Official records and church registers

Metryki.GenBaza.pl

This website is a little hidden gem. It is a non-profit organization that is digitizing at record speed church records and official birth, marriage and death registers kept by the government from 1874 ("Registry Office").

The file names follow a fairly simple naming convention:

Link: metryki.genbaza.pl

Other church records

For me, familysearch.org was a great resource for finding information, or at least figuring out where to look for more information, since the website often doesn't have scans. When you find a record, highlight the "Document" tab, find the film number and enter it into the catalog search on the website to find out which church it is from. Then:

On Archion.de you will find records from the Protestant church (however, you will have to pay a fee for one month's access).

Catholic church records can be found at https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/.

Address books

From around 1764, the town kept address books. Originally, these books contained a list of the high officials of the government and the church and unfortunately not of all citizens. This changed in the 19th century, when good records were kept from the late 1830s onwards. These documents later became telephone directories. There is an up-to-date list of all available digitized books at genealogy.net's wiki.

Police records

These have only recently ('22) been scanned by the Polish State Archives. These are official police records and citizen registration cards beginning around the 1840s. The Allenstein Indexing Project has compiled the collection on its website, which can be viewed here##. The list is quite long, and the index starts with the reference number 10/14/0/5/7000, which is at the bottom. The collection itself can be found in the Polish archives ##Szukaj w Archiwach## under the series ##"Kartoteka."

State Archives

A lot of information is available (if you can find it) scanned or in person at the Polish State Archives: Szukaj w Archiwach.