Looking at Lodz

If your family has ties to Lodz, Poland, you should check out what’s available through Jewish Records Indexing-Poland.

Roni Seibl Liebowitz of New York is the Lodz Archive coordinator for the JRI-Poland/Polish State Archives Project.

In 1997, JRI-Poland entered into an agreement with the Polish State Archives to index Jewish vital records not microfilmed by the Mormons (LDS). Each year, the Lodz USC (Urzad Stanu Cywilnego - civil registration office) transfers eligible (i.e. 100-year-old) registers to the Lodz branch of the Polish State Archives. These records then become available to JRI-Poland for indexing.

• 1826-1877: Birth, marriage and death records were indexed by volunteers from the records microfilmed by the Mormons.
• 1878-1898: The first Lodz PSA project; these results have been online for years.
• 1899-1905: The project to index 43,501 birth, marriage and death records began in 2001. These were computerized by the JRI-Poland team in Warsaw, and the 1899-1901 indices have been added to the online searchable JRI-Poland database.
• 1902-1905: The indices are completed, says Liebowitz, but cannot added to the online database until funding is complete.

Liebowitz says this new data will enable researchers to expand the time period of research "from our grandparents and their siblings to when many of our parents, aunts and uncles were born in Lodz." There are 26,735 birth, marriage and death records in these four years, offering many opportunities for success in researching Lodz families.

To see if your names of interest are found in the new 1899-1905 data, click here.

The project to index the records of 1906 and later will be announced after the new data funding is completed. To see the current project’s status, click here, go to "Lodz (Phase 2)" in the drop-down menu.