Notarial Records in Poland

Church registers record births, marriages and deaths. Notarial deeds record what families did with their property: sales of land and houses, divisions between heirs, dowries, loans, business partnerships and settlements of disputes. A single deed can name parents, children, in-laws and their places of residence. How the records were made, in which language, and where they are now depends on which partition the family lived in.

Types of notarial records in Poland

The deeds most useful to family historians are:

• Wills (testamenty), naming heirs and often stating how they were related to the testator.
• Inheritance agreements (umowy spadkowe, działy), in which heirs divided an estate among themselves, often where no will had been made.
• Property sales (umowy kupna-sprzedaży), with the buyers and sellers, a description of the land or house and the date.
• Marriage and dowry contracts (intercyzy, umowy posagowe), mostly among better-off families, which set out what each side brought to the marriage.
• Loans, debts and business contracts, useful where an ancestor traded or ran a workshop.
• Powers of attorney (pełnomocnictwa), given by people who could not attend in person, which sometimes show that someone had emigrated or was serving in the army.
• Settlements (ugody) of family disputes over property or inheritance.

How the partitions shaped notarial records

Between 1795 and 1918 Polish lands were divided between Austria, Prussia and Russia, and each state applied its own law to notaries. The partition your family lived in decides what kind of deed to expect, its language and the archive that holds it.

Austrian partition (Galicia)

Galicia covered southern Poland, including Kraków, and what is now western Ukraine, including Lwów (Lviv). Austrian notarial law was extended to Galicia in 1858 and notaries’ offices opened there in 1859; from 1871 they worked under the Austrian Notarial Act, which also shaped the Polish notarial law of 1933. Early deeds are often in German. After 1869, when Polish became the internal language of the Galician courts and offices, Polish became the usual language. Records for western Galicia are in Polish state archives such as the National Archives in Kraków; those for eastern Galicia are mostly in Lviv.

Prussian partition

The Prussian partition included Poznań (Posen) and Gdańsk (Danzig) and the surrounding provinces. Deeds were made under Prussian law and are almost always in German. Surviving records are mainly in the Polish state archives of the region, such as those in Poznań and Gdańsk.

Russian partition

In the Kingdom of Poland (Congress Poland), which included Warsaw and Lublin, civil law remained based on the Napoleonic Code and notaries at first worked on the French model. In 1876 the Russian notarial statute of 1866 was extended to the Kingdom, and from then on deeds are usually written in Russian; earlier ones are in Polish. Further east, in the provinces annexed directly to the Russian Empire, such as the Vilnius region, Russian law applied. Records for the Kingdom are held in Polish state archives such as those in Warsaw and Lublin, though wartime losses were heavy.

Where Polish notarial records are kept

Where older notarial records survive, they are usually in the state archives (Archiwa Państwowe), arranged by individual notary, with major holdings in Warsaw, Kraków, Poznań and Lublin. Many of these collections are described in the archives’ online catalogue, Szukaj w Archiwach (szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl), though usually only by notary and year, not by the names of the parties.

Court records often fill gaps, because inheritance and property disputes that began with a deed frequently ended in court. Records for places that are now in Ukraine, Belarus or Lithuania are held in archives in those countries.

Reading notarial records

Notarial deeds are written in legal language, in Polish, German, Russian or Latin depending on the period, and in hands that can be hard to read. Some 20th-century records are still restricted under Polish data-protection law. Because a deed may refer to earlier deeds, mortgage entries or court decisions, one transaction can lead to several more documents.

Our research in notarial records

We search the notarial records that fit your family’s place and period and explain what each deed shows about your ancestors. Our work covers:

• locating the deeds in Polish state archives and the relevant foreign archives;
• reading and translating deeds in Polish, German, Latin and Russian;
• following property and inheritance through the related court and mortgage records;
• explaining the historical jurisdiction and the legal terms in English.