The Kurpie region suffered greatly in terms of the preservation of genealogical records—both during the First and Second World Wars. Many parish registers (e.g., from Myszyniec, Kadzidło, and Ostrołęka) were destroyed. Other official documents from the time of the partitions were also lost irretrievably. However, not all of them.In the digital age, we have a wide range of possibilities for searching sources related to our ancestors. More and more archives are making their collections available online, allowing us to browse records from the comfort of our homes.
Researching family history is best started by interviewing the oldest living relatives and recording what they remember. Sometimes, this treasure trove of knowledge can reach back several generations. Once all the information is gathered, it is worth creating a basic chart, which will serve as a starting point for further research.
The next step may be visiting the Civil Registry Office corresponding to the place of residence of our ancestors. Birth, marriage, and death records can, by law, be photographed with our own equipment for free. Sometimes, we might find several ancestors in one visit, while other times, we may need to travel to multiple offices.
Once we surpass the time limit for the protection of civil registry books, the process becomes easier—older records are transferred to state archives, where they are scanned and made available online (szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl). Occasionally, before an archive officially includes a particular record in its digitization plan, a volunteer steps in, photographs the documents with their own equipment, and uploads them to one of the publicly accessible databases. Examples of such platforms include the website of the Polish Genealogical Society (Skanoteka) or GenBaza. These sites contain hundreds of thousands of images waiting for those searching for their ancestors.However, browsing records page by page can be time-consuming—especially for documents from before the First World War, when records in the Kurpie region were written in Russian.
This is where genealogical search engines come to the rescue. A flagship initiative in this field is undoubtedly ProjektKurpie.pl, which currently holds over 800,000 indexed records from various documents related to the Kurpie region. These include not only parish registers but also property, military, and mortgage documents. Thanks to such diverse sources, it is sometimes possible to fill in some of the gaps caused by wartime destruction.