Partitions of Poland

This is a partner event. Presenter: Greg Nelson. Poland’s genealogical records are shaped by one defining fact: from 1795 to 1918, the country didn’t exist — it was carved up among the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires, each running its own language, timeline, and record-keeping system. This session uses that partition framework as the key to Polish research, teaching participants to identify which empire governed an ancestor’s village and what that determines: the record’s language (Polish/Russian Cyrillic, German Kurrent, or Latin), its format, and which archive holds it today. From there, the session covers FamilySearch’s history of microfilming across all three partitions, hands-on navigation of the Polish National Archives portal (Szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl), and the distinct record types each partition produced — Russian Akta Stanu Cywilnego, Prussian Standesamt registers, Austrian Josephine registers — plus land, court, military, and Jewish community records beyond the standard vital registers. Participants will also learn how Poland’s 100-year privacy law and GDPR shape access to 20th-century records, and how to pivot to diaspora sources when they hit that wall. The session closes with a curated, partition-organized list of supplementary databases, tools, and societies — including Geneteka, the Poznan Project, GenBaza, JRI-Poland, and more. Greg Nelson is a Content Strategy specialist for Europe at FamilySearch. He holds a BA in Russian, MA in Slavic Linguistics and Literature, and a BS in Computer Science. He resides in Stansbury Park, Utah. Registration.

Pacific time zone | online | English