Hi Doug, VERY FEW regional archives in the Polish state archive system have their complete scanned inventory available for consultation online. The beta projects have barely begun themselves (since 2010): Poznan and its spinoff Konin, Warszawa, and Lublin come to mind. Very little has been indexed in a way that leads directly to a scanned record. The national society (*Polskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne*) has a small number at http://metryki.genealodzy.pl/. This is the exception! The best analogy I can think of at the moment is the following. Imagine that someone has gone through your office bookshelves scanning what you have. There is no index. How do you know whether there is anything that you want in any of them? Your bookshelf has tens of thousands of pages that have become images. To find the image you want, you must know enough about the subject matter to find the book that it came from. Now we are starting to have digital images of records from Poland. Only a trickle. You want grandpa's birth record. To search a name, you must know the exact place of birth, marriage or death. Furthermore, you must also know the appropriate parish or civil registry office for that village (this is why you must learn to use gazetteers in your research, see https://www.familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Poland_Gazetteers). The pradziad database will tell you which regional archive holds these records (http://baza.archiwa.gov.pl/sezam/pradziad.php?l=en). If you can find the scans, then, you must search through them year by year, page by page (one year may have 200 pages). If you have a specific date, the search is somewhat easier. If you are familiar with using microfilmed records from the LDS church, then you know that it is possible in the filmed records of some regions to find an index somewhere for the year. I am thinking of 19th records whether Lutheran, Catholic or Jewish, in Russian Poland. In my experience working in Lutheran records in West Prussia (Prussian Poland), an index is often on a completely separate film. Mostly non-existent. And when I say index, i do NOT mean computer searchable. The Kalisz archive is just getting going. Their equipment was just purchased in late December. It will take years for them to get it all out there for us (even the other BETA projects are off to a slow start). At this stage of the digital projects in Poland, research in them requires a proactive approach. They are nothing like the databases of ancestry.com<http://www.ancestry.com/>or familysearch.org <http://www.familysearch.org/> or the better known ones in Poland at http://bindweed.man.poznan.pl/posen/search.php or http://www.ptg.gda.pl/ No English. No convenient search boxes. Even the inventories of the completed BETA scanning projects do not link directly to the records themselves. About the research process itself, nothing has changed. Name, exact date and place. If you are lucky enough to have ancestors living in the few areas where scanning is taking place at the moment, you may be able to save a few dollars since you do not need to rent an LDS film. (What am I saying, one film? I usually end up with at least five microfilms per parish, or more). We might all wish for the digitizing process to go quicker (my grandpa Muth's ancestry will be in the records of Konin archives, now in BETA). I have used films for years; these records will be part of what becomes available, but NOTHING HAS, so far. Remember my original analogy: even if the records are digitized, they are not indexed in a way that a computer can search through them. Quicker is definitely not better. LDS cannot keep up with the pace of growth of its own catalog. Currently, films and scans are cataloged in two separate places. Films are cataloged geographically using a certain set of administrative jurisdictions; scans of Catholic church records are organized by diocese. For using the scanned Polish records at www.familysearch.org see https://www.familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Poland,_Roman_Catholic_Church_Books_(FamilySearch_Historical_Records ) At present, most historical images from Poland are limited to members of the LDS church. To see which ones are, and which ones are not, see https://www.familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Poland,_Roman_Catholic_Church_Books_(FamilySearch_Historical_Records)/Known_Issues Don't get upset about this if you are not LDS; it is simply a matter of waiting for the church to implement the appropriate technology of user authentication. Keep your shirt on! Citing one's sources is becoming harder and harder as new formats keep appearing. Now, we must reference the online digital image of an original historical record in a foreign archive. I know that, at the Archive, a lot of thought went into how to present the images in a way that would ease the task of citation. Since the images are online, we must cite a URL that is unchangeable. Doing genealogy on ancestors living in the area of today's or yesterday's Poland grows easier and easier. I have merely been drawing attention here to some of the growing pains. Al Muth On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 3:39 PM, <dplowman@frontier.com> wrote: > Thanks Al. > > Can you tell me which records or archives that currently available via > digital images? > > > Thanks > > > Doug Plowman > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Albert Muth" <albertmuth734@gmail.com> > To: prussia-roots@rootsweb.com > Sent: Friday, January 13, 2012 2:03:35 PM > Subject: [PRUSSIA-ROOTS] new Polish State Archives digitization project > > In an e-newsletter, the Polish State Archives announced today (13 January > 2012) that > they are expanding their digitization projects now into the branch archive > at Kalisz. > Of the highest priority will be church and civil records of births, > marriages, and deaths > (*akta metrykalne i stanu cywilnego*). All scanned materials will > eventually be available > for free in the Internet. > > Al Muth > Michigan > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > PRUSSIA-ROOTS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without > the quotes in the subject and the body of the message > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > PRUSSIA-ROOTS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without > the quotes in the subject and the body of the message >