Vital Records - Krakow, Poland

This database contains Jewish birth, marriage, and death records from Krakow, Poland (in the Austrian province of Galicia before WWI), including Kazimierz and Podgórze (today, districts of Kraków). The information was transcribed and compiled by Prof. Dan Hirschberg from microfilmed and digitized records, the originals of which are held by the Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie (National Archives in Kraków).

Records Inventory

As of February 2023, there are 94,519 birth, marriage and death records in this collection, including:

• 75,065 Birth Records (1798-1942)
• 17,001 Marriage Records (1798-1933)
• 32,028 Death Records (1798-1890)

More records are in the process of being added to JewishGen from Prof. Hirschberg's databases. A detailed inventory will be provided in the future.

Notes

• Information in square brackets [] was deduced by Prof. Hirschberg by comparison with other records. For example, although an early census record might not include surnames, the surname later used by someone in the record might be apparent by comparison with later records on the basis of common house number, names of inhabitants, their ages, etc.
• The Notes field in database entries includes information written on the record and/or deduced by Prof. Hirschberg.
• Some fields may reference other records with text like m. 1813#18. The first letter identifies the type of record (b=birth, m=marriage, d=death), then there is a year, and the number after the # is the akt/reference/record number.
• Some fields may reference other house numbers with text like kasim#42, meaning Kazimierz house 42. For example, the 1795 census has a field for Previous Residence, i.e., residence in the 1790 census.

Images of Records

Images of most of the records are available online, although search results do not currently link to the images. Prof. Hirschberg's website (https://www.ics.uci.edu/~dan/genealogy/Krakow/) contains many images and links to images on other websites. Vital records can also be viewed on the Polish State Archives' Search the Archives website (https://www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/zespol/-/zespol/33389).

Acknowledgements

Thanks very much to Prof. Dan Hirschberg for his monumental ongoing effort to transcribe and compile genealogical data about Kraków's Jewish Community, and for his generosity in contributing this extraordinarily valuable collection to JewishGen. Thanks also to the National Archives in Kraków for preserving the original records and making them available to the public.

Search the Database

The Krakow Vital Records can be searched by clicking here.

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