Lara's Jewnealogy: Polish Schoolchildren's Signatures

Sunday, July 6, 2025

Polish Schoolchildren's Signatures - Now Searchable!

I wrote the following back in a 2018 post:

Anyone who had family in what was Poland of 1926 (which includes parts of modern-day Ukraine and Lithuania, as well as much of modern-day Poland and parts of what used to be Russian Empire, Galicia, Czechoslovakia and East Prussia among others) needs to be aware of an incredible resource hosted by the Library of Congress.

In 1926, in honor of America's 150th anniversary of independence, Polish schoolchildren wrote their signatures in "admiration and friendship for the United States." Children of all religions participated--Jewish names are interspersed with Ukrainian, Polish, and Czech children's names.

At that time, you had to use a relatively manual process to find pages from a particular town and then search through that town's pages in hopes of finding relatives. But a reader named John recently commented on that post and pointed me (and now you!) to a site that has made this resource wonderfully searchable. I've played around with it, and here's how you can as well!

Page of signatures from schoolchildren in Horochow, Poland (now Horochiv, Ukraine), 1926

You can now quickly search this incredible resource by going to https://polska1926.pl/. A few tips I've figured out:

On the top right, choose "EN" to change the display to English
You can enter a partial word, and if those characters appear anywhere in that field, you'll get a result. For example, I can search for "Diam" in the Surname field, and I'll get results for Diamant, Diamont, Diamantstein and more. I'll also get results if "diam" appears anywhere in a surname. When I searched for "Land" hoping to find my Lander/Landor cousins, I also got "Friedland" and similar surnames.
Accents count, sometimes. Polish has various diacritical marks on some letters. The search engine is Polish-based, so use those marks, or you may not get the results you hoped for.
There's a Google Maps interface to help you visualize which towns are included, so you can see which towns near you might be worth searching. See that here: https://polska1926.pl/miejscowosci. Important caveat: The search only shows the towns displayed to the right at the time. The maximum number of towns you can display is 80 (and there are 11418 towns included in total), so you'd need to scroll through multiple pages of results to see all towns visualized.
You can also narrow down your search to a particular district. To see which districts are included (to make sure you're spelling things correctly to be found on a search), go here: https://polska1926.pl/powiaty. You can click on a particular district to see all names included, or search by district. This helped me to narrow my searches to "wołyńskie" under "Voivodeship in 1926" because all of my ancestors lived in that district.

Any other tips you have found while playing around? Please comment below to help others.