Locating the grave of a family member may at times bring a breakthrough in the research. The most comprehensive database for Poland is www.grobonet.com. At present it has more than 6 million records from Polish cemeteries and graveyards. Although there is no English version of the website, it is very intuitive and easy to use.
There are four fields to enter research criteria. Enter the surname of the person in the second field. Optionally, in the first field you may enter their name. Please note that both name and surname may have a different spelling to what you think it should be. You may wish to check here for the correct spelling of Polish male and female given names.
The third field is a drop down list of Polish provinces, so if you know where the tombstone you are looking for is located you may choose one of them.
In the last field you may enter the name of the place where the graveyard or cemetery is located.
The results will be displayed on a map of Poland with number of matching records in each province. After clicking on a selected province, a list of cemeteries with their location and the number of matching results will be presented. And finally, click on a selected cemetery to view the graves that match your searching criteria. Besides names, surnames and dates of birth and death, each entry also has the information on the graves’ location on the given cemetery. Most often the pictures of the tombstone are also available.
Out of the global databases there are two major ones that need to be mentioned here: www.findagrave.com and www.billiongraves.com – each of them having nearly 1. million records from Polish cemeteries. Both databases are in English and easy to use.
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