Polish Citizenship through Great-Grandparents
Are You Eligible?
Unlike the law of certain other European states, Polish citizenship law sets no upper limit on the number of generations for the transmission of citizenship by blood.
Consequently, a person whose great-grandparent was a Polish citizen may, in principle, be eligible, provided the genealogical chain from the ancestor to the applicant remains unbroken — meaning that neither the grandparent nor the parent lost Polish citizenship before the birth of the next link in the chain.
Unlike the law of certain other European states, Polish citizenship law sets no upper limit on the number of generations for the transmission of citizenship by blood. Consequently, a person whose great-grandparent was a Polish citizen may, in principle, be eligible, provided the genealogical chain from the ancestor to the applicant remains unbroken — meaning that neither the grandparent nor the parent lost Polish citizenship before the birth of the next link in the chain.
In these cases, archival research is typically more demanding, as it extends into earlier time periods where records may have been destroyed, relocated, or may now lie outside Poland's present-day borders, due to the territorial changes that followed World War II.
Special attention is required when the great-grandparent's emigration took place before 31 January 1920, the date the first unified Polish citizenship law entered into force — in these cases, specialist examination of the record is needed to determine whether and how citizenship was originally acquired.