Buffalo Research

A History of the City of Buffalo: Its Men and Institutions; Biographical Sketches of Leading Citizens (While not specifically focused on Polish-Americans, this is a general reference for the history of the city, published in 1908.)

Album pamiątkowe i przewodnik handlowy : osady polskiej w mieście Buffalo, z dołączeniem okolicznych miejscowości ze stanu New York [Souvenir album and trade guide of the Polish settlements in the City of Buffalo, with the addition of neighboring towns in the State of New York] The Przewodnik Handlowy was published in Buffalo in 1906. The book contains genealogically-relevant paid ads, for which information was supplied by the advertiser. In most cases, information includes place and date of birth, name of spouse and year of marriage, names of children, and the organizations or parish to which the family belonged. The entire album is now available for browsing and searching online. Alternatively, we offer a database of names found in the Przewodnik Handlowy. A complete English translation of this text is available here.

Broadway-Fillmore Neighborhood: Polish-American History in Buffalo, NY (A collection of links to photos and articles documenting the architectural history in one of Western New York’s Polish neighborhoods.)

Buffalo & Erie County Public Library’s Digital Collections (Unique collections for genealogy which include Erie County Poor House Ledgers; Marriage and Death Announcements, 1811–1833; as well as atlases and city directories.)

Buffalo & Erie County Public Library Genealogy Databases (Erie County residents with a valid Buffalo & Erie County Public Library card number have free access to HeritageQuest Online, which contains U.S. federal census records from 1790-1940, special federal census schedules, over 20,000 local and family history books, over 20,000 U.S. city directories, a genealogical and local history serials index, Revolutionary War Pension Files, Freedman’s Bank Records, and select content from the U.S. Serial Set.)

Buffalo’s Polish Pioneers (Article reprinted from Polish American Studies, Vol. XXI. No. 2, July-December 1964.)

BuffaloResearch.com (A portal for researching architecture, business, genealogy, literature, and obscure websites in Buffalo, NY. Includes a very helpful collection of links to Buffalo City Directories online from 1828–1942, as well as a few directories that included the broader Western New York area. They also offer this fabulous table of repositories for vital & archival records!

History of Buffalo and Erie County in the World War, 1914–1919, Daniel J. Sweeney, compiler (Historical account of World War I from a local perspective, including an extensive roster of service men and women from Erie County, those killed in action, medical personnel, government officials, etc. A list of Buffalonians in the Polish Army appears on p. 694/image no. 706.)

Polonia Trail of Western New York (A digital showcase of significant historic sites throughout Western New York that have significance to the Polish American community. This site enables individuals to virtually explore architecture, clubs, meetinghouses. churches, cemeteries, and other places that figured prominently within Western New York’s Polish American Community and learn about the people who shaped it.)

University at Buffalo, University Libraries Genealogy & Ancestry Research (A list of genealogy resources available from UB libraries and local research links.)

Cemeteries

Find-A-Grave (The world’s largest gravesite collection, featuring over 238 million memorials, probably needs no introduction!)

Forest Lawn Cemetery database (Although not a Polish cemetery, the Forest Lawn Cemetery database is nonetheless a valuable research tool for those researching Western New York ancestors as it includes burials from Forest Lawn, St. Matthew’s in West Seneca, Lakeside in Hamburg, Lancaster Rural Cemetery and two cemeteries in the village of Williamsville, NY—Williamsville Cemetery and Gethsemane Cemetery. Some database entries offer links to images of cemetery records which can be downloaded.)

Grave Finder at St. Stan’s (Volunteer Barbara Ruppert created this photographic index to burials in St. Stanislaus Cemetery, a historic cemetery which has served the Buffalo, New York, Polish community since 1889.)

Grobonet.pl (Database of over 2,500 indexed cemeteries throughout Poland.)

Mogiły.pl (Database of nearly 1 million indexed grave markers, and 1.7 million individual burials, throughout Poland. Scroll down to first select a cemetery from the map or search box, then search names of the deceased within that cemetery. Be sure to use proper Polish diacritics when spelling place names and personal names! If you don’t have a Polish keyboard, use this site, then copy and paste.)

Newspapers

Chronicling America (Hosted by the Library of Congress, this site offers includes more than 21 million digitized newspaper pages.)

Newspapers.com Free Access for New York State Residents (Any resident of New York State can apply for a virtual library card from the New York Public Library and get at-home access to Newspapers.com, and a variety of other resources. You can apply for a library card online here.)

NYS Historic Newspapers (Includes more than 14 million digital images to New York papers, including our very own PGSNYS contributions: the Dziennik dla Wszystkich, the Polak w Amerykańskich, Polak w Ameryce, Przegląd Tygodniowy, and Warta: the Polish Weekly. Please note that there are significant gaps in the range of available issues of the Dziennik which we digitized from microfilm, including many of the historically important World War II years. Our current Dziennik digitization project seeks to rectify that.)

Old Fulton New York Postcards (Also known as Fulton History, this site offers over 57 million digital images from newspapers across the U.S. and Canada, with an emphasis on papers from New York State.)

Immigration & U.S. Research

Ellis Island (Free, searchable database now includes all immigration through the Port of New York from 1820–1957)

Databases of the Polish Genealogical Society of America (A potpourri of databases relevant to Polish immigration throughout the U.S. Most databases are free, although a few are available only to PGSA members.)

Databases of the Polish Genealogical Society of Connecticut and the Northeast (PGSCTNE offers seven databases of interest to those researching Polish immigrants to the U.S.)

National Archives (U.S.) (A wealth of information for genealogists, including informative articles on a variety of topics. You can search the Catalog, using these tips.)

New York City Databases (The Italian Genealogical Group offers a number of indexed databases for New York City research, including births, marriages, and deaths across all ethnic groups.)

New York GenWeb (An older, but still useful, collection of links to help you navigate genealogy research in New York State. Select a county to begin, and explore topics and resources—often including transcribed and indexed records—for that location.)

New York Heritage Digital Collections (Digital images of postcards, newspapers, city directories, historical photos, documents, correspondence, yearbooks, oral histories, and much more. Try using search terms such as “Polish” and “Poland” to locate items that may be of interest.)

Polish Family Information (James J. Czuchra’s databases offer indexed birth, marriage and death records from selected Polish parishes in New York State, including parishes in Albion, Auburn, Depew, Dunkirk, Elmira, Rochester, and Salamanca, as well as other resources.)

Researching Your Family from Ship’s Passenger Lists (A collection of search tips, family genealogy resources, and additional research links.)

Rochester (NY) Churches Indexing Project (Over 220,000 indexed birth/baptism, marriage and death records from Roman Catholic parishes in the Diocese of Rochester, New York and other churches in the Rochester area.)

One-Step Webpages by Steve Morse (This site contains tools for finding immigration records, census records, vital records, and for dealing with calendars, maps, foreign alphabets, and numerous other applications. Some of these tools fetch data from other websites but do so in more versatile ways than the search tools provided on those websites.)

Translation

Dziennik Translation Guide (Helpful template for translating Polish-language death notices.)

Genealogical Translations group on Facebook

In Their Words: A Genealogist’s Translation Guide to Polish, German, Latin, and Russian Documents, by William F. Hoffman and Jonathan D. Shea (A four-volume series of highly-recommended translation guides available in print or PDF form)

PolishOrigins Translation Forums for Polish, Russian, German, and Latin records

Zofia Federowicz’s Parish Records in Russian site (Provides translation templates for translating Russian-language birth, marriage, and death records)

Gazetteers & Maps for Polish Genealogy

Gazetteers (Annotated list of gazetteers for Polish genealogy, organized by coverage area, style, publication date, and language, including links to gazetteers available online.)

Maps (Annotated list of maps for Polish genealogy, organized by publication date and coverage area.)

Databases for Research in Poland

Archion (A great source of for digital images of records from Lutheran churches in Poland that were transferred to the Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin. The available parishes were located in the former provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, Brandenburg East, Pomerania, Poznan and Silesia.)

BaSIA (Indexed vital records from Wielkopolska)

FamilySearch (This genealogy powerhouse provides indexed historical records from places around the world, including Poland, but the catalog is often overlooked as a source of unindexed, browsable images from Polish parishes, registry offices, and other repositories.)

FBPGG Index (Miscellaneous indexed records from Poland and other locations)

Garwolińska Grupa Indeksacyjna (Indexed vital records from Garwolin County)

Genealogiawarchiwach (Repository for digital images of vital records held by the state archives in Toruń, Bydgoszcz, Inowrócław, and Włocławek)

Geneteka (Indexed vital records for locations throughout Poland today as well as other areas with a Polish presence historically. Marriage records from St. Stanislaus Church in Buffalo, 1874–1913 are included here.)

Indeksacja recesów uwłaszczeniowych [Indexation of Enfranchisement Records] (This site offers indexed documents related to the enfranchisement of peasants/abolition of serfdom from the former Grand Duchy of Posen—present day Wielkopolska and part of Kujavia—from 1823–1910. Not many records offered currently, but it should be an interesting source of information as new collections are added.)

Jamiński Zespół Indeksacyjny [Jaminy Indexing Team] (Indexed vital records from these parishes in northeastern Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus)

Lubelskie Korzenie [Lublin Roots] (Indexed vital records from the Lublin region)

Matricula (Offers digital images of parish records from a few locations in Poland that were previously part of Germany.)

Metryki GenBaza (Digital archive of vital records held by numerous state archives, as well as the diocesan archive in Kielce)

Metryki Wołyń (Indexed vital records from the Volhynia area)

Pomeranian Greif Index (Includes nearly 2 million indexed birth, marriage and death records from both West Pomerania and East Pomerania—territory which includes northwestern Poland and northeastern Germany. You can use your browser to translate the page into English.)

PomGenBase (Indexed vital records from the Pomerania region)

Portal Rodziny Szpejankowskich i Szpejenkowskich [Szpejankowski and Szpejenkowski Family Portal] (Indexed vital records from the Dobrzyń nad Wisłą region of Poland)

Poznan Marriage Index Project (Indexed marriage records from the Poznań region of Poland between 1800–1899)

Projekt Eliza-Bzura (Indexed vital records from the Bzura River area, including locations in Płock and Sochaczew Counties in Mazowieckie Voivodeship, and Kutno, Łęczyca, Łowicz, and Skierniewice Counties in Łódź Voivodeship)

Projekt Kurpie (Indexed vital records from the Kurpie region of Poland)

Projekt Podlasie  (Indexed vital records, court records, conscription records, etc. from the Podlasie region of Poland)

Projekt Warmia (Indexed vital records from the Warmia region)

Skanoteka (Sister site to Geneteka; repository for digital images of vital and other records held by various state archives and civil registry offices. Be sure to check out their growing collections of “non-vital” records including court and town records, notary records, population registers, and more, to see if they have something relevant to your area of research.)

Słupca Genealogy (Indexed vital records from Słupca, Kalisz, and Ostrów Wielkopolski Counties in Wielkopolska)

Świętokrzyskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne “Świętogen” (Indexed vital records from Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship)

Szukajwarchiwach (Main search portal for holdings of the Polish state archives, including digital images)

Towarzystwo Genealogiczne Ziemi Częstochowskiej (Indexed vital records from the Częstochowa area)

Polish Geographic Surname Distributions

Nazwiska Polskie (Enter a Polish surname, and this website displays a map with the approximate number of people with that surname living in Poland. Be sure to use proper Polish diacritics! The search engine considers masculine and feminine versions of a surname to be equivalent and reports combined totals. Zoom into the map for more precise distributions.)

Nazwiska w Polsce (This surname dictionary includes 30,000 of the most popular Polish surnames and provides the number of bearers in Poland, the popularity rank of that surname, geographic distribution, etymology, and more. The database was created from PESEL data from 2014.

Słownik Nazwisk at Herby.com.pl (This surname database uses PESEL data from the early 1990s, and the geographic surname distributions are depicted according to the administrative divisions of Poland as they existed between 1975 and 1999, when there were 49 provinces instead of the 16 provinces which exist today. These older data may include surnames which are no longer extant. A tutorial for using this database is here.)

Miscellany

Arolsen Archives (This online archive hosts over 30 million documents and a database related to concentration camp victims, displaced and deported persons, forced laborers, and others persecuted by the Nazis. Formerly managed by the Red Cross as the International Tracing Service, the Arolsen Archives will also perform research to help you discover the fate of relatives who may have been victims of Nazi persecution.

How to Interview Elderly Relatives for Genealogy Research

Member Submitted Links lists useful websites that have been submitted with commentary.

National Genealogical Society’s Free Resources (Includes instructions for building a family tree, links to free genealogy websites, research hints and tips, a family relationship chart—for all those who wonder what “once removed” means—and more)

Personnel of the Polish Air Force in Great Britain 1940–1947 (Names and brief biographical data for Polish airmen who served in Great Britain during World War II)

Polona (Polish digital library sponsored by the National Library of Poland and cooperating institutions. Try searching “Objects,” and use Polish search terms to find online maps, gazetteers, historical photos, documents, and more,)

Tracing Polish Family Ancestry (Assorted links; includes some duplication with links provided above)

Using AI for Genealogical Research (Some suggested uses for incorporating AI into your genealogical research and writing, with numerous links to articles with additional information.)

All links tested 9 February 2025. Please report broken links to information@pgsnys.org.