Robert Hanna asked if Ted Gostin's webinar about using the Polish
State Archives websites (plural!) to do Polish genealogy would be
available to view afterwards. The Los Angeles Public Library has now
put it online at YouTube, free:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJqAzI9vxGk

It's about an hour and half long, with some Q&A at the end.

A short summary:
Over forty million scans of old Polish records are now online,
including books for some areas that used to be in Poland but aren't
anymore. Many of them are hosted on the main "Szukaj w Archiwach"
("Search in Archives") website that supplanted/absorbed the old
Pradziad database. The search interface has some really annoying
quirks, and it is also tremendously slow when displaying images or
zooming into them, but the site also has tons of material that was
never microfilmed by FamilySearch and which isn't available anywhere
else. So it's absolutely worth learning about how to use the website
(warts and all) so that you can view the scans online for free, from
home.

Sometimes the newest Polish record scans are only posted at the
smaller archives' individual branch websites and don't get sent up to
the main "Szukaj w Archiwach" website in a timely manner, so you need
to know how to check each of the small archive branch sites, too, and
Ted explains how to do that.

Finally, the Kuyavia and Pomerania area in north-central/northwestern
Poland has a unique and separate website with text-searchable surname
indexes of their records, just from two of the archive branches
(Bydgoszcz and Torun) so far. It also has some of its own very
annoying quirks in its search interface, and Ted explains how to work
around them to find records.

It's a really excellent talk, very in depth, and I highly recommend watching it.


- Brooke Schreier Ganz
Mill Valley, California