Stanczyk has been writing for a while about Polish National Archives announcing via their National Digital Archive (NAC) that Poland would be putting 2.4 Million digital images of church / synagogue metric images from their regional archives online. So today’s blog post is a guide (poradnik) about how to use szukajwarchiwach.pl to view these images.
It is easiest if you know the regional archive you are interested in, but you do not need to know it really. I will demonstrate with the RZESZOW regional archive. This archive was in Austrian-Poland partition, so its records should be for those locales to Rzeszow. Recall from my post, Polish State Archives – Numbers (13 March 2013) where I listed the archive numbers, that Rzeszow = 59.
Step By Step
Step OneGo to the archive of interest – http://www.szukajwarchiwach.pl/59#tabInformacje
You should see the web site with the information for the Rzeszow regional Archive.
Notice the two links: Poprzednie archiwum and Następne archiwum . With these two links you go through the list of regional archives. The list of archives only includes those archives for which they are presently loading images. If you hover over my two links above you will see ‘Previous Archive’ and ‘Next Archive’.
Step Two
Click on ‘Resource’ [see 2 in red circle] – which brings you to the list of collections at Rzeszow. http://www.szukajwarchiwach.pl/59#tabZasoby
You should see …
Step Three
Click on Collection Number ‘59/20/0‘ for the civil records from the Roman Catholic parish of Błażowej – http://www.szukajwarchiwach.pl/59/20/0#tabZespol
You should see …
Step Four
Click on ‘Units 20/20‘ in red circle – http://www.szukajwarchiwach.pl/59/20/0#tabJednostki
You should see …
Step Five
Click on ‘Reference Code 59/20/0/-/1‘ in red circle – http://www.szukajwarchiwach.pl/59/20/0/-/1#tabJednostka
You should see …
Step Six
Click on ‘Digital Copies 107‘ to see a table of 107 scanned images – http://www.szukajwarchiwach.pl/59/20/0/-/1#tabSkany
You should now see the scanned images …
There are 107 images [currently] and the data looks like it is in the Latin Box format. Since there is no index, you will have visit each image in turn and look at each row of boxes to see if that birth/baptism is for one of your ancestors.
So that is a visual guide for how you navigate the szukajwarchiwach.pl website to get to the scanned images. Obviously, you will need to focus on the villages/parishes for your ancestor. That may be another Archive (besides Rzeszow) or if it is in the Rzeszow archive then you need to pay closer attention to the parishes in the Rzeszow collections and finally, you will need to select Birth/Marriage/Death (Urodziny/Małżeństwo/Zgony) for the year of interest to you.
You will still need to be able to deal with Latin or Polish or Russian or German language in the records to understand what you see in the scanned images. You will also need to be able to read the handwriting. But you can do this!
Good Luck!
Stanczyk - Internet Muse™ 