by Pro Format | Oct 1, 2026 | Blog

Warsaw Genealogy: Finding Ancestors in Warsaw Records

Before the Second World War Warsaw was a city of about 1.3 million people. Roughly 30 percent of them were Jewish, and the rest included Catholic, Lutheran and Orthodox communities. The city’s archives went through the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and the deliberate destruction that came after it, and they lost a large part of their holdings. Even so, parish registers, civil records, Jewish vital records and some population registers survived. They are now kept in the State Archive in Warsaw, in parish and diocesan archives and in volunteer-built online indexes. To trace a Warsaw ancestor, you need to know which records were made, which survived and where each one is kept today.

Warsaw’s record losses in WWII

The Warsaw Uprising lasted from 1 August to 2 October 1944. After the insurgents surrendered, German units emptied the city of its population and destroyed it district by district. Special demolition and burning squads targeted libraries and archives on purpose. By January 1945 most of left-bank Warsaw lay in ruins, and estimates of the destruction usually put it at around 85 percent of the city’s buildings.

The archives suffered badly. The Central Archives of Historical Records (AGAD) lost most of its pre-war holdings, and the municipal and state collections kept in the city lost a large share of their files. For genealogy, this means that research in Warsaw often runs into gaps:

some parishes have both copies of their registers for a given year,
some have only one copy,
for some years and districts nothing survived.

The destruction was uneven, so no single statement covers the whole city. In each case you have to check year by year, parish by parish, what is available.

Civil-religious records from 1808

Warsaw belonged to the Duchy of Warsaw from 1807. In 1808 the Napoleonic Code introduced civil registration there. From 1808 to 1825 births, marriages and deaths in Warsaw were recorded by secular civil registrars working in the city’s districts, called cyrkuły. From 1826 the Civil Code of the Kingdom of Poland made parish clergy act as civil registrars. Catholic, Lutheran and other priests kept the registers for their own congregations, and separate registrars kept them for the Jewish population.

This system has one feature that matters a great deal for research. Every register was written in two copies. One stayed in the parish or registry office, and the second, the duplicate, was sent to the civil court each year. When one copy burned in 1944, the other often survived in a different building. Until 1868 the entries were written in Polish. After that they were written in Russian, and from 1917 in Polish again. Each entry follows a fixed formula with the date, the place, the witnesses and the parents’ names and ages, so even the Russian entries can be read with a short word list.

State Archive in Warsaw

The State Archive in Warsaw (Archiwum Państwowe w Warszawie) has its main seat at Krzywe Koło 7 in the Old Town and branch offices around the Mazovian region. Its holdings include civil-religious registers of Warsaw parishes and Jewish registry districts, notarial files, court records, city administration files and population registers.

Record type	Where it is kept
Births over 100 years old	State Archive in Warsaw
Marriages and deaths over 80 years old	State Archive in Warsaw
More recent vital records	Civil Registry Office of Warsaw (USC)
Parish copies of older registers	Parish offices or the Warsaw Archdiocesan Archive

Many registers have been scanned and are available through the national archival portal szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl. Before you visit, check the archive’s catalogue for the fond number of the parish or registry district you need. You can also order scans or certified extracts from the reading room by email.

Jewish Warsaw records

In 1939 about 375,000 Jews lived in Warsaw, the largest Jewish community in Europe. Their births, marriages and deaths from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were recorded in separate Jewish civil registers, kept by district. Many of these registers survived and are held by the State Archive in Warsaw and the Civil Registry Office. Jewish Records Indexing–Poland has indexed large parts of them.

Records from the war years are of a different kind. From 1939 to 1941 the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee ran an office in occupied Warsaw. Its archive holds correspondence, aid case files and letters from relatives abroad who were looking for family members inside Poland. These files sometimes name people who appear in no other surviving source. After the ghetto was created in October 1940 and sealed in November 1940, Jewish life was documented mainly by its own institutions and by the clandestine Ringelblum Archive. That archive is now kept at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

Population registers and address books

From 1861 towns in the Kingdom of Poland kept population registers (księgi ludności stałej). Warsaw kept them house by house. Each page lists the residents of one building, with dates of birth, parents’ names, occupations and the dates they moved in or out. Many Warsaw volumes were lost in 1944, but the ones that survived can show a whole household and the order in which it moved around the city.

Printed sources help fill the gaps:

Warsaw address books and commercial directories list business owners, craftsmen and professionals, often with their street addresses.
Telephone directories from the interwar years list subscribers by name and address.
Professional yearbooks cover doctors, lawyers, teachers and clergy.

Many of these publications are digitised in Polish digital libraries, such as the National Library’s Polona service. A Warsaw street address found in a directory can then point you to the right parish or registry district and narrow down the search in the vital records.

Online indexes

Geneteka is run by the Polish Genealogical Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne). It is the largest free index of Polish vital records, and it has wide coverage for Warsaw parishes. Volunteers enter the names of children, parents and spouses, the year and the record number. Many entries link straight to the scan of the original register.

A practical search order for Warsaw looks like this:

Search Geneteka by surname, filtering for the Mazowieckie province and the Warsaw parishes.
Note the parish, year and record number of every match.
Open the scan on szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl or metryki.genealodzy.pl.
Check Jewish Records Indexing–Poland for Jewish families.
Look at the period after 1900 separately, since records less than 100 years old are kept by the Civil Registry Office.

An index entry is only a pointer. You should always read the original record, because it often gives ages, occupations, witnesses and house numbers that the index leaves out.

Researching Warsaw ancestors with GenealogyTour

The fate of Warsaw’s archives means that research there needs patience and a good knowledge of which copies survived where. At GenealogyTour we have spent more than 15 years working with the State Archive in Warsaw, parish archives, Jewish record collections and civil registry offices. We search the registers, translate Russian and Latin entries and put the results together into a documented family history. We also organise visits to Warsaw and the surrounding region, so our clients can walk the streets where their ancestors lived and see the places named in their family records.

Sources:

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