PGSNYS is thrilled to announce the completion of our ongoing project to digitize Buffalo’s Polish newspaper, the Dziennik dla Wszystkich and make images freely accessible via the NYS Historic Newspapers website! A total of 15,648 issues covering the period from 17 January 1911–9 August 1957 are now available for browsing and keyword searching. This includes almost 10 years of the Dziennik’s local editions from historically significant years (1941–48, 1950–52 and 1957), which were not previously available on microfilm.
Within the pages of the Dziennik, you will find a wealth of information about Western New York’s Polish people, businesses, churches, schools, institutions, and events not covered by the mainstream press, including
- Local politics and business news
- Church, school, arts and social events
- Bios of leaders and community members
- Birth and marriage announcements and obituaries
- WWII news on servicemen, editorials, ads for war bonds and recruitment
- 1950s Cold War and Labor Movement
How Do I Find My Family in the Dziennik?
The Dziennik can be searched in several different ways. You can do a broad search in all the digitized newspapers at NYS Historic Newspapers by entering a surname or keyword in the search box on the home page (boxed in green), as shown in the image below.
You can narrow your search to a particular county within New York State by clicking that county on the interactive map. A list of available publications from that county will appear on the right side of the page. You can also add additional counties if you wish to search a broader region. Your surname or keyword is added to the search box at the top right of the page (see below).
You may choose to limit your search to the Polish-language newspapers contributed by PGSNYS by selecting “Collections” from the menu at the top and then drilling down to “Polish Genealogical Society of New York State,” which will get you to the page shown below.
For translation assistance with Polish-language newspaper articles, please check our Researchers in Poland & Translation Services page. We offer a translation guide specifically for death notices, and additional translation resources are listed on our Research Links page.
Remember that Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is imperfect, and OCR searches will sometimes fail to return all relevant results, especially when the digital images were created from old or damaged microfilm. For this reason, it’s always a good idea to check our databases, in which we have indexed death announcements from the Dziennik, the Polak w Ameryce, the Przegląd Tygodniowy, and the Warta, rather than searching solely by OCR at NYS Historic Newspapers. If you find an item of interest in the database, you can look up that newspaper name and date and then browse to find the desired article. We will continue our ongoing indexing of marriage, death, and other announcements within these newly-available Dziennik issues.
A Final Round of Applause for our Donors
This digitization project was an ambitious one for an organization of our size. At a final cost of over $36,000 (a little less than anticipated), we could not have done this without help. Special thanks goes to the Permanent Chair of Polish Culture at Canisius University, the Louis Skalny Foundation in Rochester, NY, Monica Polowy Winter, and the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Arts & Culture Initiative, for generous grants and donations totaling $20,000. Thanks, too, to all our members and friends for each and every dollar of the remaining $16,214 that put us over the finish line. PGSNYS is deeply grateful for your support in partnering with us to preserve and make accessible this important record of Polish American life during the 1940s and 1950s for generations of students, historians, genealogists, journalists and community members! Bardzo, bardzo dziękuję! (Many, many thanks!)