Polish Family Information

Large scale Polish immigration grew after the first group of Polish immigrants arrived in Panna Maria, Texas in 1854. So Poles appear in the 1860 US Census and each one thereafter. Familysearch.org now lets you edit names in all the US census indexes. This is a fairly recent development (as of this update in July 2021) since for some census years, editing had not been allowed.

This is one of those historical explanations of how the Dziennik Chicagoski death index came to be and other meanderings related to the index.

I noticed that many of the early settlers of Panna Maria, Texas were added to the FamilySeach Family Tree but that the 1860 US Census was not attached to very many of them as a source. I began viewing the 1860 census records for Karnes County in which Panna Maria is located. I downloaded the index into a spreadsheet and deleted people who were not of Polish descent. I began to see why the census was not attached to very many people-- the index was not particularly useful and cannot be edited. I've included the index here.

If you are reading this, you found your way to the website at this new URL. The contract with the Internet Service Provider (ISP) that hosts this website at the old URL expired January 6th. If you see something on this site that isn't working as it should, please send an email to subscription@polishfamily.info and tell me where and what the problem is. Thanks.

Polish, like most European languages including English, is based on the Latin alphabet. To represent additional sounds, some of the letters get modified to create new letters. The new letters pretty much look like their unmodified forms. In Polish, these additional letters are: ąćęłńóśźż. How does one alphabetize the new letters? The Polish alphabetization rule (also called a collation) is to place the new letters after the unmodified form. So the Polish alphabetical order is: aąbcćdeęfghijklłmnńoóprsśtuwyzźż.

This parish is significant because some of its residents emigrated to the United States in the 1850s and established the first Polish settlement in the US (in Texas).

The Prussian Province of Poznań had 2 administrative districts, Poznań and Bydgoszcz. The Poznań district had 28 powiaty (counties) and Bydgoszcz had 14 powiaty. The value of this gazetteer is that it gives both Polish and German names of locales which can help you locate them on a map. The gazetteer also gives the Catholic parish for the locale.

The LDS imaged most of the loose papers collection of the Haller's Army recruitment records and made them available on their FamilySearch website. All of those loose papers have been indexed and added to the index on this website. Subscribers to this website can easily access the images and the additional indexed information like: birth date, birthplace, and marital status.

The Illustrated Geographical Atlas of the Kingdom of Poland may be useful for finding towns in the Russian partition of Poland. The atlas is broken down by powiat which is fine if you happen to know which one to look at. Many records we encounter do not include that information. This combined index lets you look for a town without knowing the powiat.