My research for records primarily covers Toledo/northwest Ohio, South Bend, Indiana, and two general regions in Poland: Poznan and the Troszyn region. So quite a bit of my research list below will cover these areas.
If you are new to researching Polish records, prepare yourself by reading a bit of Polish history first. A basic piece of information to keep in mind is that Poland was not Poland between the years of 1772 and 1918. It was divided between Germany, Russia, and Austria. This is quite helpful to know this when locating and translating records for your ancestors. Those from the German partition may have been written in German from the period of about 1870 going forward to 1918. This was the time of Bismark and his effort to Germanize Prussia. Records from the Austrian partition also will be written in German. Records from the Russian partition are written in Russian. For a good overview of this history with a map of how the partition borders were drawn and changed, Wikipedia has a good article.
- Arolsen Archives: This website contains comprehensive archives on the victims of Nazi persecution. If you believe you have ancestors who were in Poland during the Nazi occupation, it’s worthwhile exploring.
- Bremen Passenger Lists. This is a subsite of the De Maus Society (below). Many Polish ancestors traveled through Bremen. Here you may be able to locate records for a family member who traveled through Bremen.
- De Maus Society for Family Research, Bremen: This site is written in German; however, you can translate it with your browser. The city was captured in 1806 and then annexed by France in 1810, before it regained independence in 1815. In the late nineteenth century, Bremen was drawn by Prussia into the German Empire.