers photographed and served free, without an account. Austria and much of Germany and Poland; the Italian entries are South Tyrol.

  • Szukaj w Archiwach free Warsaw, Poland

    The Polish state archives' scans, free and without an account. Covers ground now in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania as well as Poland.

And 12 worldwide providers reach Poland too — the full list.

7 FamilySearch collections

Grouped by the ground each one covers, nationwide. A free account opens the images; some are restricted to a Family History Centre.

Poland — nationwide 7

6 more collections, contributed

A directory David assembled, sorted by what kind of record each one is. Read this differently from the rest of the page. The descriptions are his, not an archive's catalogue, and nobody here has opened the volumes behind them. Every link was tried on 2026-09-20 and answered; the ones that did not are not listed.

Church and parish registers 1
Civil registration and vital records 2
Probate, land and notarial 2
Military and wartime 1
Jewish and minority 4
General historical archives 1

685 places, 8 volumes

The 250 carrying the most collections are listed; 435 more are in Poland and on the map. Every place lists them all.

Every country · The map