Polish Genealogy: Finding the Polish Records

By Stephen Szabados

When did your Polish ancestors immigrate, from where did they leave, why did they leave, and how did they get here? These are questions we all hope to find the answers. This book is designed to give the researcher the tools needed to research their Polish ancestors and find possible answers to the origins of their Polish heritage. The author, Stephen Szabados, uses his own genealogical experience to outline a simple process that will identify where your ancestors were born and where to find their Polish records. 

 

The book lists many sources of information that will add to your family history; identify where your ancestors were born and where to find their Polish records.  Traditional sources are covered but it also discusses many new and exciting sources for Polish records that have been implemented by genealogy societies in Poland. The book includes many sample documents and tips that should prove useful for both the beginner and the veteran genealogist. The information in this book covers the most up-to-date collection of sources for Polish genealogy and should prove to be invaluable when doing Polish research.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Szabados
• Release date: Jul 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201517694

Stephen Szabados

Steve Szabados grew up in Central Illinois and is a retired project manager living in the Chicago Suburbs. He received a Bachelor of Science Degree from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and a Masters in Business Administration from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. Steve Szabados is an author and lecturer on genealogy. He has been researching his ancestors since 2000 and has traced ancestors back to the 1600s in New England, Virgina, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and the 1730’s in Poland, Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Slovenia. He has given numerous presentations to genealogical groups and libraries in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. His mission is to share his passion for Family History with as many people as he can. He is a former board member of Polish Genealogical Society of America, and he is a genealogy volunteer at the Arlington Heights Memorial Library. Steve also is the genealogy columnist for the Polish American Journal.

Book preview

Polish Genealogy:

Finding the Polish Records

By Stephen Szabados

Dedication

To my grandmother

Anna Chmielewski Zuchowski

We miss you

Copyright ©2022 Stephen M Szabados

Last update 07/21/2022

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 9798834321507

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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We owe many volunteers in Poland and the United States tremendous thanks. They have been instrumental in indexing the vast collections of Polish records we can now find online. In addition, JewishGen, Familysearch.org, and the Polish genealogy societies have enlisted armies of volunteers devoted thousands of hours to make our research more accessible. Finally, we should also thank the directors at the Polish State Archives for allowing access to the many records now available in online databases.

My wonderful wife also deserves many thanks for her patience, consideration, and support while I compiled this book.

Thanks to Terry Hlavac for providing me with his great-grandparents’ personal papers I used in some of the exhibits.

The following are the resources I used for the other exhibits in the book:

Ancestry.com

Familysearch.org

Arlington Heights Memorial Library (Arlington Heights, Illinois)

South Suburban Genealogical Society (Crestwood, Illinois)

Illinois State Genealogical Society

U.S. National Archive

Illinois State Archives

I also need to thank my brother-in-law David Mayfield who encouraged and prodded me to put my research efforts into writing. I miss his quiet voice telling me why I should.

CHAPTER ONE: START WITH HISTORY

Taking your first step in finding your immigrant ancestors' Polish records can be challenging. When I began my research, I did not have access to many tools available today. However, I still see a difficult path for anyone starting now. Today, I find it essential to review the history of Polish immigration to America: the when, why, where, and how. The answers to these questions differed depending upon when they left. Understanding this aspect of Polish history is critical to my success because knowing the immigration story helped me find the seemingly hidden records of my ancestors.

Polish Immigration to America

The first Polish immigrants arrived in America in October 1608 on the ship Mary and Margaret. They were Michal Lowicki, a merchant, Zbigniew Stefanski, a glassblower, Jan Mala, a soap maker, Stanislaw Sadowski, a water-mill builder, and Jan Bogdan, a shipwright. The London Company hired them to create glass, pitch, and potash, which were the first exports of the Jamestown colony.

Zbigniew Stefanski wrote a book about their experience titled Pamietnik Handlowca (A Merchant's Memoir) and published it in Amsterdam in 1624. However, copies were lost until one appeared in war-torn France after WW II, and it offered some fascinating details about the Polish craftsmen in the Jamestown settlement.

The owner offered to sell the book in 1947 to Mieczyslaw Haiman, director of the Polish Museum in Chicago, but he could not raise the asking price of $5000. Unfortunately, the copy of the book has since disappeared. However,  Haiman had dictated fragments of the information he saw in the book, and Arthur Waldo published this information. Some prominent scholars have attempted to locate the elusive Merchant's Memoir but had no success. This fact and the death of Mieczyslaw Haiman in 1949 make it difficult to verify Waldo’s information.

The American Council for Polish Culture dedicated the pictured historical marker reflecting these verifiable facts on July 20th, 2012. There also is a plaque listing the names of the five early Polish craftsmen, and it is near a flagpole in the parking lot of the Jamestown Settlement Visitor Center parking lot.

The following facts are verifiable from other sources:

The first Poles in America arrived in 1608 at the Jamestown Colony on the English ship Mary and Margaret under the command of Captain Christopher Newport.

The Virginia Company of London recruited these men to establish early manufacturing at the colony: wood shingles, turpentine, tar and pitch for ship repair, potash (soap), and glass.

Capt. John Smith commented favorably on the Poles' work ethic in his journals.

Later two Poles were credited with aiding Capt. Smith as he fought off an attack by a chief of the Paspahegh tribe.

More Poles arrived on subsequent ships. The fact they contributed to the colony's survival through their labor is indisputable

However, to obtain their rights (in 1619) as fully enfranchised community members, the Polish workers staged a work stoppage, possibly the first labor strike in America. As a result, the Virginia Company of London recognized their value to the colony. I found a statement in their records stating these men were enfranchised and made as free as any other inhabitant.[1][2]

Small numbers of Polish workers, intellectuals, and sons of Polish noblemen probably continue to immigrate to Colonial America. The promise of opportunities in America attracted workers and merchants from many countries. Also, the success of the early Polish craftsmen may have encouraged the recruitment of more Polish workers. However, I could not find any estimates or statistics to identify the size of this group. Also, note Polish immigrants came only from the Poles free to leave Poland. The peasants of Poland did not immigrate because they were tied to the land and could not leave.

After the Polish nobility lost the last battle of the Polish Partitions in 1795, many fled Poland to other European countries. However, I did not find any evidence many fled to America.

The first wave of immigration by the Polish peasant began in the late 1860s when the German Empire attempted to Germanize all of their non-German lands. This mandate focused on the Poznan Provence, which Poland ceded to Prussia after the 1772 partitioning. In 1871, the German Kaiser enacted new laws (Kulturkampf) that were very oppressive to the Polish people. The German-ruled Poles saw their Church supported schools closed and replaced by German-speaking schools. In 1886, the Prussian Colonization Policy forced Poles to sell their lands to Germans recruited to re-settle in these new German lands. These policies forced the Polish farmers to become day laborers. However, most emigrate because they could not support their families from the meager wages of a day laborer. Passenger lists from this time period (1860 to 1890) indicate whole families left Polish-Germany (the German Partition of Poland) to settle in the cities and farms of America.

The next wave of Polish peasants to leave Poland began in the 1880s when young single Polish men left to find work in America. These men were the younger sons of Polish farmers in the Russian and Austrian-controlled lands. They had no hope of owning land because inheritance laws gave the oldest son the lands. There were few jobs outside the family farm because Russia and Austria did not encourage industrialization in these areas. Most of our Polish ancestors were peasants and farmers when they came in these two waves of immigrants. Some settled on farms in the Midwest, and many more worked in the steel mills, meat packing, and the railroads. They worked at jobs nobody else would. Their efforts contributed to the industrial and economic growth of the United States.

To legally leave their villages, the emigrant had to get the permission of the government and local civil officials. They paid all their debts, and young men had to have completed their military service. If they met the requirements, officials granted the immigrant an exit visa. However, some still left even though they could not meet the requirements.  

The journey to America started with a walk or a ride in a cart to a train station. There they boarded a train for the trip across Poland and Germany to the ports of Hamburg or Bremen. Some walked most of the distance because they could not afford the cost of the train ticket.

For the emigrants from the Austrian and Russian partitions, they faced their first obstacle at the German border. The German police and a medical officer met them at the border. German law required a medical inspection of people crossing from Russian and Austrian territory. German police refused admittance to immigrants who were not healthy, were criminals or did not have the proper documentation. Many people, who feared border inspectors would turn them back, paid guides to help them sneak across the border and avoid these inspections. As a result, the young men who had not completed their military service avoided train travel and had to sneak across the border.

The Polish immigrants somehow traveled 1000 miles and arrived at the German ports of Bremerhaven or Hamburg. There, they purchased their tickets and stayed in immigrant dormitories until their ship left for America. The dormitories were usually large rooms with beds where they slept, waiting to board their ships. The dormitories were in a quarantined area near the docks and were typically crowded. The travelers also received a medical exam in this area by steamship company doctors to ensure they were healthy and U.S. immigration inspectors would accept them. If U.S. officials rejected immigrants, the shipping companies had to bear the cost of returning the deported traveler.

Early ships were powered only by sail, and the voyage took two months or more. The development of the steamship reduced the sailing time first to about two weeks and then by the early 1900s to one week.

For the early voyages, shipping companies sold steerage passage in converted cargo holds. They strung hammocks to provide sleeping arrangements, and sanitation conditions were primitive, usually a bucket in a corner. The immigrants in steerage had to endure unsanitary conditions, tasteless food, cramped quarters, nauseating odors, and crying children. Death and sickness among the passengers were common until the U.S. established standards aboard ships disembarking in American ports. After 1900 steamship companies abolished steerage as a ticket class and replaced it with third-class. They also began adding upgraded living quarters with the addition of bunk rooms, dining rooms, and improved food for third-class passengers.

It was not easy to come to America. Most immigrants could afford only the cheapest fare, which meant traveling in steerage. In the early 1900s, steerage tickets to America cost between $30 to $35. This amount would be the equivalent of 2 to 3 months' wages for the average European worker if they could find work. People also had to eat daily, so they saved money for years to buy their tickets or borrowed the money from relatives.

Not all who left their villages made it to the new lands. Some Polish emigrants were turned back at the German border, while others squandered their passage money in Hamburg and Bremen. Moreover, even if they made it to the port, Shipping lines could turn the emigrant away because they failed their medical exams.

Shipping companies competed for passengers by advertising in towns and villages. They sought to increase revenues by hauling people to fill their empty cargo space on the westbound journey across the Atlantic. By 1900 most large villages in Poland had ticket agents in their local village who made it possible to book passage, purchase, and prepay for all tickets to a final destination in North America. The agents were normally innkeepers, but sometimes the local priest or school teacher sold the tickets.

In the early 1900s, shipping companies built facilities in Bremen and Hamburg ports to house and process their immigrant passengers. Once the immigrants reached the departure ports, they were housed and fed in the restricted harbor area in dormitories. They called this area in Hamburg Auswanderer Hallen or emigrant village. In addition, they were given medical exams, completed their paperwork, and waited for the departure date of their ship. Steamship companies also fumigated their baggage and clothes for germs and lice. Companies implemented these systems before departure because the United States had enacted restrictive rules increasing the possibility U.S. officials would refuse the immigrants entry, which required the shipping company to return the passenger to the original port. The Immigration Service also fined the shipping company $100 for each passenger deported.

Upon arrival at U.S. ports, immigrants faced the entry process as their next obstacle. First, before docking, immigration doctors removed any passengers who had become sick during the voyage. They placed the sick passengers into quarantine at a hospital run by the immigration administration. Next, inspectors reviewed the health and papers of the first and second-class passengers on board the ship. If they were healthy and their papers were in order, these passengers were free to disembark as soon as the ship docked. The third-class passengers disembarked, and officials directed them to the immigration station, where they had to endure long lines for medical and legal inspections. For those arriving in New York, the third-class passengers were ferried to Ellis Island on barges for their legal and medical inspections

The inspections for third-class passengers started with a quick examination by doctors who tried to evaluate passengers as they walked for possible physical and mental problems. The inspectors noted any suspicious symptoms with a chalk mark on the right shoulder of the immigrants. If marked, immigrants received a more thorough examination. If they were diagnosed with a permanent ailment, they were not allowed entry and were shipped back to the originating port at the expense of the shipping company. If they passed the medical exam,  the immigrants moved to the lines where clerks looked at the legal information on the passenger manifest to check the immigrant's identity, ensure the immigrants could support themselves, and ensure they were of sound character.  Criminals and undesirables were not allowed entry, and Immigration officials deported them to their port of departure at the shipping companies’ expense. Once they received approval to enter, the immigrant claimed their luggage, exchanged their money for American dollars, and then boarded trains for their destinations in America. Immigration officials detained small children and women until an adult male relative or sponsor arrived to claim them. This sponsor also guaranteed the woman’s or child’s support.

Many family histories believe the inspectors changed the family names when immigrants entered America. However, this is usually a myth. Names on passenger manifests were based on official documents presented by the immigrant to the shipping line at the time of boarding. Therefore, it would be illegal to change their names. Also, immigration stations were staffed with large numbers of translators to help ensure the examiner recorded the immigrant’s information accurately. Problems with the spelling of names and places were usually due to the illiteracy of the immigrant.  If families changed the spelling of their surnames, they did it after arrival, and they typically did it to make it easier for the people around