The Poznan Project is a free, searchable database of transcribed 19th-century Polish marriage records from the former Prussian Province of Posen, now Poznań, Poland and neighboring areas.

“The Poznań Project was primarily conceived as a way to resolve a problem common to many genealogists researching this area: the 19th century records rarely provide the precise location of origin for people who left the Poznań/Posen province to settle in America, Australia or elsewhere. Instead, the short label “Posen” is usually all that is provided. As this name actually indicates the city of Poznań (being the capital of the Province of the same name, both in the 19th century, when it belonged to Prussia, and now – within the Republic of Poland), scores of researchers have spent needless time and resources searching for their ancestors within the parishes of the Poznań/Posen City. Predictably, few succeeded. The reality is that their ancestors could have originated anywhere within that region which included around 2 million residents as of 1900.”

“To overcome this problem we hoped to eventually make sufficient marriage records available on-line for all the parishes of the region, thus providing the information needed for researchers to pinpoint and order the appropriate microfilm(s). The period between 1835-1884 was initially chosen for practical reasons, corresponding to the period of greatest emigration and later, the timeframe was extended to 1800-1899. The sheer volume of microfilmed records made it impractical for one individual to search the records of the entire area. Our approach has always been for many people to split the effort, volunteering to transcribe one or two parishes per person. This undertaking was initiated in 2000 and we estimate that we have currently accumulated ca. 75 per cent of the region’s marriages (some of them might be no more available due to the records’ loss in wars etc).”