Search instructions
In order to search for the persons you are interested in, please enter a name in the search box. The search engine has a number of improvements that may help you find people. The most important ones are as follows:
- Search names are reduced to the basic form, what means that lastnames ending with -ska and -ski are treated as one name. In addition, Polish and German diacritical letters are converted into their Latin equivalents, and upper and lower case letters are treated in the same way.
- Search can be narrowed down to the first name - then simply enter the beginning of the first name after a space or comma after the last name. Note, that the names are written in their original form, so that for example Stanislaw and Stanislaus are different names for the search engine. This can be bypassed by entering only the first letters of the first name, e. g. "Kowalski sta" will find all Kowalskis with first names beginning with "Sta".
- The primary way of sorting names is to sort them by the signature number. You can change the sorting method by displaying data in the order of last names and first names, or the first names only, regardless of last name.
- Bearing in mind, that the file was prepared by Prussian officials who might misspelled Polish names, we introduced the possibility of searching for similar-sounding names. This option is available by selecting "approximate search".