ul. Dywizjonu AK "Jeleń" 7B/U4, WarszawaGeneration limit
None
great-grandparents and beyond can carry the chain
Residence in Poland
Not required
nor is a language certificate
Decision fee
PLN 277
raised from 58 on 1 August 2025
Statutory deadline
6 months
in practice longer – varies by voivodeship office
Who decides
The Voivode
Mazowiecki, if you never lived in Poland
Nature of the decision
Declaratory
it confirms; it does not grant
In this guide
What Polish citizenship by descent actually means
Poland has followed ius sanguinis – the law of blood – without interruption since 1920. Citizenship passes from parent to child, and it keeps passing so long as nothing in the chain broke it. It does not lapse because a family left Poland, because nobody spoke Polish for three generations, or because a hundred years went by.
The consequence is the single most important thing to understand about this area of law. If your chain is intact, you have been a Polish citizen since the day you were born. You are not applying to become one. You are asking the Polish state to confirm a status you already hold – which is why the procedure is called confirmation of possession of Polish citizenship and why the decision is declaratory: it looks backwards and states what has always been true.
What this route does not require
No residence in Poland. No Polish language certificate. No renunciation of your current citizenship – Poland permits dual nationality on this route. No minimum income, no housing, no interview. And no generation limit: a great-great-grandparent can carry the chain as effectively as a parent, provided the links hold.
The work, therefore, is not persuasion. It is proof. Every claim comes down to two questions: did your ancestor hold Polish citizenship, and did anyone in the line between that ancestor and you lose it before passing it on?
Four statutes, and why the date decides everything
Poland has had four citizenship acts in the modern era. The rule that governs your case is the one in force on the day the relevant event happened – the birth, the marriage, the naturalisation, the enlistment. Not the law of today. This is the intertemporal principle, and it is settled.
It means a family can straddle three different legal regimes. A great-grandfather who naturalised in 1928, a grandmother who married in 1949, a father born in 1961: three events, three statutes, three different answers.
| Statute | Governed events between | What mattered most under it |
|---|---|---|
| Act of 20 January 1920 | 31 January 1920 – 18 January 1951 | Citizenship lost automatically on voluntary acquisition of a foreign citizenship, or on foreign military service or public office without Polish consent. Loss extended to a wife and to children under 18. |
| Act of 8 January 1951 | 19 January 1951 – 20 August 1962 | Foreign citizenship could be taken only with permission. Marriage stopped affecting either spouse's citizenship. A narrow group permanently abroad was declared not to be citizens. |
| Act of 15 February 1962 | 21 August 1962 – 14 August 2012 | Loss was never automatic. It required an application by the individual and an individual permission from a state authority – the Council of State, later the President. |
| Act of 2 April 2009 | 15 August 2012 – today | The only way to lose Polish citizenship is to renounce it with the President's consent. It also governs the confirmation procedure itself. |
Why this is good news more often than bad. The automatic, unforgiving loss rules belong to the 1920 Act and ended in January 1951. From 1962 onwards, nobody lost Polish citizenship without personally asking to. So the further down the chain an event sits, the harder it is for it to have broken anything – and the scrutiny concentrates on the oldest generation, usually the emigrant ancestor.
How the chain passes down
Acquisition by birth has always been the rule, but the detail shifted with each statute – and the detail is where claims are won.
Births before 19 January 1951
A child born in wedlock took the father's citizenship. A child born outside wedlock took the mother's. Family citizenship was treated as a unity: the grant or loss of citizenship extended to the wife and to children under eighteen unless the act said otherwise. In practice this means the male line usually carries the claim for this period – and that a break in the father's status breaks it for the whole household.
Births from 1951 onwards
The unity principle was dismantled. Marriage ceased to affect either spouse's citizenship, and children of mixed couples were treated far more even-handedly – with declaration mechanisms allowing a choice in some situations. Under the current Act a child acquires Polish citizenship at birth if at least one parent is a Polish citizen, full stop.
One further point about the oldest generation. The 1920 Act did not create Polish citizenship out of nothing in 1920; it identified who became a citizen of the newly independent state, principally by reference to settlement and residence on Polish territory. That is why a claim often turns on a document showing an ancestor was registered as a permanent resident of a Polish town – the population registers held in the state archives go directly to this question.
A form requirement that is often mistaken for a limit. The application asks for the details of your ancestors to the second degree – parents and grandparents. That is what the form needs in order to trace the line; it is not a rule that your claim must come through a grandparent. Claims routinely run through great-grandparents and further back. The chain has no statutory end.
Why chains break – loss of citizenship
Almost every refused claim is refused for the same reason: somewhere in the line, the Voivode finds that an ancestor lost Polish citizenship before the next generation was born. Everything after that point is then outside the chain, because a person who is no longer a citizen has nothing to pass on.
Under the 1920 Act – the statute that governs the emigration generation for most families – there were exactly two grounds, plus one proviso that is frequently overlooked and frequently decisive.
Acquiring a foreign citizenship
Loss was automatic and needed no decision – but only where the foreign citizenship was acquired voluntarily by someone who was already a Polish citizen. Naturalisation is the classic case. The date matters: if it fell before the next generation's birth, the chain is broken at that point.
Foreign army or public office
Entering the military service of a foreign state, or accepting public office there, without Polish consent. Until December 1932 that consent came from the Polish Government; afterwards from the competent Voivode. This is the ground that most often surprises families.
The proviso that saves claims – and is missing from most English-language guides
The same provision closes with a qualification: a person who was subject to Poland's compulsory military service obligation and had not been released from it could not effectively shed Polish citizenship by taking a foreign one. In the eyes of the Polish state they did not cease to be a Polish citizen. For a man of military age who naturalised abroad without ever settling his Polish service obligation, this can rescue a claim that appears, on its face, to have died with his naturalisation certificate. It requires evidence about his age, his obligation and any release – but it is worth investigating in every case of that shape.
Simultaneous acquisition at birth is not “acquisition”
A development of real importance for families in the Americas. Where a child was born abroad to Polish parents in a country applying ius soli, that child acquired both citizenships at the same instant – Polish by blood, foreign by birthplace. The courts have held that in this situation nothing was “acquired” in the sense the 1920 Act meant, because nothing was chosen. There was no voluntary act, and therefore no loss.
The Supreme Administrative Court decided the point on an Argentine birth, and the reasoning is stated in general terms rather than being tied to any one country – it turns on the order in which the two citizenships arose, not on where the child happened to be born. For descendants of Polish emigrants across the Americas it unsettles an assumption that defeated many claims for years: that a foreign birth certificate was itself evidence that the Polish line ended. It was not. The judgment is set out in full in the case-law section.
The same logic explains why Polish law contains no general prohibition on dual citizenship for this period. The rule was never “a Pole may not hold another passport”. It was that a Polish citizen who went out and took another citizenship thereby gave up the Polish one.
Women who married foreigners – the most misstated rule in this field
You will read, on a great many websites, that under the 1920 Act a Polish woman lost her citizenship by marrying a foreigner. There is no such provision. We have checked the statute; it is not there. One article deals with the opposite case – a foreign woman marrying a Pole – and another presupposes that such a loss can happen, without ever enacting it.
What actually happened was this. Marriage caused loss only through the ordinary rule on acquiring a foreign citizenship: in that era most states conferred the husband's citizenship on his wife automatically on marriage, so she acquired a foreign citizenship, and that is what cost her the Polish one.
Why the distinction is worth money to you
If the husband's own national law did not give his wife his citizenship automatically, she acquired nothing – and so she lost nothing. Her Polish citizenship survived the marriage and passed to her children.
The clearest example is the United States. The Cable Act of 22 September 1922 ended the automatic naturalisation of wives in American law. A Polish woman who married an American citizen on or after that date did not become American by the marriage – so she remained Polish. Other countries abandoned the same rule at their own dates through the 1930s and 1940s. Each case turns on the husband's national law as it stood on the date of the wedding, which is a question of foreign law to be researched and evidenced, never assumed.
The rule ended for good on 19 January 1951. From that date Polish law provided expressly that neither the conclusion of a marriage nor a change of citizenship by one spouse affects the citizenship of the other.
If a claim in your family has previously been dismissed – by an official, a genealogist or another firm – on the bare ground that a female ancestor “married out”, that conclusion deserves to be tested rather than accepted.
Foreign military service
This is the most heavily litigated ground of loss, and the one where outcomes are least intuitive. The settled position of the administrative courts, for service between 1920 and January 1951, has three features that consistently surprise families.
1. Loss operated by force of law. No Polish decision, notification or record was needed. The citizenship was gone the moment the person entered foreign service without consent, whether or not anyone in Poland ever knew.
2. “I had no choice, I was conscripted” does not usually help. Where the person had voluntarily taken the foreign citizenship that carried the conscription obligation, the courts treat the resulting service as voluntary in substance: military obligation attaches to citizens, so choosing the citizenship meant choosing the duty of allegiance that came with it.
3. Reserve enrolment can be enough. Formal enrolment in a foreign state's reserve forces has been held sufficient. Actual active service is not required.
And a point in the applicant's favour: whether a given activity counts as “military service” is judged by Polish law as it stood at the time, not by the foreign state's characterisation.
Where the burden sits. When the authority asserts that your ancestor lost citizenship by foreign service, it is for the authority to establish that as a fact. Vague or ambiguous foreign service certificates have been held insufficient to support a finding of loss. A refusal built on a thin evidential record is a refusal worth appealing.
Three myths that end claims before they start
“The 1951 Act stripped citizenship from everyone who had emigrated.”
It did not. The provision people have in mind declared that a narrow, closed group was not Polish: people permanently abroad who had acquired another citizenship under a border-change treaty, or who were of one of six named nationalities, or who were of German nationality. The conditions were cumulative and the categories exhaustive. It did not touch Polish Jews, and it did not touch emigrants to the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Britain or Australia. This is probably the most over-cited provision on the internet in this field.
“My family were given a travel document saying they were not Polish citizens, so that settles it.”
It does not settle it. Those who emigrated in and around 1968 were typically required to apply for permission to change citizenship, and were then issued a travel document bearing a statement that the holder was not a Polish citizen. The courts have held that permission to change citizenship had to be an individual act addressed to a named person – a general resolution could not take its place. Where no individual act exists, the purported loss was legally ineffective, and the person concerned, together with their descendants, should normally be confirmed as Polish citizens. The wording printed in the document is not proof of anything.
“There are no surviving records, so there is nothing to be done.”
Roughly seventy per cent of the Polish population registers survived the Second World War, which means absence of a record is common and is not evidence that citizenship was absent. The law recognises this: the obligation to produce supporting documents is expressly qualified where obtaining them meets obstacles that are hard to overcome. Indirect evidence carries weight – a document that never mentions citizenship may still establish it by implication.
Everything above rests on decided cases, not opinion
The propositions in this part of the page come from judgments of the Supreme Administrative Court, and several of them overturn what most English-language guidance still says. Each one is set out – holding, facts and citation – in the case-law section further down.
The confirmation procedure
The application asks a Voivode to issue a decision confirming that you possess Polish citizenship. The same procedure can also be used to confirm that citizenship was lost – which sounds perverse but is sometimes exactly what a client needs, and it means the application must state clearly which of the two findings is sought.
Which Voivode
The competent authority is the Voivode of your place of residence in Poland, or of your last place of residence in Poland. Only if there is no such place does the Mazowiecki Voivode in Warsaw take the case. Practitioners often simplify this to “always Warsaw”, which is wrong: if you yourself once lived in Kraków, your file belongs to the Małopolski Voivode. It is your own residence that counts, not your ancestor's.
Filing from abroad
If you live outside Poland you may file through a Polish consul, who forwards the application to the Voivode and later serves the decision on you. Most descent applications arrive this way. You do not need to travel to Poland to start – or, usually, to finish – the procedure, and you may act through a Polish lawyer under a power of attorney.
Step one
Establish the chain on paper – who held Polish citizenship, and whether any link broke it.
Step two
Archive research in Poland and abroad, and Polish civil-registry copies where the records exist.
Step three
The application, on the prescribed form, with the evidence and a statement of the material circumstances.
Step four
The Voivode's decision – and, where the answer is wrong, the appeal.
Evidence, archives and proof
The statutory rule is that the applicant must attach documents confirming the information in the application – unless obtaining them meets obstacles that are difficult to overcome. That qualification is the difference between a workable procedure and an impossible one, and it is regularly the hinge of a well-argued case.
| Where records live | What they can prove |
|---|---|
| Civil registry offices (USC) | Births, marriages and deaths. Polish civil-registry copies are the backbone of most claims. |
| State archives | Permanent population registers – the records that speak directly to who became a citizen of the new Polish state. Around 70% survived the war. |
| Central Military Archive | Military records. Indexed by unit and, for the interwar period, largely for officers – which makes searches for other ranks genuinely difficult. |
| Consular and ministerial files | Passport applications, consular registrations, correspondence about citizenship – often the only surviving proof that an ancestor was treated as Polish. |
| Family papers | Old passports and travel documents, military booklets, employment records, professional licences, letters. Indirect evidence counts. |
A document need not mention citizenship to prove it. Service in the Polish army presupposed Polish citizenship. So did a Polish passport, a place on an electoral roll, or a state professional licence. Where the direct record is gone – and for families from regions devastated in the war it very often is – the case is built from documents that establish citizenship by implication. That is ordinary legal work, not a last resort.
Fees and how long it takes
Both the fees and the statutory deadline changed in 2025 and 2026. Any guidance written before August 2025 states the wrong figures.
| Item | Amount | In force from |
|---|---|---|
| Stamp duty on the decision confirming possession or loss of citizenship | PLN 277 previously PLN 58 | 1 August 2025 |
| Stamp duty on a power of attorney | PLN 17 | exempt for close family |
| Consular fee where the application is filed through a consul | EUR 100 | 1 January 2026 |
To those official charges you should add the real costs of a descent case: archive searches in Poland and abroad, certified copies of civil-registry records, sworn translations, and legal fees. These vary enormously with how much of the family record survives.
Timing – and an honest answer
Since 1 August 2025 there has been an express statutory deadline of six months for the Voivode to decide, and it applies to cases already pending as well as to new ones. Before that, the general administrative deadlines of one or two months applied in theory and were routinely exceeded in practice.
The six months is not the whole story, and we would rather say so.
The clock excludes periods spent waiting for documents from other institutions, periods of suspension, delays caused by the applicant, and circumstances outside the authority's control. In a descent case those exclusions cover exactly the slow part – archive enquiries that can take many months on their own.
A straightforward file with complete documents can be decided within the statutory period. A case that requires tracing records across several countries, or in which the Voivode contends that an ancestor lost citizenship, commonly takes substantially longer, and a contested matter that runs to appeal and then to court can take years. In practice the six months is exceeded more often than it is met, and how long you actually wait depends materially on which Voivode office holds your file – caseloads differ sharply between voivodeships, and the office that receives most applications filed from abroad carries the heaviest backlog of all. Anyone who offers you a guaranteed timetable at the outset is guessing.
Where the authority simply exceeds its deadline without good reason, the remedy is a formal ponaglenie – a request to expedite – addressed to the higher authority, followed if necessary by a complaint to the administrative court for inaction.
If confirmation is refused
A refusal is not the end of the matter, and in this field it is frequently not even a good indication of the answer. The route upward is well trodden.
First
Appeal to the Minister
To the Minister of the Interior and Administration, lodged through the Voivode, within 14 days of service of the decision.
Then
Administrative court
A complaint to the Voivodeship Administrative Court in Warsaw within 30 days of service of the Minister's decision, lodged through the Minister.
Finally
Supreme Administrative Court
A cassation appeal within 30 days of service of the judgment with written reasons – which must themselves be requested. It must be drafted by an advocate or legal adviser.
The deadlines are short and they run from service, not from the date printed on the decision. For an applicant abroad, where a decision travels through a consulate, a fortnight disappears quickly. If a refusal arrives, treat it as urgent even if you intend only to think about it.
Four routes to Polish citizenship, compared
Confirmation is only one of four. Choosing the wrong one wastes years, and the differences are not subtle.
| Route | Decides | Who it is for | Live in Poland? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Confirmation | Voivode | You are already a citizen by descent and need it declared. Effective back to birth. | No |
| Restoration | Minister of the Interior | People who lost Polish citizenship before 1 January 1999 under the old statutes. Restores it to that person – so it helps where the ancestor is still living. | No |
| Recognition | Voivode | Foreigners who have lived in Poland lawfully for a qualifying period, with stable income and housing. Normally requires a certified B1 Polish language certificate. | Yes |
| Presidential grant | The President | Anyone. Entirely discretionary and subject to no statutory conditions – and with no appeal of any kind against a refusal. | No |
A note on the reform debate. In January 2026 the Sejm rejected at first reading a bill that would have tightened the recognition route considerably – a ten-year residence requirement, C1 language, a citizenship examination. The existing rules stand, and further debate is expected. None of it concerned confirmation by descent, which is the route on this page. Headlines about “Poland tightening citizenship” have alarmed a good many people whose claims are entirely unaffected.
After confirmation
The decision is the foundation, not the finish. Three things usually follow.
Registering the records
Foreign birth and marriage certificates are transcribed into the Polish civil registry, which is what allows Polish documents to be issued in your name.
PESEL and identity documents
A Polish identity number, then a Polish identity card or passport – and with it the right to live, work and study anywhere in the European Union.
The rest of the family
If you are a citizen by descent, your children are too, by the same rule – and the evidential work is already done. Siblings and cousins often follow the same file.
Case law: what the courts have held
Citizenship by descent is, to an unusual degree, a case-law subject. The statutes are short and old, and the answers come from how the Supreme Administrative Court has read them across decades of litigation. These are judgments we work with directly. They cut in both directions – some open claims that look closed, others close claims that look open – and each heading below states what the judgment actually decides.
Loss of citizenship
The order in which the two citizenships arose decides whether Polish citizenship was lost+
Loss under the 1920 Act assumed a sequence: Polish citizenship first, a foreign one afterwards. Where the foreign citizenship came first, or where both arose in the same instant, there was no loss, because the rule had nothing to bite on. The Act’s opening provision was never a general ban on dual nationality – it meant only that Polish authorities would treat a dual national as exclusively Polish.
Decided on a mother born out of wedlock in Argentina, Argentine by birthplace from the day of her birth, who became Polish only when her parents later married and she was legitimated. The Court applied to Argentina a 1925 Ministry of the Interior circular written for persons born and naturalised in America, and stated the reasoning in general terms rather than tying it to one country.
Supreme Administrative Court, 19 December 2022 · II OSK 2095/21
The family-unity rule did not suspend loss, and did not reach every child+
A father’s acquisition or loss of Polish citizenship extended to his wife and to his legitimate children under eighteen. But that rule cannot be read as suspending a loss until a child came of age – an argument applicants sometimes run, and it does not work.
It also has limits of scope that matter in practice: it does not reach a child born out of wedlock who takes the mother’s citizenship, nor a widow. Where a chain runs through either, the rule cannot be invoked in the family’s favour – or against it.
Supreme Administrative Court, 19 December 2022 · II OSK 2095/21
Acquisition and descent
A child already foreign by birth was not swept in by general recognition – even though the parents were+
The 1920 Act had two quite different routes into citizenship, and they behave differently. The route that recognised the existing population of the reborn Polish State applied only to people not already entitled to another state’s citizenship – and that condition was applied to children in their own right, independently of their parents.
So a child born in the United States before the Act came into force, American by birthplace from the day of birth, did not become Polish under it even though his parents did. The same 1925 circular was relied on here – this time against the applicant. The generous reading of the loss rule belongs to acquisition by birth and legitimation; it does not rescue a claim that depends on the general-recognition route. Getting a family onto the correct limb of the 1920 Act is often the whole case.
Supreme Administrative Court, 6 March 2018 · II OSK 1176/16
Evidence, identity and proof
Polish citizenship must be proved by documents; it cannot be presumed+
Citizenship must emerge from documents; it cannot be inferred from probability. Foreign immigration papers compiled solely from the applicant’s own statements, without source records and never verified – a marriage licence, a declaration of intention – are at most an indication that something may have happened, and need corroboration by proper official records. The discrepancy between two such American documents as to a date of birth was itself treated as showing why they could not stand alone.
Indirect evidence remains admissible in principle. But derivative foreign documents not built on source records cannot establish a parent’s Polish citizenship, and the complete absence of any Polish identity document could not be passed over.
Supreme Administrative Court, 21 January 2025 · II OSK 956/22
Confirmation requires the applicant to be identifiable beyond dispute+
A decision confirming citizenship must rest exclusively on evidence that identifies the applicant beyond dispute. It cannot be built on divergent data – conflicting dates and places of birth, uncertainty about the identity of the biological father, or about whether the applicant was born in or out of wedlock. A person’s public-law status cannot be settled on material that points in several directions at once.
Birth, place and parentage are to be proved by civil-registry records, which are the exclusive evidence of the events recorded in them. That is not as harsh as it sounds: the facts those records contain may also be shown by other documents evidencing the same events – which is what makes cases winnable where the register itself was destroyed.
Supreme Administrative Court, 15 April 2015 · II OSK 2292/13
Contradictory accounts of your own identity will defeat the application+
Where an applicant gives contradictory information about their own identity, the discrepancies are never resolved, and no document unambiguously shows that Polish citizenship was acquired and retained, confirmation must be refused.
The authority must investigate of its own motion and must call on the applicant to supplement the evidence before deciding against them. But the applicant carries the burden in the material sense – meaning they bear the consequences of a fact left unproved – and is expected to cooperate actively rather than leave the file to the office.
Supreme Administrative Court, 8 November 2013 · II OSK 1291/12
What the last three have in common is worth noticing. None of them turned on a point of citizenship law at all. They were lost on identity and documents – a name spelled two ways, a date that moved between records, a father who could not be pinned down. In a field where the events in issue are eighty or a hundred years old, and the records were kept in several languages under several administrations, that is where cases are actually decided. It is also the part a lawyer can do something about, long before anyone argues about the 1920 Act.
One genuinely unsettled question. Israeli citizenship was conferred on immigrants with retroactive effect by a statute of 1952. Whether that retroactively-conferred citizenship counts as having been acquired before 19 January 1951 – and so falls under the 1920 Act’s automatic loss rule rather than the 1951 Act’s permission requirement – is exactly the line between a claim that fails and one that succeeds for a large number of families. We do not present either answer as settled, because it is not. If your family history runs through Israel, this is the point on which your case will most likely turn, and it deserves argument rather than assumption.
How our lawyers help
KRASUSKI Legal is a boutique firm built around immigration and citizenship law. We have handled several thousand immigration matters for clients from all over the world, and we act for descendants of Polish emigrants across the Americas, Israel, Western Europe, South Africa and Australia. The cases divide fairly cleanly into those where the documents exist and the work is procedural, and those where they do not and the work is forensic and legal.
Before you commit
- An honest assessment of whether the chain holds – including telling you when it does not
- Identifying the exact event that puts the claim at risk, and what would answer it
- Archive research in Poland and, where needed, through foreign institutions
- Advice on whether confirmation, restoration or another route fits your situation
Through the procedure
- Preparing and filing the application, with or through a consul, under a power of attorney
- Answering the Voivode's enquiries and meeting evidential objections
- Appeals to the Minister and proceedings before the administrative courts
- Civil-registry transcription, PESEL and passport applications afterwards
Frequently asked questions
How many generations back can I go?+
There is no limit in Polish law. Claims through great-grandparents are routine and we have acted on claims reaching further back than that. What matters is not the number of generations but whether every link held – and, practically, whether the records still exist. The application form asks for ancestors to the second degree, which is a requirement of the form, not a restriction on the claim.
Do I have to give up my current citizenship?+
No. Poland permits dual citizenship, and confirmation asks nothing of your other nationality. The one thing to check is the law of your other country, since a minority of states restrict dual nationality – that is a question for a lawyer there, not in Poland.
Do I need to speak Polish, or live in Poland?+
Neither. Language certificates and residence requirements belong to the recognition route, which is for foreigners who have settled in Poland and are becoming citizens. You are not becoming anything – you are being confirmed as something you already are. The whole procedure can be conducted from abroad through a consul and a Polish lawyer.
My great-grandfather naturalised as an American. Is that the end of it?+
Not necessarily, and the answer turns on dates. If he naturalised after your grandparent was born, the citizenship had already passed and his later naturalisation does not reach back to undo it. If he naturalised before, look next at whether he was subject to Polish compulsory military service and had never been released from it – because in that case Polish law did not treat him as having ceased to be a citizen. Two questions, two documents, and a claim that looked dead is often alive.
My grandmother married a foreigner. I was told that ended the line.+
You were told something that is widely repeated and frequently wrong. Marriage in itself never caused loss under Polish law. She lost her citizenship only if her husband's national law gave her his citizenship automatically when they married. If it did not – as in the United States from September 1922 onwards – she stayed Polish and so did the line. This needs checking against the husband's national law at the date of the wedding; it should never be assumed either way.
My family left Poland in 1968 and were told they were no longer citizens.+
In most cases they remained Polish citizens throughout, whatever the travel document said. Permission to change citizenship had to be an individual act naming the person concerned; a general resolution covering a class of emigrants was not enough. Unless an individual act exists in that person's name, the loss was legally ineffective – and confirmation should follow for them and for their descendants. Where an individual act does exist, restoration of citizenship is the alternative route.
We have no Polish documents at all. Is it hopeless?+
Usually not. Around thirty per cent of the relevant Polish records were destroyed in the war, and the law acknowledges as much: the duty to produce documents is qualified where obtaining them meets obstacles that are hard to overcome. Cases are built from what survives elsewhere – civil-registry copies, population registers, consular files, military papers, ships' manifests, foreign naturalisation records – and from documents that establish citizenship by implication rather than by stating it.
Was my claim affected by the citizenship reforms in the news?+
No. The proposals that attracted attention – longer residence, a harder language requirement, a citizenship examination – concerned recognition, the route for foreigners settled in Poland. The bill was rejected at first reading in January 2026 in any event. Citizenship by descent was never in question, and it is difficult to change: your status arises from events that happened decades ago under the law as it then stood.
What does confirmation actually give me?+
A decision stating that you are a Polish citizen, effective back to your birth rather than from the date of the decision. With it you can transcribe your foreign civil-registry records into the Polish registry, obtain a PESEL number, and apply for a Polish identity card and passport – and, because Poland is a Member State, live, work and study anywhere in the European Union. Your children hold the same status by the same rule.
Your attorney
Konrad Krasuski – Attorney at law
KRASUSKI Legal advises on Polish citizenship and immigration law: confirmation of citizenship by descent, restoration, recognition, civil-registry transcription, appeals against refusals and proceedings before the administrative courts. If you are not sure whether your family's chain holds, that is the question we answer first – and we would rather tell you early that it does not than take you through two years of archive work to the same conclusion.
Warsaw: +48 502 115 589 Wrocław: +48 71 719 59 08
Mobile: +48 736 860 916 office@krasuski.legal
Legal status as of September 2026. This article is general information and does not constitute legal advice for an individual case. Whether a particular family chain holds depends on facts and on foreign law, and can only be assessed on the documents.
Warsaw Office
How can we help? 
