Polak w Ameryce [The Pole in America], was a Polish-language newspaper published in Buffalo, New York, from 1887–1920 by Fr. Jan Pitass, pastor of St. Stanislaus Church. Its production dates span an earlier time period than that covered by the Dziennik dla Wszystkich [Everybody’s Daily]. Newspaper research is important to genealogists because newspaper articles offer insight into the daily lives of our ancestors. Details about their civic contributions, social and professional lives, and community roles, can help add “flesh” to the “bare bones” of names and dates in our family trees.

Former PGSNYS President David Newman initiated a project to copy and index death notices from this newspaper. Working in the Fronczak Room in the E.H. Butler Library at SUNY Buffalo State, he began development of the database, “Polak w Ameryce Death Notices (1886–1920),” which can be searched here. For translation assistance with death notices discovered in the database, please see our Translation Guide.

Continuing David’s efforts to make the Polak w Ameryce accessible to all, we have digitized available issues of this newspaper from microfilm, and contributed them to NYS Historic Newspapers. As with all the papers at this site, issues of the Polak w Ameryce are surname- and keyword-searchable with optical character recognition (OCR). Additional translation resources are provided on our Research Links page. Our entire collection of online newspapers can be viewed here.

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