In an old wooden house in the Podlasie region, a black-and-white photograph of a young man in a military uniform hung on the wall for years. No one in the family could say who he was. It was only a great-granddaughter with a passion for history who, going through family documents, came across a pre-war military service booklet belonging to Jan. The photo in the booklet was almost identical to the man on the wall.

After a visit to the parish to confirm the documents, it turned out that the young man in the photo was the brother of her great-grandmother, who had gone missing during the September Campaign of 1939. Uncovering this story became the seed of a bigger adventure – building a family tree that reunited relatives scattered around the world.
Many genealogical searches begin with a single haunting photograph, one document and one question.

Where to start building a family tree?

1. Talk to the family's elders.
The most valuable source of knowledge is still your living relatives.
Talk to your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Ask about:
dates of births, weddings and deaths,
places of residence and origin,
ancestors' stories, anecdotes, family legends,
old documents, photos, diaries,
information about migrations and occupations.
It's worth recording these conversations — many such stories are hard to reconstruct later.

2. Gather and organise documents.
Homes often hide real treasures such as: birth and marriage certificates, old passports, military records, letters, family chronicles and, once again, all sorts of photographs. Sort the material by family branch. Even at this stage you can start sketching the first drafts of your tree.

3. Use online archives.
Poland's digital archives are impressive and constantly growing:
https://szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl – scans of documents from state archives,
https://geneteka.genealodzy.pl – a database of record indexes maintained by volunteers,
https://metryki.genealodzy.pl – scans of parish registers from many parishes.
Thanks to them you can often find documents up to 150 years old.

4. Choose a tool for building your family tree.
To organise a growing amount of data, it's worth using modern genealogy tools.

The best available tools for building a family tree.

1. MyHeritage
Who is it for? For people who want an easy start and access to broad databases.
Advantages:
intuitive to use,
automatic hints and matches to existing profiles,
a huge database of documents and scans,
the ability to add photos, stories and documents.
Free version: yes, up to 250 people in the tree.
Paid versions: from about PLN 20–30 per month depending on the plan.

2. FamilySearch (completely free)
Who is it for? For those who want free access to vast genealogical resources.
Advantages:
one of the largest genealogy projects in the world,
free access to millions of records,
a shared family tree where you can find connections to other descendants.
Cost: PLN 0 – a project run by FamilySearch International.

How much does it cost to have a professional build a family tree?
The costs are not clear-cut. No two trees are the same, and so the process of creating them cannot be standardised. Costs depend on the number of generations sought, the availability of documents and how difficult they are to obtain. A basic tree of 3–4 generations costs between PLN 1,000 and 2,500. A full genealogical investigation with document analysis and reconstruction of collateral lines can run to tens of thousands of złoty.

Building a family tree is detective work — the more complicated a family's history, the more time and cost its reconstruction requires. We offer a consultation with the TakŻyli team. We work with professionals who will reconstruct your family's most precious paths and stories.
Write or call: https://takzyli.pl/kontakt

Your family tree in a TakŻyli digital biography — preserve your history for generations.
Once you have built your family tree, on your own or with an expert's help, it's worth keeping it somewhere accessible to the whole family, now and in the future. TakŻyli lets you place a family tree in a digital biography with a QR code, which you can put on a headstone, a memorial plaque or in family chronicles. This keeps photos, documents and relationships safe forever. Preserve your family stories. Organise the memory of your ancestors and immortalise your family tree with a TakŻyli digital biography.

It's an extraordinary way to keep the memory of your family alive for many generations.