Polish research

+3 votes
165 views
Hey there,

I'm trying to take my friend's paternal side back and at the moment I'm not getting very far.

Any free resources for researching Polish families with result sets in English? I know FamilySearch has a few datasets but the only records that show up for this guy are events based in England.

Any help appreciated.

Cheers.
WikiTree profile: Bruno Legowski
in Genealogy Help by Day Garwood G2G6 Mach 2 (25.4k points)

2 Answers

+2 votes
So much depends on the region in Poland where they came from. For Polish-Americans I have had good luck using their USA Naturalization records to identify their birthplace - which might have been recorded by its German/Prussian name or its Polish name, depending on the time the question was asked! Do you have a town or region of origin for Bruno? Can you locate UK immigration records that might help you find it? That's where I'd start.

If not Bruno himself, can you find any neighbors, possibly siblings or cousins, in the neighborhood where Bruno settled? I didn't have naturalization records for my direct ancestors but I found birthplaces recorded for some known siblings, which pointed me to the right regions, and searching regional indexing websites in Poland uncovered many more records for the rest of the family including my ancestors!

Happy to help if anything I'm saying sounds useful to you :)
by Cheryl Hammond G2G6 Mach 3 (33.0k points)

Hi Cheryl,

Thanks for this.

According to the National Archives, most of the immigration/naturalisation records are on Ancestry. A search on there gave me nothing before his marriage in 1951. I got more or less the same results on FamilySearch.

The very first reference to a Legowski in the UK is a marriage in 1942, but that was in London so don't know whether that could be Bruno's relative. Not sure how
popular that surname is in Poland.
I must admit even after 15 years of research, I'm very new to researching families outside England, so this is a bit of a genealogical adventure.
I found this one, looks interesting: https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/1518/images/30807_A001202-00400?pId=29362739

Bronislaw Legowski, b 1923, passage from Algiers (!) to Liverpool in Jul 1943.

I have a relative whose Polish name was Bronislaw who went by Bruno in the US.

You have this one from the UK death index? Definitely your guy. https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv=1&dbid=60630&h=1266477

Hi Cheryl,

Yes, I have his marriage in 1951, his two children, and his death in 2009.

What you mention about the 1943 entry seems very interesting. Thanks for that. Does it give us any other information? Unfortunately that's purely image-based, no transcription and so I can't read it myself.

Searching for Bronislaw rather than Bruno on FamilySearch, came up with a lot more this time, but still nothing that seemed relevant. There was a guy in Italy, and then most of them were based in the US with all kinds of spelling tangents and variations on the surname.

Again, thanks so much for your help with this, very much appreciated.
+2 votes
Hi,

There are 16,000 + Legowski's in geneteka.genealodzy.pl in their database (You can get it in English)
by Alina Hudzik G2G1 (1.4k points)
Hi Alina,

Thank you very much for this.

I can't seem to find the right guy there for my work on my friend's Legowski family, but this will be a very useful resource if I do any Polish genealogy in the future.

Cheers.

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