Tag Archives: poland

Polish State Archives Contact List

It’s great that so many records in Poland are being scanned and put online for everyone to access, but sometimes it’s necessary to contact an archive directly. I’ve created a list of archive locations with their contact information, which you can view on the new Polish State Archives Contact List page.

You can get an idea of what it looks like above. Each archive has their archive number, the name in both English and Polish, the physical address, the phone number, and a series of links which include e-mail, web site, the list of records for that archive, a description of that archive, and (if it exists) the Facebook page.

You can search through the list using the search field on the top right of the table.

Go to the Polish State Archives Contact List page now to check it out. If I’m missing anything, let me know.

Zbaszyn Refugees in Falenica

JDC Warsaw Office Locality Files 1939-1941

I’m happy to announce a new set of resources in the B&F Compendium of Jewish Genealogy. I recently came across a set of files from the JDC Archives that is organized by town, and has all of the records scanned and online. These are referred to as the Warsaw Office, 1939-1941 Localities collection.

Zbaszyn Refugees in Falenica
Zbaszyn Refugees in Falenica

The documents in these files are for the most part correspondence between the Warsaw office of the American Joint Distribution Office and representatives of Jewish groups in over 500 different towns in Poland during the years 1939-1941. Frequently the group in the town was the German-organized Judenrat, although not always. Sometimes the organizations are local support organizations, and sometimes the letters are to individuals.

Some of these files consist of a single letter. Others have over 100 documents. While the letters can open up an important view into the lives of Polish Jews during the first years of the Holocaust, before the deportations to concentration camps, the more exciting feature of this collection are the lists.

Bolimow Matzah Recipients
Bolimow Matzah Recipients

Many of the towns have lists of people. These lists can be lists of all the Jews in the town, refugees from other towns, those who received financial assistance, and even those who received flour, matza and even herring. Considering the dearth of information on the lives of Jews during this period, I think these lists are incredibly important.

I did find some minor issues with the list of files which I tried to correct if I could. I’m also sending an e-mail to the JDC to mention them so they can be fixed. A few items on the list had incorrect links. Many of the items list the file language as English, even though essentially none of the files have any English in them. I think this must have been some default setting. Almost every file has documents in Polish, many have in German, and some are in Yiddish. A few files are just in German, but not too many.

These files will show up in over 500 Polish town pages (out of the more than 1400 on this site) in the Holocaust resource category. See the Holocaust category for the town of Żabno:

Continue reading JDC Warsaw Office Locality Files 1939-1941

Notes for the town of Zagórze

Improved notes for Polish towns

I mentioned back in August when I added more towns to the B&F Compendium of Jewish Genealogy (Over two hundred new Polish towns added to the compendium) that I had also turned on notes for towns. I had actually added some simple notes to many towns as I had added them last year, but never made them visible on the site.

With the new towns, which were predominately from the areas of Poland that had belonged to Germany before WWII, I found myself adding notes pointing that out and wanted the notes to be seen. In August that was the primary use of Notes, but there were other Notes, such as pointing out the previous name of a town, or explaining that the town name was very common in Poland.

Around the same time I turned on notes, Phyllis Kramer, VP of Education at JewishGen, commented on my page on Żmigród requesting that I differentiate between it and Nowy Żmigród. It turns out Nowy Żmigród before 1946 was also known simply as Żmigród. Adding to this confusion, many people find their town in the Compendium by going to the Alphabetical List of Polish Cities, and that list doesn’t show which region a town is in, and can be confusing if there are two towns with the same name.

At the time I added notes for Żmigród and Nowy Żmigród saying simply not to confuse them, but it started me thinking if there was more I could do for those situations where people were likely to get confused.

I spent a considerable amount of time going through all the notes I had created, and making sure if it referenced another town, that that other town had a corresponding note as well. I then added links to notes, so you can immediately link to another town if it is mentioned in a note.

Here’s an example of the former town of Zagórze, which has been part of Sosnowiec since 1975:

Notes for the town of Zagórze
Notes for the town of Zagórze circled in red

You’ll notice the note is shown below the town name and province, and above the map. I’ve circled it in red just to be clear. The note points out that this town no longer exists, that it is now part of Sosnowiec, and provides a link directly to the page about Sosnowiec.

Here’s another example, the city of Kraków, which lists the former towns of Podgórze and Kazimierz:

Note for Krakow
Note for Krakow

In case you’re wondering, the reason there are separate pages for these towns, even though they no longer exist, is that people may only know their relative came from one of these non-existent towns. Also, many of these now-non-existent towns have very specific genealogy resources online, and having the resources for Podgórze be separate from those of Kraków can be very useful for finding the right information.

Over 300 towns now have notes, many of them with links to other related towns. Thank you to Phyllis Kramer for her simple comment which led me to improve the notes for towns. If you visit a town page in the Compendium and think a clarifying note would be useful, please write a comment on the town page, or send me a message. It’s worth pointing out as well that I recently added another 150 or so towns to the site (in addition to the 200 added in August), so there are now over 1350 towns in the Compendium. These are towns that exist in what is today Poland – there are no pages for towns that are currently in other countries, even if they were once part of Poland. The new towns were added to help facilitate a new feature I will be adding to the site. More on that soon…

If you have other suggestions for improving the site, please send me a message, or add it to the How can this site be improved? page so others can discuss your proposed improvements.

Ukrainian towns with Jewish records in Polish archives

[Update: The PRADZIAD links all changed and are no longer accurate. The JRI-Poland links should be fine. Unfortunately, the PRADZIAD site changes their links every few months, and I don’t have a way to keep them updated. To get the proper PRADZIAD page, follow the link in the first paragraph below, and search for the town using the Polish name.]

The following table shows all collections of Jewish records in the Polish state archives that are for towns currently in Ukraine. Most of these towns were originally part of East Galicia. Each line has a link on the right side that goes to the record collection’s page in the PRADZIAD (Baza danych Program Rejestracji Akt Metrykalnych i Stanu Cywilnego, or Database Program for Registration of Metric and Civil Status Files) database, which is a list of all records in the Polish state archives, organized by town.

In addition, if JRI-Poland has a town listing for the town, I’ve added a link to that as well. Keep in mind that the PRADZIAD link goes to a description of the specific collection of records, while the JRI-Poland is a general link for the town. The JRI-Poland page should tell you if the records have been indexed by JRI-Poland.

As this is a Polish database, the town names are of course in Polish, although I’ve tried to supply the current Ukrainian name for the town. I have not added the Yiddish town names (such as Lemberg for Lwow/Lviv) although I could do that at a later date. I’m not an expert on Ukrainian towns, so it’s possible I made a mistake in assigning Ukrainian town names. If you see a mistake, please let me know.

I also could not find the current names of three of the towns listed – Janowiec, Sakała, and Ułaszkowice. It’s possible Ułaszkowice is simply a typo for Ułaszkowce. If you know the current names of these towns, please let me know.

The table below is sortable by every field, so although it is initially sorted by Polish town name, you can easily sort it by Ukrainian town name. You can also change the number of towns to show at once (it defaults to 20, although you can increase it up to 100). The table is also searchable, which is useful as there are over 500 entries in the list.

A look at Dobiegniew, one of the more than 200 new towns added

Over two hundred new Polish towns added to the compendium

I’m happy to announce that I have just added over 200 new Polish towns to the B&F Compendium of Jewish Genealogy. This brings the number of towns in the compendium to over 1200, and I think it is the largest database of Polish towns with former Jewish communities, or a connection to former Jewish communities, online. Many of these towns are towns that before 1945 were part of Germany (primarily Prussia), so while the compendium only (currently) lists towns within the borders of Poland, many people who had family in Germany may find their ancestral towns listed. I should point out if you search for the old German name of a town it should show up (i.e. if you search for the German town name Woldenberg, it will give you a link to the Polish town name Dobiegniew).

It’s been over a year since I launched the compendium with resources for roughly a thousand towns in Poland (in addition to resources on over 200 countries and 80 provinces). Time is a good thing, as it allowed me to forget how hard it was to add towns to the compendium. Once I got started, however, I needed to see it through to completion.

A look at Dobiegniew, one of the more than 200 new towns added
A look at Dobiegniew, one of the more than 200 new towns added

I’ve known since I launched that I did not have all the Polish towns where Jews lived, but I worked very hard to confirm the identity of each town I added, and that was painstaking work. When I add resources I spend a lot of time confirming that they are connected to the correct town, something that is not so easy when dozens of towns in Poland can have the exact same name. What that meant was complicated efforts to cross-reference all the resources between many sites, checking geographic coordinates if they existed for a resource, comparing alternate names for the town, and whenever possible checking the province and county of the town.

Checking the province and county proved especially difficult since many sites did not use the current province and counties if they had them listed at all. Poland has changed their regional designations many times in the last century, which means if you’re referencing old documents, then they could give the wrong information. Luckily, geographic coordinates don’t change, so for resources that included them, that allowed synchronization of resources. The end result is that all the towns in the compendium are firmly identified, and their current province and county are identified on their town page.

I wrote recently about adding new cemetery resources, including pages from Lo Tishkach, an organization that is collecting information on Jewish cemeteries in Europe. When I added the Lo Tishkach resources, I analyzed the pages that did not have towns in the compendium. I removed the towns that only had associated mass graves as they were probably not indicative of a Jewish community having existed there. Looking at just the towns that had a Jewish cemetery left me with over 200 towns that I did not have in the compendium.

Clearly, not all of these towns had Jewish communities either. Many Jewish cemeteries were built outside of the communities they served. While I’m sure a handful of the towns I’ve added only had a Jewish cemetery there, and not a living community, I’ve added them since the names of these towns still come up in research. Where I’m fairly certain that the town only had a cemetery, I’ve made note of that. Occasionally, if I only had a single cemetery reference to a town, and I was sure it was used by a different town with a Jewish community, I simply added that link to the town with the existing community.

It’s not surprising that sites like the IAJGS Jewish Cemetery Project and Kirkuty had many links to these towns, as they are similarly focused on cemeteries. Where I was pleasantly surprised, however, was when I started collecting resources from other sites to connect to these towns. Virtual Shtetl had over 150 of the towns in its database, JRI-Poland lists records for over 50 of the towns, and Routes to Roots had information on over 70 of the towns. I also discovered that while none of the towns existed in the JewishGen Communities database, many of the towns had listings in the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF) database.

As a side note, I’ve changed how I link to the JGFF, so where before I only linked to JGFF if there were listings for the town, I now always link to it. If you have family from a town, and you see no links, add your family. I’ll be writing more about this in another post soon.

When I said above that I made note of some towns only having a Jewish cemetery, those notes actually show up on the page. I actually added notes about many of the towns when I added them last year, but never displayed the notes on the town pages. Many of these new towns came from the border areas that before WWII were part of Germany, and as I added notes to point this out, I made sure to turn on the notes on all the town pages. If the town has a note, you’ll see it displayed below the province/county information, and above the map.

It’s clear that there are more towns to add, and in time I hope to do so. In this batch I came up with about ten towns that I was able to identify but not easily cross reference due to not being able to find certain information on them. I will continue to look for the information I need to add those towns. I’m also always happy to receive suggestions for new towns to add, although I can’t promise to add them as I have many requirements I need to satisfy before adding them, but they will get added to my queue for future consideration.

So take a look at the expanded alphabetical List of Polish Cities, and check out the towns where your family lived. If you know of resources I’m missing, please submit them to be added. If you find resources you were previously unaware of, write a comment here and let me know how the site has helped you with your research.