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Comments or questions
The lists of existing records are organized according to the 1887
district
division of the Poznan Province and the Eastern Greater Poland.
Note: If you don't know to which district your town or village
belonged, please refer to the
alphabetical list
of localities (only seats of Catholic parishes, Protestant and Jewish
communities or civil
registries are listed! For smaller villages you first have to determine
what parish etc. would be
keeping their records).
As you can see, the format of the records lists is somewhat 'raw'. This is due to the method the files are generated. They are produced by an automated routine which processes the simple text formatted lists of records and LDS microfilms for each locality in the Province. Therefore, the lists can be automatically updated once there is any correction introduced, but it can be admitted that the layout would be more convenient if I could prepare the files myself!
The lists are clear and easy to use. Here are the guidelines:
The list is arranged alphabetically and indicates the records available for each district.
Below the first line, alternative Polish (normal font) and German (italics) names may be listed, as well as the information about cities being seats of district authorities in years 1887-1919. As a rule, the town names in the first line are circa 1890, the alternative names were in use after 1890. Read here about the renamings.
Key to code and records:
RC Roman Catholic records
LU United Evangelical church - the "mainstream" Protestant
(Lutheran) church officially
approved by the Prussian monarchy
JE Jewish vital records
CI Civil records (introduced in 1874) where all confessions had to
register their
births, marriages and deaths
OL "Old Lutheran" - other Protestant denominations which did not
accept the unification
MRC Roman Catholic records for the military
MLU Protestant records for the military
PRC Roman Catholic records for the prisoners
PLU Protestant records for the prisoners
GC Greek-Catholic (only one parish)
OR Eastern Orthodox (only three parishes)
Christian communities, are designated as 'P' or 'C' which denotes their status as an independent parish/community during the 19th century. Filials (where separate records were sometimes produced) are marked with 'F'. Civil registries may be cited for several neighboring locations and are identified in brackets. Additional information on e.g. date of establishment of a parish may be listed.
Below the code of the records type, additional info is provided:
For Catholic parishes in the Prussian province of Poznan:
For Lutheran communities in the Prussian province of Poznan:
For Civil registries in the Prussian province of Poznan, as well as for all parishes and communities of the former Russian territory:
The next section lists the present location of records known to the author. For some localities or particular parishes you may find nothing but their general description - this indicates that there are probably no existing records.
Each particular place where the records are held is listed in bold
face.
(Postal addresses for the Polish
archives)
Birth or baptism (B), marriage (M) and death (D) records are provided, according to what the particular archive or parish possesses. The initial 'i' stands for alphabetical indexes (rather than actual records). Those are, as a rule, listed only if they fill the gaps in the actual records.
'Open' dates (like 1880-) mean that either (in case of RC parishes) all records starting from the point provided up to present are available there, or (for civil registry records or civil duplicates) that the 100-year old records are given each year to the archive from the site provided in the previous section, and you can expect them to end at about 1898-1900 in the archive (this is according to the Polish law).
Some civil records are also split to 'City' and 'Land' records. In the former, events from the locality itself were registered, while in the 'Land' records they registered people living in the surrounding area.
The LDS microfilms section starts just afterwards and it lists the
particular portions of records
which are located on microfilms (microfilms numbers written in the bold
style; 'items' numbers, i.e. microfilm section
numbers also provided).