We’re excited to announce the culmination of our multi-year project to improve access to the Polak w Ameryce, a popular Polish-language newspaper published in Buffalo, New York, between 1887 and 1920. Our Polak w Ameryce project began in the late 1990s under former PGSNYS President, David Newman, who spearheaded an initiative to copy and index death notices from microfilmed copies of the newspaper. The project continued through recent years, as we raised funds to digitize the Polak w Ameryce from microfilm. The digital images were provided to the NYS Historic Newspapers site, where they were added to the queue for processing to make the images searchable with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Some additional delay was necessitated by an overhaul and redesign of the NYS Historic Newspapers website. However, the wait is finally over, and the Polak w Ameryce is here at last!

The paper is available for browsing by date, or searching by keywords such as surnames. Be sure to also check our databases for your surname(s) of interest. You can limit your search to “Polak w Ameryce Death Notices (1886–1920),” if you wish to focus exclusively on this collection. Note that in some cases, the poor quality of the original microfilm makes OCR difficult, so you will find death notices in our database that do not come up in search results at the NYS Historic Newspapers site. However, once you know the publication date from our index, you can browse to find the original article from the digital images online. More information about this project can be found here.

The PGSNYS is proud of our role in improving access to the Polak w Ameryce, an important historical resource for genealogists, students, historians, journalists, or anyone with an interest in Buffalo’s Polish heritage. Dziękuje bardzo—thank you very much—to our members and donors, whose support has made this possible!