Records under 100 years old can be found in the local parish and/or the local goverment agency, which covers the gmina. If you know the village where they were born, married or died, used http://mapa.szukacz.pl to learn the name of the gmina. When you know that, you can use Google to find the office by searching for ______ (village or town name) and the word urzad. Be careful. If it is Jelenia Gora, you will find one for the miasto (city) and one for the powiat (county). As far as parishes go, most are in the town where the gmina urzad are located. Sometimes you will find places that have different towns for the parish and gmina urzad. The more information you have at hand, the quicker your search will go. Knowing exact places of birth or exact parish is important. I have not documents on my grandfather saying the name of his birth village. He only listed Bakalarzewo (parish) or Suwalki (county and/or province). You can learn the name of the local parish by using this site: http://dir.icm.edu.pl/pl/Slownik_geograficzny. This is from a set of books giving geographical information, history and statistics on places in the old Kingdom of Poland. It took them from 1880 through 1914 to gather and print all the information on these places in Poland. Since some parishes were destroyed during WW I and WW II and some had boundary, check this site to see if there is still a church there. This site gives you the year they were established: http://parafie.genealodzy.pl/. Some tell you which records have been forward to the archdioceses for storage. If you know where the families lived or may be now living, you can write to the parishes or the gmina headquarters for help in locating them. The LDS has filmed a sizable amount of old records from Poland. Once you learn the gmina and parish, check their online catalog at http://www.familysearch.org/eng/Library/FHLC/frameset_fhlc.asp. This is their site to locate an LDS Family History Center, where you can rent the film and copy all the records you want: http://www.familysearch.org/eng/library/FHC/frameset_fhc.asp. If you are trying to find family and all else fails in locating them you can write to this address: Centralne Biuro Adresowe ul. Kazimierzowska 60 02-543 Warsaw Poland You will need to give them the name of the person, when born, where they lived, and parents names if possible. This is for tracing living people. This is the website for the Polish Red Cross. They can help with locating living and deceased persons: http://www.pck.pl/. This is one for tracing people who ended up in concentration and labor camps: http://www.its-arolsen.org/en/contact_information/index.html. There may be others you have different sources. Happy hunting. Tina Ellis On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 3:52 AM, Watson's <[email protected]> wrote: > I would like to thank everyone who answered my message only a week ago. > I have found my Grandmother, Aunt and Uncle who were all deported. My Aunt > and Uncle seem to have been repatriated, which we didn't know, we thought > they had perished in the camps. So maybe they married and had children, in > which case cousins are out there! So sad my Father didn't know they had > survived the war. > I am now looking for birth, death and marriage certificates. Are these kept > in a central location or in each parish or town? Bearing in mind we still > don't know where they were repatriated too. Although I think my Uncle may > now be in western Poland possibly near Jelenia Gora? > Any further help would be fantastic! > Anita Watson > ********************************* > Need to contact the list manager? Write to Marie at > [email protected] > ---------------------------------- > Discussion of Polish food, culture, and customs are welcome on the list as > long as the discussion stays pertinent to the topic of this list: > researching our Polish roots. > ---------------------------------- > Browse the list's archives here: > http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index?list=poland-roots > Search the list's archives here: > http://archiver.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/search?aop=1 > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message >