This summary is drawn from the Polish National Archives

In Poland, church synods started to address the issue of church records only in the second half of the 16th century, i.e. in the post-Tridentine period. Maintaining record books in earlier years was rare, although they were already recommended by the Krakow Synod in 1459 and the Poznań Synod in 1506.

The general obligation to record Roman Catholic baptisms and weddings in parishes was introduced by the Council of Trent on November 11, 1563. As part of the decree Tametsi dubitandum, 2, which regulates marriage law, the council decided that the wedding books kept by parish priests should include entries regarding the names of newlyweds, wedding witnesses, and the day, month, year and place of marriage. In a similar way, the council ordered the keeping of baptismal books. Each baptism entry was to include the name and surname of the child, date of the ceremony, names of the parents, names and surnames of the godparents, and data regarding the person administering the baptism.

There was no mention in the decisions of the council for the need to keep books of the dead. Only the so-called “Roman Ritual”, issued in 1614 by Pope Paul V, required Roman Catholic parish priests to keep five categories of record books for the baptized, confirmed, married, deceased and the so-called status animarum which were books containing lists of parishioners. At the same time, the form and content of individual entries were specified in detail.

The obligation to register baptized and married parishioners was introduced by Polish post-Tridentine synods in the years 1579-1602, at the same time imposing a very high penalty. However, only the primatial synod of Piotrków of 1607, chaired by Cardinal Primate Bernard Maciejowski, was decisive for the entirety of Poland. He ordered the keeping of books of the baptized, confirmed, married, those communicating at Easter, parish statistics, and at the same time providing a detailed form for individual record entries. Only the Piotrkowski Ritual, introduced to all Polish dioceses and archdioceses in 1631, obliged the Polish clergy to introduce death registers. Bishop Gembicki, at the Synod of Lutsk of 1641, ordered parish priests to make entries in person, and the Synod of Płock, in 1733, established that record books should be numbered on all pages for greater reliability with individual entries numbered by date.

The recommendations of later Polish synods placed the main emphasis on the careful and separate keeping of the three categories of books (christenings, weddings and deaths) and careful storage. The condition of the record books was controlled by parish visits carried out within individual dioceses. The keeping of records was often assessed unfavorably by the inspectors due to the combined preparation of wedding and baptism records, lack of registration of deaths, illegibility of entries and their chronological movement.

In the second half of the 18th century, there was a gradual improvement in the keeping of record books. This was related to the increased administrative activity of church authorities, the increase in the level of education of parish clergy, and the increasing importance of the records themselves whose certified copies began to acquire legal force. This imposed the need to carefully secure the books, either by depositing them in diocesan archives or by preparing annual copies of them at the disposal of state authorities.

Major changes in the organization of the Roman Catholic Church were introduced by the first partition of Poland. During the period of partitions, church registration records took on the character of an official register of population movement due to its recognition as a civil status file. In the Austrian partition, for example, parish priests were appointed civil registrars by the imperial patent of March 15, 1782. The decree of August 9, 1786, extended this right to clergy who were employees of episcopal consistories. Thus, each parish priest maintaining civil status files was simultaneously subordinated to both church and state authorities. The reform of the form of record books in Galicia was carried out under the imperial patent of Joseph II of February 20, 1784. At that time, the Old Polish form of entries based on the Roman Ritual and the Piotrkowski Ritual was abandoned. The imperial regulation announced on April 7, 1784, by the episcopal consistories in Lviv, Przemyśl and Tarnów, obliged parish priests to keep three different registers: birth books, wedding books and death books. Entries were to be made in Latin, separately for each village included in the parish. This was a novelty compared to the Old Polish books which contained entries for the entire parish in one volume. A major innovation was also the introduction of the “born” rubric in the birth registers and “zdary” in the death registers, while the Old Polish books were actually baptism and funeral books.

The books of the born henceforth contained the following: dates (year, month, day) of the birth and baptism of the child, name of the child, gender and status (marital, extramarital), names and surnames of the parents and their religion, names and surnames of godparents and their profession.

The wedding books included data on the course of the ceremony and its participants: wedding date, personalia nupturientów (names, surnames, religion, age, marital status, house number) of the wedding couple and of the witnesses (names, surnames, professions).

The entries in the books of the deceased included: year, month and day of death (and possibly service and burial), house number, name and surname of the deceased, religion, gender, age, type of disease or cause of death which was entered according to the diagnosis of the doctor.