Who Do You Think You Are Magazine Forum

[owenlee4me]

HI IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE WHO CAN ADVISE ME WHAT TO DO, TO GET A COPY OF A BIRTH CERTIFICATE FROM POLAND, THE TOWN OF KATOWICE TO BE PRECISE

WOULD LOVE TO GET OFF THE STARTING BLOCKS AT LEAST

THANKS TO ANYONE WHO HAS TOOK THE TROUBLE TO READ THIS

DEBS

[callbrian]

Hi
Have you tried the following link?

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~polwgw/Research.html

Brian

[MaggyMay]

I've not had experience with Polish research, however have been researching my Hungarian roots for over 15 years. I actually find the church records more helpful and cheaper than certificates. Hopefully you have an LDS Family History center close to you and you can order and view microfilms of your village church records. If you need help with that, let me know and I can help.

In the meantime Family Search has some wonderful videos to help you get started.
https://www.familysearch.org/learningce ... 2Poland%22

Good luck and have fun with your research it's very exciting.

[mandyjanes]

My father was from Poland so I know the problems this can bring up.

If the event was pre-1900 you may be able to find what you are looking for at:

http://www.jewishgen.org/jri-pl/jriplweb.htm

I found my paternal grandfather on this site and from this I've got my dad's family back to Mendel Popinski who was born in 1780.

My problem is in 20th century records as from my dad's family he was the only Holocaust survivor and as he never spoke about it I'm not even sure how many siblings he had or what their names were. This makes it very difficult to find out what happened to them.

Hope this helps.

Mandy

[Loish711]

I can also recommend Rootsweb/ Rootschat websites. I did some research for a friend whose father was from a Polish family but he was born in France. Someone on there not only give me the correct address to write to but also a template for the letter I should send in French. All I had to pay was postage so that was another bargain and it arrived soon afterwards. With the help of the internet translation programmes we were able to understand it's contents.

[owenlee4me]

I just want to say thankyou for all the people who have been helpful, at the moment, still no joy, but hopeful something will turn up, lots of sites refer to Polish Jews but this does not seem to be my situation.

Debs

[owenlee4me]

Hi
Have you tried the following link?

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~polwgw/Research.html

Brian

Brian, apologies for not getting back to thankyou, but that was a great link, my research hit a big stop, due to other commitments, and am now back on the trail.

i cannot seem to find anything for the village of Katowice, but who knows??

thanks Deb

[bernie_fozzie]

I have had some experience of obtaining Polish birth/marriage/death certificates, so I hope this helps.

Firstly the bad (more difficult) news. Polish authorities refuse to issue copies of BMD certificates less than 100 years old to anybody outside the polish border. I got around this (although at a cost) by having a work college (polish of course) post them to his home address. However you will need a Power of attorney from a solicitor to give him/her access to obtain them as they will not be direct family (about £40 for me). They were very strict but helpful. These certificates were from Chorzow old Konigshutte of Silesia

Any certificates which are 100 years or over are available to anyone performing research and moved from the local town offices to a central archive. In my example I have relatives who lived in Guttentag/Dobrodzien (three generations) and I managed to obtain most of their certificates (I was lucky, many were lost in the wars) from the state archives in the region Częstochowa where the books were moved to.
In most cases if you contact the local town hall where your relatives lived then I imagine they will re-direct you to the relevant archive, they did with me. I used google translate to write in simple English ang then translated into polish... it appeared to work.

The certificates were written in German as Silesia was under the German empire at the time but they held a lot of information and had references to other events such as deaths etc. The record keeping was very good.

The civil archives stop around 1855 for my Town and you then need to go to the Parish archives. I found the LDS held my town in question so I ordered the micro film and I am still ongoing.

Hope this helps