The PRADZIAD search site is no longer active. Use Szukajwarchiwach.pl for your Polish digital archive searches.

PRADZIAD (was at http://baza.archiwa.gov.pl/sezam/pradziad.php) is the State Executive Archives of Poland’s free, online database which locates where civil registration and parish records are held in the various state archives, Ecclesiastical archives, and Civil Registration Office in Warsaw.

Searches will show what records are available and where they can be accessed.

After using PRADZIAD to locate the Archive holding the records you can visit Szukajwarchiwach.pl, created by the National Digital Archive of Poland, and see the actual civil registration and parish record images.

Searches at PRADZIAD can be made by village, municipality, region, religion, or record type.

“The materials collected in the database:

• name of the village (present in the Polish language and Polish speaking on a long time), which were made or for which vital records and civil status (parishes, subsidiaries, filiały, each village with a parish located in Galicia, home to offices of civil status)

• membership administration (with respect to the village lying out on Polish territory – the municipality and the province in accordance with the territorial divisions of the years 1975 to 1998 and from 1999 .; in relation to the village no longer existing or currently outside the Polish borders – from the period of administrative affiliation in which they arise files: in the case of areas which, prior to 1939. belonged to the Polish and currently lie in Ukraine and Lithuania – districts and provinces, in the case of land that was part of the German Reich, and now lie in Germany and Russia – Region and counties)

• Creed / rite (Seventh Anglicans, Baptist, Christ Catholic, Christian Catholic dissidents Lutheran, Lutheran, Reformed, evangelicals, filipońskie, Greek Catholic, Hussite edinoverie, Catholic apostolic Islamic, Mariavites, Mennonite, mixed, Mosaic, unspecified, Armenian, Polish-national, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, staroluterańskie staroobrzędowe and registry office)

• call (basically only when the village was in several parishes of the same religion)

• kind of act of civil status (basic series: birth, marriage and death, and file collective records of grant, voucher, confirmations, baptisms, exams prenuptial, and Holy Communion, other catechumens, communicating, licenses, confirmations, converts, book families, mixed, burials, protocols, pre-marriage, divorce, the sacrament of the sick, the list of souls, confessing to join the rite, wypominki, of the rite, the announcement)

• date – the date of the annual limit documentation,

• microfilms – the date of the annual limit for the books that have utility microfilm stored in the archive that stores documents,

• Information about the availability of the act,

• site storage of materials – the name and number of the state archive department or state archive,

• name and number of the team,

• comments.”

The Executive Office of State Archives has a map with the territorial scope of the various state archives.

PRADZIAD is an acronym for Baza danych Program Rejestracji Akt Metrykalnych i Stanu Cywilnego (English: The Program for the Registration of Records from Parish and Civil Registration Offices).