Record Atlas
Poland · 0 volumes

Tarnowskie Góry

Tarnowskie Góry in Poland. 0 record volumes and who holds them.

Last changed 2026-09-30 · first mapped 2026-09-23 Follow what changes.

Comes out as a sheet for the reading room — what to ask for, who holds it, and every link written out in full.

This place

Where to begin

You know your family came from Tarnowskie Góry. Here is the order I would work in, cheapest and easiest first — and what to do when that runs out.

  1. Work out which country your year belongs to

    This is the step almost everybody skips, and it is the commonest reason a record that exists cannot be found. The ground did not move; the border did. A baptism here in one decade may sit in a different country's archive from one twenty years later.

    YearsWho governedWhose archive
    1526–1742 Habsburg Bohemian crown lands actapublica · porta-fontium · familysearch
    1742–1871 Prussia — Province of Silesia (Austrian Silesia stays Habsburg) szukajwarchiwach · archion · actapublica · familysearch
    1871–1918 German Empire — Prussian Silesia szukajwarchiwach · archion · agad · familysearch
    1918–1939 Divided — East Upper Silesia to Poland in 1922, the rest German; Těšín split with Czechoslovakia szukajwarchiwach · geneteka · actapublica
    1939–1945 German annexation of the whole arolsen · bundesarchiv
    1945–2026 Poland, and Czech Silesia in the south szukajwarchiwach · geneteka · actapublica · familysearch

    Do this: take the year you are looking for, find its row, and note the archive. That is the one to search — not the one the village is in today.

  2. The things that catch people out here

    1742–1871, Prussia — Province of Silesia (Austrian Silesia stays Habsburg). THE TRAP. Frederick took most of Silesia in 1742 and left a strip — Austrian Silesia, around Opava and Těšín — with the Habsburgs. Two record systems, two languages of administration and two present-day countries, for a province people still name as one place.

    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.

  3. Find the parish, because that is where the book was

    Before civil registration, the parish priest kept the register. A village without its own church was written into a neighbour's book.

    • Saint John of Nepomuk chapel in Tarnowskie Góry-Repecko
    • Sacred Heart and Our Lady of Fatima church in Tarnowskie Góry
    • Lutheran church in Laryszów
    • Chapel in Strzybnica

  4. When you run out — and you will

    Everything above is what this atlas knows. It is not everything there is. Nine places in ten on this map have never been surveyed by anybody, so a gap here is usually our silence rather than the record's absence.

    Do this: write to the archive named in the era table for your year, even if we hold nothing for it. Then tell us what you found — a gap somebody has personally closed is the most useful thing a stranger can give this map.

The archives named above: actapublica · porta-fontium · familysearch · szukajwarchiwach · archion · agad · geneteka · arolsen · bundesarchiv. What each one holds and why.

Whose archive this ground was

Tarnowskie Góry sits in Silesia. Which empire held it decides which archive holds its records — and for some of these years that is not the archive you would guess.

YearsWho held itWhose archive that means
1526–1742 Habsburg Bohemian crown lands Acta Publica · Porta fontium · FamilySearch

Catholic and Lutheran registers in Latin and German, kept by the parish.
1742–1871 Prussia — Province of Silesia (Austrian Silesia stays Habsburg) Szukaj w Archiwach · Archion · Acta Publica · FamilySearch

THE TRAP. Frederick took most of Silesia in 1742 and left a strip — Austrian Silesia, around Opava and Těšín — with the Habsburgs. Two record systems, two languages of administration and two present-day countries, for a province people still name as one place.
1871–1918 German Empire — Prussian Silesia Szukaj w Archiwach · Archion · Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD) · FamilySearch

Standesamt civil registration from 1 October 1874, in German, alongside the church books.
1918–1939 Divided — East Upper Silesia to Poland in 1922, the rest German; Těšín split with Czechoslovakia Szukaj w Archiwach · Geneteka · Acta Publica

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.
1939–1945 German annexation of the whole Arolsen Archives · Bundesarchiv

Auschwitz is in this region, in what the Germans had annexed as Ost-Oberschlesien. Arolsen and Yad Vashem hold the names.
1945–2026 Poland, and Czech Silesia in the south Szukaj w Archiwach · Geneteka · Acta Publica · FamilySearch

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.

No volumes recorded here yet.

The ground worth walking

Within 14 km — 14 places · 6 parishes · 5 burial grounds. These neighbours hold 26 catalogued volumes between them.

A register belongs to a parish, not to a village. A hamlet with no church of its own was written into the book of the church it walked to — and that book is catalogued under the other place's name. This is the ground to search before concluding a record does not exist.

Neighbours with volumes catalogued
Also within 14 km, nothing catalogued

Tarnowice Stare · Nakło · Repty Stare · Zyglin · Zbrosławice · Wieszowa · Karb · Bobrowniki · Sączów · Orzegów · Karchowice

Correctly placed and unread. A gap here is this atlas's silence, not the record's — the registers may well exist and nobody has walked them.

The nearest parishes

A church is a parish and a parish is where a register is kept — the register of a hamlet with no church of its own is kept at the church it walked to, so the distance is the useful part. Wikidata's coverage is very uneven: 34,612 churches in England against 105 in central Istria, so a short list here means thin data and not an empty landscape. Unchecked, and only inside a mapped record region.

Where the burials are

The other end of a parish: the register records the burial and the ground holds it, and a family that left no other trace very often left a stone. These are points on a map, not record collections — from Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, nobody here has visited one, and whether the burial register survives is a question for the parish or the municipality above. Grounds OpenStreetMap has not named are here too. They used to be left out, on the reasoning that a shape with no name is not a place anyone can ask about — which cost Senj its own graveyard, 2 km away and unnamed, while a named one 7 km off was all this page would show. Being unnamed is a fact about the map data, not about the ground. Only inside a mapped record region.

25 volumes catalogued here

The level below «a collection covers this place»: which book, for which years, and the link that opens its images. From FamilySearch's own catalogue. Nobody here has opened any of them. You can, though — mark the pages you have searched on any row below and this browser will remember where you stopped.

Other — 25

National sources for Poland, unverified

From Wikidata, CC0 — the national archive and the national library where the country has one. Nobody here has opened these. The link answered when it was asked and that is the whole of what this map knows about them. They are listed because a country with no named source at all is the worse answer: 199 of the 237 countries here had nothing but the worldwide services, which cover everywhere and therefore say nothing about anywhere.

The sources for Poland

National and regional sources that cover this ground whether or not anybody has walked it here — which makes them the answer, not the consolation, for a place with no volumes recorded on it.

  • Szukaj w Archiwach Images, free, no account Warsaw, Poland
    The Polish state archives' scans, free and without an account. Covers ground now in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania as well as Poland.
  • Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD) A catalogue entry only — the paper is not photographed 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.
  • Bundesarchiv A catalogue entry only — the paper is not photographed 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.
  • Matricula Online Images, free, no account 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.
  • Archiwum Państwowe w Bydgoszczy Nobody has walked this one yet 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.
  • GenTeam.at Images, free, account needed 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.
  • Geneteka An index only — no images 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.
  • Genealogia w Archiwach Nobody has walked this one yet 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.

Sources that cover everywhere

Not about Poland in particular — these reach most of the world, which includes here. They are listed after the local sources because a body that holds this ground's own paper is a better first stop than one that holds a little of everywhere's. Worth knowing they exist all the same.

  • Internet Archive Images, free, no account
    Full-text search across millions of digitised books, including parish histories, nobiliaries and local monographs that name ordinary people.
  • Arolsen Archives Images, free, no account
    The former International Tracing Service. Concentration camp, forced labour and displaced-persons records for some seventeen and a half million people, free and fully indexed.
  • BillionGraves Images, free, no account
    GPS-tagged headstone photographs. Smaller than Find a Grave but its coordinates are per-stone, which Find a Grave's often are not.
  • Find a Grave Images, free, no account
    Volunteer-photographed headstones and cemetery indexes, worldwide, with very uneven coverage. Owned by Ancestry but free to read.
  • WikiTree Images, free, no account
    A free, single shared tree with an unusually strong sourcing culture. Not a record source.
  • Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names Images, free, no account
    Names and testimony pages for victims of the Shoah, free.
  • FamilySearch Images, free, account needed
    The largest free collection of record images and indexes in the world. A free account is required, and a minority of images are restricted to Family History Centres and affiliate libraries.
  • Geni Images, free, account needed
    One shared world tree. Useful for finding other researchers on the same line; not a record source, and its assertions are only as good as their citations.
  • JewishGen Images, free, account needed
    The central Jewish genealogy resource — town-level KehilaLinks, burial and Holocaust databases, and revision lists for eastern Europe.
  • Geneanet Partly free, partly paid
    Member-contributed trees and transcriptions, strongest in France. Much is free; a Premium tier gates some search and images.
  • Ancestry Images, behind a paywall
    The largest commercial collection. Strong on the English-speaking world, censuses and immigration; weak on continental parish registers.
  • MyHeritage Images, behind a paywall
    Commercial, with a large tree network and good European newspaper and directory coverage. Search is free; opening a record is not.

FamilySearch collections that reach here

A collection is a claim over an area, not a book standing in this town — so these are ranked by how specifically they reach Tarnowskie Góry. A free account is needed to open the images, and some are restricted to a Family History Centre.

The whole country — 7

Worth searching, and worth knowing it is a national index rather than a local one.

See who held Tarnowskie Góry between 1800 and 1920 →
The jurisdiction answer — which empire held this ground, and therefore whose archive — could only be got at from the map until now. This opens it there, on 1863; drag the year from any point between 1526 and 2026.

See Tarnowskie Góry on the map →

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