10 Tips for Finding Your Family on Passenger Manifests

Published on by Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz5 Comments

Those of us with ancestors who immigrated to America in the 19th and early 20th centuries know how valuable passenger manifests can be, as they often provide the name of the immigrant’s place of birth. We also know how frustrating it can sometimes be to find those immigrants in indexed databases such as Ellis Island and Ancestry. Today I’d like to review some basic concepts regarding passenger manifests, and then share a few tips for finding your ancestors in those databases.

Types of Manifests:  Embarkation vs. Arrival

It helps to begin with an understanding of the manifests themselves and how they were created. There’s a persistent myth in American culture that names were changed at Ellis Island. This article explains more fully why that isn’t true, but the short version is that the manifests were recorded at the port of embarkation, and Ellis Island officials were merely working from those original lists. Many of these manifests recorded at ports of embarkation did not survive. For example, most of the Bremen lists were destroyed due to lack of space in the Bremen Archives. However, the Hamburg emigration lists recorded between 1850-1934 have largely survived, and sometimes it’s possible to find both the outgoing Hamburg manifest and the incoming Port of New York manifest for the same immigrant.

Types of Errors:  Original vs. Transcription

There are undoubtedly errors in spelling and transliteration that occurred on these passenger manifests, but most of the name changes that people attribute to “Ellis Island” were adopted by the immigrants themselves as part of their efforts to assimilate into American culture. In my experience, far more dramatic spelling errors were created during the process of transcribing and indexing the passenger manifests to create a searchable database, than occurred during the original recording of the manifests. I don’t want to place too much blame on the indexers here, as they’re faced with a formidable task. Anyone who’s ever looked at a passenger manifest knows that the handwriting can be cramped and illegible, the manifest might have been torn, taped, or faded, and the microfilmed image might be blurry or grainy. Combine this with the fact that you might see on the same page immigrants from a variety of different countries, each with its own language and maybe its own alphabet, and it’s immediately clear that indexers are brave and hardy heroes, indeed.

Faced with all these obstacles, how do we find our immigrant ancestors on those manifests?

1. Use wild-card searches.

If you have a subscription to Ancestry (or can access it at your local public library or Family History Center), you can search their immigration database using wildcard characters. Ancestry‘s directions state,

“An asterisk “*” replaces zero or more characters, and a question mark “?” replaces exactly one character. For example, a search for “fran*” will return matches on words like “Fran,” “Franny,” or “Frank.” A search for “Johns?n” matches “Johnson” and “Johnsen,” but not “Johnston.”

2. Try leaving off the surname entirely.

In cases where I suspect a surname has been butchered in the transcription, I sometimes omit it entirely, and search for the immigrant based on other identifying information.  For example, I could search for my great-grandmother, Weronika Grzesiak, by looking for a female passenger named Weronika, born about 1876, stating Polish ethnicity, arriving about 1898.

3. Play with the search parameters.

If your parameters are too specific, you get too few hits, but if they’re too broad, you get too many, so try tinkering with them one by one. Sometimes male passengers are marked as female and vice versa, sometimes first and last names are reversed, and that “race/nationality” box is tricky for Poles, who might be marked as Polish, Russian, German, or Austrian. Be flexible.

4. Determine your ancestor’s name at the time of immigration before you search.

I’d bet a million dollars that a Polish ancestor named “Walter Cherry” will not be listed under that name on his passenger manifest. There’s a good chance you’d find him under “Władysław Wiśniewski,” though. That’s because many of our ancestors adopted new given names, or new versions of their surnames, as part of their efforts to assimilate into American culture. Some common name changes among Polish-Americans were Władysław to Walter, Stanisław to Stanley, Czesław to Chester, Bronisław to Bruno, and Wojciech to Albert or George. For women, common changes include Jadwiga to Ida or Hattie, Władysława to Lottie or Charlotte, Pelagia to Pearl, and Bronisława to Bertha. These are generalizations, and it’s important to recognize that there were no hard and fast rules. You need to do research into your own family history to determine the names that your immigrant ancestors used. (See here for my story of my challenge in finding the passenger manifest for an immigrant who used Edward in the U.S. when his real name was Stanisław!) For Polish ancestors who settled in the U.S., try checking church records from the parish they attended here, as those are frequently a good clue to their original names.

5. Familiarize yourself with spelling and pronunciation rules in your ancestor’s native language.

In Polish, “Szcz” is a common combination of two digraphs (sz and cz), and there are a lot of surnames that start this way. In contrast, surnames that start with “Lz” are quite rare (I found exactly one example, Lzarewicz, which belonged to exactly 1 person in Poland as of 1990, in this database). So when your search results at Ellis Island or Ancestry include results for passengers with names like “Lzczerba,” “Lzcrepaniak,” and “Lzcsepansky,” you can bet that those names are misspelled and actually start with “S.” In these examples, when I checked the original image of the manifest, those names were clearly Szczerba, Szczepaniak, and Szczepansky.

6. Databases index differently, so if you can’t find your ancestor in one database, check another.

My husband’s great-grandfather had a sister named Marcjanna Szczepankiewicz who was indexed on Ellis Island as “Marcyanna Sezezefsankiewiez” and on Ancestry as “Marcyanna Sczezyoankiemg.” On the manifest, the surname is clearly “Szczepankiewicz,” so this is a case of the indexers having no familiarity with Polish surnames. Even better, in looking up those examples, I came across one poor guy who was indexed on Ancestry as a 24-year-old Ruthenian woman named  “Fazel Lzczzvca.” I took a look at the actual manifest, and the passenger was a 24-year-old Ruthenian man named Józef Szczyrba. I didn’t have the heart to see how he was indexed on Ellis Island, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

7. Give Steve Morse’s site a try.

If you’re not familiar with Steve Morse’s website, you’re missing out. He’s got a variety of very helpful tools for genealogists, including resources for translations, DNA, searching census records, and a search portal for the different immigration databases (both free, like Ellis Island and Castle Garden, and paid, like Ancestry). I used to use his search portal all the time back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, because it was far superior to Ellis Island‘s search portal for the same data. But to be honest, a lot has changed since then, and both Ancestry and Ellis Island now offer fairly powerful, flexible search parameters that are comparable to Steve Morse’s. However, you may find that his search page is laid out in a more intuitive fashion, so it can’t hurt to try if you’re not having luck with the other search engines.

 8. If you already know your ancestor’s hometown but you still can’t find his manifest, try searching according to place of origin.

This technique is not only useful for finding missing manifests, but also can sometimes be used to gain insight into the family groups in your ancestral village. For example, one of my ancestral parishes is Młodzieszyn in Sochaczew County, Poland. Records for Młodzieszyn were largely destroyed in World War II, leaving only records from 1885-1908. So, my understanding of my family history there is very incomplete. However, I’ve discovered that passenger records can offer a surprising amount of information to help fill in some of these blanks. Manifests for emigrants from Młodzieszyn have given me their names, approximate birth dates, and the names and relationships of contacts in the new world (often family members), as well as the names and relationships of family members still living in their former home town. Many of these emigrants were born before 1885 when existing birth records for Młodzieszyn begin, so their passenger manifests are incredibly useful in constructing family groups. Of course, one problem with this is that the hometown is just as likely to be misspelled as the passenger’s name, but it’s still worth a shot.

9. If your ancestor has a common name but he immigrated with other family members, try searching for the manifest using the family member with the least common name.

For example, “Nowak” is the most common Polish surname there is, so if your great-grandfather was Jan Nowak, you’ll probably have to wade through a lot of manifests to find the right one.  But if you have reason to believe that he emigrated at the same time as his wife, Pelagia, try searching for her instead.

10. If your ancestor naturalized after 1906, get his naturalization papers first, then try to find his manifest.

I was really stuck trying to find a manifest for my husband’s great-grandfather Joseph Bartoszewicz. He was supposed to have come in with a large family group, and I’d tried pretty much all the tips I mentioned here, but I just couldn’t tease the data out of the search engines. However, he naturalized in 1914, and after 1906, Petitions for Naturalization included questions about the person’s arrival date in the U.S., the port of entry, and the name of the ship. I obtained Joseph’s naturalization petition, which told me that he arrived on 12 October 1890 in the Port of Philadelphia on the ship Pennsylvania. Great! Only I still couldn’t find him, using that date as an exact search term. Further investigation revealed that Joseph reported his arrival date inaccurately — the Pennsylvania did not arrive in Philadelphia on 12 October 1890, but rather on the 13th. I finally found Joseph and his family by browsing through the manifest page by page.

If you’ve been struggling to find the right passenger manifests for your family, know that you’re not alone. It can certainly be frustrating sometimes, and we’ve all been there. But persistence and flexible search strategies will usually pay off. As always, I’m happy to hear from other researchers, so if you try some of these strategies and they work for you, or if you’d like to offer other suggestions, please leave a note in the comments.  Happy researching!

© Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz 2016

 

 

 

 

 

Playing “Telephone” Across Generations: Documenting Family Stories

Published on by Julie Roberts SzczepankiewiczLeave a comment

Family stories are always the starting point for genealogy research. Beginners are typically instructed to start with themselves and work backwards, interviewing older family members or generational peers to discover what they remember, or remember hearing, about past generations. Often it feels like a game of “telephone” played out over many decades. You may remember “telephone” as that game in which a number of players stand in a circle, and a complicated phrase is whispered from one person to the next. Repetition is not allowed, so although each person does his best to listen carefully, the phrase becomes distorted, often comically, as it is passed around. Finally the result is whispered to the person who began the game, who announces what the original phrase actually was, and everyone gets a good laugh. As family historians, our job is to sift out the wheat from the chaff, using our ancestors’ paper trail to document what we can from the family stories, but keeping in mind that not everything we were told is going to be verifiable.

I became interested in my family history soon after I was married in 1991. My husband and I were incredibly fortunate to have six living grandparents at that time, as well as plenty of their siblings still living. As I’ve tried to document all the many bits of information I gathered from them, one truth in particular has emerged:  if an older relative remembers a specific name, it’s safe to say that the person is connected to the family in some way, even if it’s not in the way that he or she remembers. Remembered names aren’t just pulled out of thin air.

As one example of this, I interviewed Uncle Mike Stevenson (Szczepankiewicz) about the Szczepankiewicz family history. Uncle Mike was the youngest brother of my husband’s grandfather, Stephen Szczepankiewicz. Although he knew a great deal about his father from his mother’s stories, Uncle Mike had never met him: he died on 14 February 1926,1 and Uncle Mike was born 3 months later, on 23 May 1926.2 Nonetheless, Uncle Mike proved to be a reliable source. He told me that his father, Michael Szczepankiewicz, had never naturalized. This assertion is validated by the 1925 New York State census, in which Michael Szczepankiewicz is listed as an alien (Figure 1):3

Figure 1:  Extract of 1925 New York State census showing Michael Szczepankiewicz and family.3michael-szczepankiewicz-family-1925

This extract shows that 49-year-old Michael Szczepankiewicz was born in Poland, had been living in the U.S. for 20 years, was an alien (“al”) at the time of the census, and was employed in “building labor.” Since Michael died in 1926, and the naturalization process took longer than a year, it would not have been possible for him to naturalize prior to his death. Uncle Mike also mentioned that his father was a stone mason who helped to build Transfiguration Church in Buffalo. Although I have yet to document this directly (maybe payroll records exist in the archive of the diocese of Buffalo dating back to the construction of Transfiguration Church?), the fact that Michael was a construction laborer is consistent with that claim.

When I asked Uncle Mike about the family of his mother, Agnes (née Wolińska) Szczepankiewicz, he told me that Agnes’s mother was named Apolonia Bogacka. Unfortunately, this didn’t pan out. Records showed that Agnes’s mother’s name was Tekla, as shown by the 1892 census for New York State (Figure 2): 4

Figure 2:  Extract from 1892 census of New York State showing the family of Joseph Wolinski, including wife “Teckla” (sic).4wolinski-family-1892

So where did the name “Apolonia Bogacka” come from? The answer was found in the 1900 census (Figure 3).5  Living with Joseph Wolinski’s family is his mother-in-law, “Paline” Bogacka.  The name “Pauline” was commonly used by women named Apolonia in the U.S. as a more American-sounding equivalent.

Figure 3:  Extract from the 1900 U.S. Federal census showing the family of Joseph Wolinski, including mother-in-law “Paline” (sic) Bogacka.5joseph-wolinski-family-1900-census

So it turns out that Uncle Mike’s great-grandmother had also emigrated, and he was confusing her name with the name of his grandmother!

As another example, my grandfather’s first cousin, Jul Ziomek, told me in a 1992 interview that the mother of her grandmother, Mary (née Łącka) Klaus, was named Janina Unicka. Jul was a very reliable source in other matters, but in this case, her memory did not serve her well. The civil record for Mary Klaus’s second marriage, to Władysław Olszanowicz, tells us that her mother’s name was (phonetically) Anna “Taskavich” (Figure 4).6

Figure 4:  Civil marriage record from North Tonawanda, New York, for Mary Klaus and Władysław Olsanowic (sic).6mary-klaus-second-marriage

The correct spelling of Mary’s mother’s name in Polish is found on Mary’s baptismal record from her home village of Kołaczyce — she was Anna Ptaszkiewicz (Figure 5).7

Figure 5:  Baptismal record from Kołaczyce, Austrian Poland for Marianna Łącka.7marianna-lacka-birth

The section of the record in the red box pertains to the mother of the child and reads, “Anna filia Francisci Ptaszkiewicz ac Salomea nata Francisco Sasakiewicz.” For those who might be unfamiliar with Latin, this translates as “Anna, daughter of Franciszek Ptaszkiewicz and Salomea, daughter of Franciszek Sasakiewicz.”

Believe it or not, it’s quite reasonable, based on Polish phonetics, that an English speaker might come up with a spelling of “Taskevich”for “Ptaszkiewicz.”  But no matter how you slice it, this is pretty far off from “Janina Unicka.”  So where did Jul come up with that name? The 1910 census gives us a clue (Figure 6):8

Figure 6:  Andrew Klaus family in the 1910 U.S. Federal census.8andrew-klaus-fam-1910

Living with the family of Mary Klaus, there is a boarder named John Unicki.  At this point I have traced Mary Klaus’s family back in Poland for another 3-4 generations, which is as far back as existing vital records go, and I’ve seen no evidence of the Unicki surname anywhere in the extended family tree.  I’ve concluded that cousin Jul’s memory was inaccurate on this point. It must have been dim memories of this boarder, Jan Unicki, living with her grandparents that caused her to associate the name “Janina Unicka” with her grandmother’s family.

As one final example, my husband’s grandfather, Stephen Szczepankiewicz, told me that his father, Michael Szczepankiewicz, immigrated from Russian Poland to Buffalo, New York, along with four brothers and no sisters. He recalled the names of his father’s brothers as Bernard, Felix, Alexander and Joseph. It turns out that he was partially correct.  Further research indicates that his father did indeed have brothers who also emigrated from Poland to Buffalo who were named Bernard (Anglicized from Bronisław), Alexander, and Joseph.  What Grandpa didn’t know was that there were two more brothers who emigrated, Adam and Walter (also known as “Wadsworth” — both names are Anglicized versions of his Polish name, Władysław), as well as a sister, Marcjanna, who emigrated to Buffalo along with Bronisław and then disappears from records there (Figure 7):9

Figure 7:  Passenger manifest for Marcyanna and Bronisław Szczepankiewicz, arriving in the port of New York on 3 May 1902.9marcjanna-manifest-cropped

 

Try as I might, I could not document a brother named Felix/Feliks Szczepankiewicz, or find one with a name that was even close to that.  Why would Grandpa remember an Uncle Felix if there never was one? Well, it turns out that there was an Uncle Felix, but it was on his mother’s side, not his father’s side. Grandpa Steve’s mother was Agnes/Agnieszka Wolińska.  If we take a closer look at that 1892 census for the Woliński family shown in Figure 2 and the 1900 census shown in Figure 3, the oldest child in the family is Feliks.  So it seems likely that Grandpa was just mixing up which side of the family Uncle Feliks was from.

As is evident from these examples, family stories work best when used as a starting point for genealogy research, but we can’t let our research end there. Time can play tricks with people’s memories, so it’s important to attempt to document everything we’ve been told.  If conflicts exist between the story and the evidence, consider how these might be reconciled.  As you document each story, you’ll begin to get a sense of the reliabilty of each relative’s memory. If you have any particularly wild stories that you’ve been able to document, please let me know in the comments — I’d love to hear about them!

Sources:

1 Buffalo, Erie, New York, Death Certificates,1926, certificate #1029, record for Michael Sczepankiewicz (sic).

2 “United States Social Security Death Index,” database, FamilySearch(https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VMDV-RJ7 : 20 May 2014), Michael A Stevenson, 28 Apr 2011; citing U.S. Social Security Administration, Death Master File, database (Alexandria, Virginia: National Technical Information Service, ongoing), accessed on 8 November 2016.

3 Ancestry.com, New York, State Census, 1925 (Provo, UT, USA, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012), http://www.ancestry.com, Record for Stepahn Szczepankiewicz, accessed on 8 November 2016.

4 Ancestry.com, New York, State Census, 1892 (Provo, UT, USA, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012), http://www.ancestry.com, Record for Joseph Wolinski household, accessed on 8 November 2016.

5 Ancestry.com, 1900 United States Federal Census (Provo, UT, USA, Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2004), http://www.ancestry.com, Year: 1900; Census Place: Buffalo Ward 9, Erie, New York; Roll: T623_1026; Page: 6A; Enumeration District: 69, record for Joseph Wolinski household, accessed on 8 November 2016.

6 “New York, County Marriages, 1847-1848; 1908-1936″, database, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Family Search, (https://familysearch.org), Wladyslaw Olsanowic and Mary Klaus, 21 Nov 1916; citing county clerk’s office, , New York, United States; FHL microfilm 897,558. accessed on 8 November 2016.

7 Roman Catholic Church, St. Anna’s Parish (Kołaczyce, Jasło, Podkarpackie, Poland), “Urodzenia, 1826-1889”, Stare Kopie, 1866, #20, Record for Marianna Łącka.

8 Ancestry.com, 1910 United States Federal Census (Provo, UT, USA, Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006), http://www.ancestry.com, Year: 1910; Census Place: North Tonawanda Ward 3, Niagara, New York; Roll: T624_1049; Page: 16B; Enumeration District: 0126; FHL microfilm: 1375062, record for Andrew Klaus, accessed on 8 November 2016.

9 Ancestry.com, New York, Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 (Provo, UT, USA, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010), http://www.ancestry.com, Year: 1902; Arrival: New York, New York; Microfilm Serial: T715, 1897-1957; Microfilm Roll: Roll 0272; Line: 5; Page Number: 132, record for Marcyanna Sczezyoankiemg, accessed on 8 November 2016.

The Walsh family of St. Catharines in the Parish Census

Published on by Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz1 Comment

Recently, I wrote about census records in Poland, and the kinds of census records one might find. One type of census record that I mentioned is called the status animarum in Latin, and it’s a parish census that the pastor would conduct annually as he took stock of his parishioners’ spiritual well-being. These types of censuses were conducted throughout the Catholic Church, not just in Poland. Some of them happen to be available online — namely, parish census records from the Cathedral of St. Catherine of Alexandria in St. Catharines, Ontario, which was the home parish of my Walsh ancestors.

Meet the Walshes

The featured photo is a copy of an old tintype photo of four generations of the Walsh family, circa 1905. On the far left is Elizabeth (née Hodgkinson) Walsh (1818-1907), my great-great-great-grandmother, and on the far right is her son (my great-great-grandfather), Henry Walsh (1847-1907). Next to Henry is his oldest daughter, Marion (née Walsh) Frank (1878-1954), and next to her is her daughter, Alice Marion Frank. The image was cleaned up a bit courtesy of Jordan Sakal in the Genealogists’ Photo Restoration Group on Facebook.

The Walshes were an interesting bunch. My great-great-great-grandfather, Robert Walsh (1808-1881), was a Roman Catholic immigrant from Ireland to Canada who arrived some time before 1840 and worked as a tailor. Around 1840, he married Elizabeth Hodgkinson (1818-1907), an Anglican native of Ontario, and a granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Loyalists. Census records show that Robert and Elizabeth had 9 children: B. Maria, James George (later known as George James), Henry, Mary Ann, Robert, Elizabeth, Ellen (also known as Nellie), Thomas J. (baptized as John), and Joseph P. (baptized as Peter Joseph). Unfortunately, baptismal records have only been discovered for three of these: Elizabeth, Thomas J., and Joseph P., all of whom were baptized in the Cathedral of St. Catherine of Alexandria. It’s likely that their parents were married there as well. The parish was certainly in existence circa 1840 when the Walshes were married, but unfortunately, early records were destroyed when an arsonist burned down the original wooden church in 1842.1 No one seems to know what became of the records created after the fire, between 1842 and 1851. The earliest records that have survived date back to 1852 (baptisms and marriages only). Apparently, duplicate copies of the parish registers were never made, and neither the parish itself, nor the archives for the dioceses of Toronto (to which the parish belonged before 1958) or St. Catharines (to which the parish belonged after 1958) is in possession of any records from before 1852.2,3,4

As is evident from the list of their children’s names, the Walsh family had a propensity for switching first and middle names, and they also used variations of their surname indifferently, appearing as Walsh, Welsh, and Welch. One example of this can be seen in Figures 1 and 2, which show the grave marker that Elizabeth Walsh shares with her husband and youngest son (Joseph P), in comparison with her newspaper death notice.

Figure 1:  Walsh monument in Victoria Lawn Cemetery for Robert, Elizabeth, and youngest son Joseph P. Walsh. The inscription for Elizabeth reads, “Elizabeth/Wife of/Robert Walsh/Died/Jan. 1, 1907/Aged 89 Years/Rest in Peace.” Photo courtesy of Carol Roberts Fischer.

elizabeth-walsh-grave-inscription

Although the name appears as “Walsh” on the family monument, both her newspaper death notice5 and her death certificate6 report her name as Elizabeth Welch (Figure 3):

Figure 2:  Death notice from the Buffalo Evening News for Elizabeth Welch, 3 January 1907.5

elizabeth-welch-obit-buffalo-evening-news-wed-2-jan-1907-crop

With so much variation in spellings of names, and with a surname that is so common to start with, particularly in St. Catharines, which was home to a large Irish immigrant population, one must proceed with caution when examining any records that might potentially pertain to this family. Canadian census records, city directories, and church records all show a number of different Walsh, Welsh and Welch families which may or may not be related to my own. This parish census collection was no exception.

Identifying the Walsh Family in the Parish Census

Once I started searching the parish census, it didn’t take long to find this record (Figure 4):

Figure 4:  Walsh family in the 1885-1886 Status Animarum for St. Catherine of Alexandria parish, St. Catharines, Ontario.walsh-family-status-animarum-cropped-marked

This shows a Mrs. Walsh with sons Thomas and Robert. Not a lot of information to go on, but I’m sure these are mine, for several reasons. First, Mr. Walsh is not mentioned, consistent with the fact that the census is from 1885-1886 and “my” Robert Walsh died in 1881. Second, the entries on this page all seem to be families living on Lake Street, which is where my Walshes were listed on several city directories as having residence (Figure 5):7

Figure 5:  “Welch” entries in St. Catharines City Directory, 1877-78.7dir-of-st-cath-1877-78-thorold-merriton-port-dalhousie

The above entries for “Welch” include Robert, a merchant tailor, and his sons, Henry, a teamster, and Robert, Jr., who was co-owner of the “Rogers and Welch” livery service, all living at 34 Lake Street. This is consistent with the parish census, which indicates that the mother, “Mrs. Walsh,” is (or was) a tailor. The fact that the word “tailor” is crossed out may suggest a correction made by the priest, due to the fact that her late husband was a tailor but she herself was living as a dependent of her sons at that point. Thomas was originally recorded as being occupied in the livery business, but this, too, is crossed out, and corrected to “tailor.” The second son, Robert, is recorded as being employed in the livery business, consistent with the information from the city directory.

The family’s religious observance is recorded in the next column with Elizabeth being described as “careless” in her Mass attendance, while her sons were apparently not practicing. Perhaps by way of explanation, the priest noted in the final column that she was “a convert” and added, “three mixed marriages:  James — Main Street/Henry Lake Street/Mrs. Divine at Henry’s.” This notation points to the other ecumenical marriages in the family at that time:  Elizabeth’s son, James George married Jane Lawder, a Protestant; her son Henry married Martha Agnes Dodds, also Protestant, and daughter Ellen (“Nellie”) married Charles DeVere (recorded here as “Divine”). On the preceding page in the book, we find the family of Henry Walsh (Figure 6):

Figure 6:  Henry Walsh family in the 1885-1886 Status Animarum for St. Catherine of Alexandria parish, St. Catharines, Ontario.henry-walsh-family-1885-parish-census-cropped-marked

Henry Walsh is listed as a carter here, consistent with other sources which stated his occupation as teamster. His wife’s name is not stated here, but his wife, Martha Agnes Dodds, was Protestant. The child living with them, “Maud,” is noted to be 8 years old and attending day school. This suggests that “Maud” is their oldest daughter, Marion, who was born in 1878. It’s unclear why none of their other children are mentioned, since Henry and Martha’s daughters Clara and Katherine were born in 1880 and 1883, respectively. The other couple living with them, “Chas. Divine and Mrs. Divine,” are undoubtedly Henry’s sister, Ellen “Nellie” and her husband, Charles DeVere, also known as Charles Dolphin or Charles Dolfin. Although this is another fine example of variant surname spellings run amuck, their civil marriage record (Figure 7) shows that the groom was Protestant and the bride was Catholic, consistent with the notation about a “mixed marriage” on the parish census record.

Figure 7:  Civil marriage record for Nellie Welch and Charles Dolphinnellie-welch-and-charles-dolphin-1883-civil-marriage-marked

Although the original parish census entry for “Mrs. Walsh” mentioned the family of James Walsh, living on Main Street, there is no corresponding entry for this family in the parish census book, nor was Main Street listed as an address for any families in the census book.  It’s possible that these addresses would have belonged to another parish in St. Catharines since there were several Catholic parishes in St. Catharines by the mid-1880s.

Parish census records are unlikely to provide any earth-shattering new data in areas in which other census records survive. Nonetheless, they may offer some useful insights to add to our understanding of our families within their local communities. If you have Catholic ancestors from St. Catharines, be sure to check out this collection to see what you might find!

Sources

1 “Roman Catholic Diocese of Saint Catharines.” Wikipedia. Accessed October 21, 2016. https://www.wikipedia.org/.

2 Price, Rev. Brian. Archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kingston. E-mail message to author. July 7, 2016.

3 Sweetapple, Lori. Archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto.  E-mail message to author, July 11, 2016.

4 Wilson-Zorzetto, Liz. Archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of St. Catharines.  E-mail message to the author, July 14, 2016.

5 Death notice for Elizabeth Welch, January 3, 1907, http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html, Buffalo Evening News, Buffalo, New York, online images.

6 Buffalo, Erie, New York, Death Certificates, 1907, #198, record for Elizabeth Welch.

7 Leavenworth, E.S., ed. “Welch” in Directory of St. Catharines, Thorold, Merriton, and Port Dalhousie, for 1877-78. St. Catharines: Leavenworth, 1877. 79.

© Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz 2016

5 Places Online to Find Polish Census Records

Published on by Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz5 Comments

In my last post, I discussed some of the reasons why census records from Poland aren’t the first-stop, go-to source that they are for many of us when researching our ancestors in America.  This is not to suggest that it’s not possible to find census records of one type or another for your ancestors in Poland, and as genealogists, we like to leave no stone unturned, gathering every bit of data we can about our ancestors.  However, existing census records may not be indexed by surname, meaning that it will take more effort on the part of the researcher to find these records, since one might have to browse through them page by page.  More importantly, there’s no single name under which census-type data will consistently appear, so researchers should try several different search terms.  And as always, the most imporant consideration isn’t what the records are called or whether they’re indexed — it’s whether or not any have survived and are available for one’s town or village of interest.

Meldunkowe.genealodzy.pl

So where can one find these records?  Online sources are limited, but one developing resource is the Meldunkowe database hosted by the Polskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne.  Meldunkowe is a sister database to the popular databases Geneteka and Metryki, and at present, it only includes records for 37 locations, 31 of which are in the Kujawsko-Pomorskie province.  There are an additional 3 sets of records from the Wielkopolskie province, as well as 3 more collections from a handful of parishes in Ukraine.  Most of the records fall under the category of “Księgi Ludności Stałej” (“Books of the Permanent Population”), although a few other types of records (e.g. passport applications) are included as well.  The collections from Ukraine are all parish census records.  In some cases, indexes do exist for the Księgi Ludności Stałej — look for the word “skorowidz” (index) and brush up on reading your ancestors’ names in Cyrillic cursive, because many of these indexes (as well as the records themselves) are in Russian.

Szukajwarchiwach

Another possible source for online census-type records is the old standby, Szukajwarchiwach.  If you have never used this resource, it’s probably best to start with the quick tutorial offered here.  There are a number of different ways to search for records.  One might start with one’s town of interest with or without a keyword like “Spis” to help narrow the search results.  Polish diacritics are not required with this site. Since you’re looking for census records, be sure that you don’t check the box for “vital records and civil registers” (old habits die hard….).  As discussed previously, census-type records can be called by different names, e.g. “Księgi Ludności Stałej,” “Spis parafian,” “spis parafialny,” “Ewidencje Ludności,” “Regestr Ludonosci,” etc., so you might try searching using several different keywords.  Keep in mind that there might be more than one place in Poland with the same name.  For example, one of my ancestral villages is Zagórów in Słupca County, but a search for “zagorow spis” at Szukajwarchiwach includes a result for Spisy ludności województwa krakowskiego z lat 1790-1791: II. Parafie powiatu krakowskiego na litery A-K which translates as, “Censuses of Kraków province for the years 1790-1791:  Parishes in Kraków County beginning with letters A-K.” The “scope and content” for this particular unit names the villages belonging to each parish covered by the census, and one of those villages is Zagórowa in Olkusz County  — not my place of interest at all.

Polish Digital Libraries

You might be lucky enough to find some census records for your town of interest at one of the Polish digital libraries. This search engine for the Federacja Bibliotek Cyfrowych (FBC, Federation of Digital Libraries) can be used to search the holdings of a number of different Polish libraries and archives simultaneously. Another good search engine for digital libraries is Europeana.  As the name suggests, it includes results from digital libraries all over Europe.  It should be noted that Europeana taps into FBC, so search results for Polish census records might not vary too much between the two sites. Again, searches should be conducted with a variety of search terms for best results, and again, both of these search engines are forgiving when it comes to Polish diacritics, so a search for “Mlodzieszyn” will return the same results as one for “Młodzieszyn.” Be aware that many European digital libraries utilize the “DjVu” file format, which is similar to PDF.  You will need to have a DjVu reader installed on your computer, however, which you can download here.

ELA database

3 May 2020 Update: Earlier this year, the baza.archiwa.gov.pl site which permitted searching in the ELA database was shut down. Consequently, the original links in this section are no longer working. Searching must be done through Szukajwarchiwach.

As with any type of records, census records available online represent only the tip of the iceberg for what’s out available.  If you don’t mind paying the archives or a researcher in Poland to access records for you, there is an entire database in the Polish State Archives for census records.  It’s called Baza ELA, and you can search it here.  ELA is an acronym for Ewidencje Ludności w Archiwaliach, “Population Registers in Archival Material.”  A detailed list of the types of records found in this database is provided along with the acronyms and abbreviations that will help you interpret your search results.  (Hint:  Copy and paste into Google Translate, or use Chrome as your browser and right-click on the page to translate to English.)  Many of these records tend to be from the early 20th-century, rather than the 19th century, but you might find something of interest.  For example, I have ancestors from Sochaczew county, and a quick search on “Sochaczew” resulted in a potentially enlightening document from 1892 entitled, “spis cudzoziemców zamieszkałych w pow.sochaczewskim,” or “List of Foreigners Residing in Sochaczew County.”  Documents like this are a bit of a gamble — they could provide critical clues, or they might be worthless to my research.  If I had reason to suspect that my family moved to Sochaczew from, say, Prussian Poland circa 1892, something like this could be very important, especially if it included details about where the “foreigners” lived previously. But given that time and money are limited resources for all of us, it’s up to each researcher to decide if his research dollars are best spent investigating a document like this one, versus (for example) obtaining vital records from a parish of interest whose records are not available online or on microfilm.  Note that if you do find something of interest in the ELA database, you should double check to see if it’s online at Szukajwarchiwach before requesting anything from the archive or hiring a researcher.

Google Search

Finally, you might get lucky and find census records for your parish of interest via a Google (or Google.pl) search.   Occasionally individual researchers will create online databases for census records that they’ve obtained personally. One good example of this is Debbie Greenlee’s database of Spis Parafialny records from Bukowsko parish in Sanok County. Over time there might be more websites like this cropping up (hey, a girl can dream….), so it never hurts to give Google a try.

So there you have it, my friends:  five quick and easy places to mine for those nuggets of genealogical gold for your ancestors in Poland.  Polish census records might not be your fall-back when you can’t find great-uncle Jan’s baptismal record in the same parish were all his siblings were baptized, but they can still provide valuable insights into the lives of your ancestors, and they’re worth seeking out.  Until next time, happy researching!

© Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz 2016

 

“Why Can’t I Find Census Records for My Ancestors in Poland?”

Published on by Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz6 Comments

Those researching their Polish ancestry often wonder wonder how they can find census records for their ancestors in Poland.  Most of us American researchers have come to rely on the census as a first step in researching our ancestors, and there are good reasons why we love it.  Census records provide a “snapshot” of our families at different points in time, revealing names, ages and relationships of family members, as well as other important details such as year of immigration, year of naturalization, how many children a woman had, and more.  Most importantly, the census has been digitized and indexed, which allows us to find our ancestors with relative ease, even when they migrate around the country.  It seems natural, then, that people would want to find similar records for their ancestors in Poland.  So where are these records?

The answer is a bit complicated, and depends on our understanding of the history of census-taking.  Censuses have been conducted since ancient times.  Remember the Census of Quirinius mentioned in the Bible, in which Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem to be counted?  Perhaps in recognition of the logistical problems of “no room at the inn” created by having an entire population move around, more contemporary emperors have conducted censuses by having enumerators go door to door, counting people where they lived.  The purpose of any census was usually to provide information for taxation and military conscription as well as statistical information about the population, which might include ethnic minorities living in a given area, languages spoken, religious affiliation, etc.  Here in the U.S., the census was mandated by the Constitution, and has been conducted every ten years since 1790.  However, since Poland did not exist as an independent nation from 1795 until 1918, there could be no “national census of Poland” during this time.  Rather, censuses were conducted at different times and in different places by the Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires which occupied Polish lands.

In the Russian Empire, a large census was conducted in 1897, although it’s worth noting that this census was criticized for undercounting Poles and overestimating those with Russian ethnicity.  Similarly, the German Empire conducted a census in 1895, which was criticized for lowering the number of Catholics and ethnic Poles in German-occupied lands.  Many additional censuses were conducted (a nice summary of which can be found here), but in many cases, original returns have not survived, and only statistical summaries remain.  In addition to these governmental census records, some religious census census records survive for Poland.  Each Catholic parish priest conducted an annual census of his parishioners, which was called “Status Animarum” in Latin, or “Spis Parafialny” in Polish, an example of which can be seen here.  The original intent of these censuses was to allow the priest to verify that his parishioners were receiving the sacraments as appropriate, but these censuses eventually grew to include addresses and ages of household members.

The result of all this history is a patchwork of records that includes parish censuses, tax lists, population registers, conscription lists, etc.  Some of these are available online (more about where to find those in my next blog post), and more are coming online every day. But the backbone of research in Polish records is vital records.  The Polish archives and genealogical societies have been going to great lengths to get more and more of these vital records—both the original church records, and the civil copies—digitized, indexed, and online.  In fact, one might wonder why we here in the U.S. chose to prioritize the digitization of census records over vital records.

Once again, the answer lies in the history.  Civil vital registration in America began slowly, and regional practices varied widely.  Town vital records exist for Massachusetts that date back to the 1600s, but vital registration didn’t begin in most parts of the U.S. until the mid-to-late 1800s.  Moreover, it wasn’t until about 1920 that vital registration requirements were reliably enforced.  Prior to that, researchers must turn to church records to obtain births, marriages and deaths for their ancestors.  A national effort to digitize church records would be problematic in the U.S. because church records are not public documents, and churches are not required to hand them over to the state or make them public for any reason.  (Of course, churches will sometimes make records available to individuals if asked nicely and if a donation is offered.)

While we in America tend to think in terms of this separation of church and state, the same is not true in Poland, or elsewhere in Europe.  As I wrote previously, church officials frequently served as civil registrars throughout Poland, and parish record books were recognized as legal documents. The practice of making duplicate copies of church books for civil authorities dates back to the late 18th century across much of modern-day Poland, and these duplicate copies serve as our foundation for Polish genealogical research.  The greater availability of vital records relative to census records does require a bit of a shift in mindset for American researchers.  Instead of having a decennial snapshot of your ancestral family groups indicating the names of all the family members, researchers will have to discover those names through careful analysis of parish records.  Although more time-consuming, the result is ultimately more complete, as a survey of U.S. census records will omit any children who died in infancy between census years.

In many cases, Polish vital records themselves will provide guideposts to migrations of the family.  Marriage records will usually state where the bride and groom were born, and where their parents are living at the time of the marriage.   But what happens if a couple moves around during their childbearing years?  One might suspect such an occurrence if there is an unusually large gap (more than about 3 years) between births to a married couple in the records for a particular parish.  It’s times like this that indexed records can be very, very helpful.  In their absence, a researcher is often faced with the task of searching parishes in the surrounding area more or less at random, unless other clues are available which suggest where the family might have gone (e.g. a child’s godparent with the same surname as one of the parents is living in another local parish).  Still, what about those researchers who have no clue where in Poland their family originated?  Indexed vital records would certainly make life a lot easier for them, too.

At present there are a number of popular indexing sites available for vital records in Poland.  The most comprehensive and ambitious of these is Geneteka, which aims to cover every province within Poland today as well as offering limited coverage in areas that were once part of Poland but are no longer.  Other indexing efforts, such as Lubgens for the Lublin area, BaSIA and the Poznań Project for the Wielkopolskie province/Poznań area, the Pomeranian Genealogical Society database for the Pomerania region, and other, smaller efforts, are strictly regional and don’t aim to include full coverage of Poland.  The situation is very reminiscent of the way things were here in the U.S. in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when numerous small indexing projects existed for census records, prior to the completion of indexing efforts by Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, and others.  Although all these Polish indexing efforts are presently free and not behind a paywall, the sponsoring genealogical societies rely on donations to pay for servers and keep the records online.

At some point in the future, tracking your ancestors’ migrations through indexed records in Geneteka might be as easy as finding them in indexed census records in the U.S. Geneteka’s search engine is powerful enough to allow for some pretty great searching already, especially now that it’s possible to search using two different surnames (e.g. father’s surname and mother’s maiden name). New indexes (i.e. new parishes, registry offices, or new ranges of years for parishes or registry offices for which coverage already exists) are being added all the time, but the vast scope of this project — indexing over 300 years’ worth of records from every parish, synagogue, other place of worship, or civil registry office in an area of about 121,000 square miles —  means that it will take some time before coverage is even close to complete. So for now, the best approach is still to accurately determine one’s ancestors’ place of origin in Poland, using U.S. records, before attempting research in Poland, rather than hoping to get lucky with indexed vital records.

In my next post, I’ll review some options for those intrepid and hardy souls who still hope to find actual “census records” of one type or another for your ancestors in Poland.  Until then, happy researching!

© Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz 2016

 

Overview of Vital Records in Poland: Part III: Additional Examples and Observations

Published on by Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz2 Comments

In my previous two posts, I gave some historical background about the evolution of vital records keeping in Poland, and about the implications of those practices for researchers today, seeking records of their ancestors.  Today, I’d like to provide some examples of the kinds of records you might expect to see from the various partitions and from different time periods, to give you an idea of what you might expect to encounter in your own research.

Examples from Prussian Poland

I’ll start off with a couple of examples from the Prussian partition, and a little confession: Although my husband has ancestors from Prussian Poland, and although I have every intention of researching those ancestors at some point, I haven’t done much research in this area yet.  Therefore, I don’t have a huge wealth of examples to offer, but here are a couple.  Figure 1 shows a Catholic baptismal record from 1858 for Stanislaus (Stanisław in Polish) Lewandoski,1 also known as Edward Levanduski, my husband’s great-great-grandfather, about whom I wrote previously.

Figure 1:  Baptismal record from Gąsawa parish for Stanislaus Lewandoski [sic], born 29 October 1859.1stanislaus-lewandowski-1859-p-1-crop

The record is in columnar form, and column headings, from left to right, tell us the number of the birth record, the year, day and month of the birth, the place of birth, date of baptism and child’s name, the name of the priest who baptized the child,  the parents’ names, father’s occupation, and then additional information on godparents’ names (cut off in this image).  The record is written in Latin.  Unfortunately, no information is given on the parents’ ages.

Figures 2a and 2b show a civil marriage record from Kucharki from 1890 for my husband’s great-great-grandparents, Augustyn and Agnieszka Drajem.2

Figure 2a:  Civil marriage record from Kucharki for August Drajem and Agnieszka Jamrozik, 1 February 1890, p. 1.2august-draheim-and-agnieszka-jamrozik-1890-p-1

Figure 2b:  Civil marriage record from Kucharki for August Drajem and Agnieszka Jamrozik, 1 February 1890, p. 2.2augustyn-draheim-and-agnieszka-jamrozik-1890-p-2

As we would expect, the record is in German, and the translation, kindly provided by Johann Kargl in the Facebook group “Genealogy Translations,” is as follows:

“Kucharki 1st February 1890
1. Before the undersigned registrar appeared the farm servant August Draheim, personally known, Catholic, born on 25 July 1866 in Mielno, county Mogilno, living in Kucharki, son of the deceased master tailor Josef Draheim and his wife Marianne, nee Kaszynska, living in America
2. the unmarried maiden Agnes Jamrozik, personally known, Catholic, born on 9 January 1865 in Kucharki, county Kleschen, living in Kucharki, daughter of the innkeeper Johann Jamrozik and his wife Rosalie, nee Juszczak, living in Kucharki.
As witnesses appeared:
3. The innkeeper Jakob Tomalak, personally known, 60 yers old, living in Kucharki
4. the innkeeper Adalbert (Wojciech) Szlachetka, personally known, 48 years old, living in Kucharki
…
read, approved and signed
August Draheim Agnieszka Draheim, nee Jamrozik
Jakob Tomalak
Wojciech Szlachetka
The registrar
signed Grzegorzewski

Kucharki, 8 February 1890
(signature)”

Notice that the record was created on a fill-in-the-blank form, with all the standard boilerplate text preprinted, so translating these civil records becomes a matter of learning to read a relatively small amount of German script.  In contrast to the brief church book entry, this record contains a lot of wonderful genealogical details, including the precise birthdate and birth place of the bride and groom, occupations and ages of the witnesses, and more.

For those of you who might be panicking and thinking,  “But I can’t read German!” help is on the way.  The very best translation guides that I have found for genealogy are written by Jonathan D. Shea and William F. Hoffman.  Their “In Their Words” series of genealogical translation guides encompasses 3 volumes to date, Volume I:  Polish, Volume II:  Russian, and Volume III:  Latin.  Volume IV:  German is currently in the works and will hopefully be out very soon.  I cannot praise these books highly enough.  These are the books that are constantly lying around the house, never making it back to the bookshelf, because I’m always referring to one or another of them for something.  I can’t wait for their German book to be published so I can learn to read these records for myself.  In the meantime, there’s always the Genealogy Translations group on Facebook, if you (or I) need assistance.

Examples from Russian Poland

In Russian Poland, the standard Napoleonic format existed from 1808-1825, followed by a modified format that was used from 1826 through the 20th century. So a civil death record from 1936 (Figure 3) looks much the same as a civil death record from 1838 (Figure 4).

Figure 3:  Death record from Budy Stare for Marianna Zielińska who died 4 April 1936.3marianna-zielinska-death-1936

Translation:  “Budy Stare.  It happened in Młodzieszyn on the 4th day of April 1936 at 8:00 in the morning.  They appeared, Stanisław Wilanowski, age 40, farmer of Mistrzewice, and Kazimierz Tomczak, farmer of Juliopol, age 26, and stated that, on this day today, at 5:00 in the morning, in Budy Stare, died Marianna née Kalota Zielińska, widow, age 79, born and residing with her sister in Budy Stare, daughter of the late Roch and Agata née Kurowska, farmers.  After visual confirmation of the death of Marianna Zielińska, this document was read aloud to the witnesses but signed only by us.  Pastor of the parish of Młodzieszyn actiing as Civil Registrar.”

Figure 4:   Death record from Kowalewo-Opactwo for Wojciech Grzeszkiewicz [aka Grzesiak], who died 25 April 1838.4Wojciech Grzeszkiewicz death.jpg

Translation:  “Kowalewo.  It happened in the village of Kowalewo on the 15th/27th day of April 1838 at 10:00 in the morning.  They appeared, Stanisław Grzeszkiewicz, shepherd, age 31, father of the deceased, and Jan Radziejewski, land-owning farmer, age 40, both of Kowalewo, and stated to us that, on the 13th/25th of the current month and year, at 4:00 in the afternoon, died in Kowalewo, likewise born there in house number two, Wojciech Grzeszkiewicz, son of the aforementioned Stanisław and Jadwiga née Dąbrowska, having one year of age.  All persons mentioned in this Act are of the Catholic religion.  After visual confirmation of the death of Wojciech, this document was read aloud to the witnesses and was signed.”

Since records from all villages within a parish were kept in the same book in Russian Poland, we see the name of the village where the event took place inscribed in the margin, next to the record number.  So in Figure 4, the death occurred in Budy Stare, but was recorded by the priest in the Catholic parish in Młodzieszyn.  When you compare the translations of these two records, you see that there’s not much difference in the format.  It’s pretty stable across 102 years and 120 miles in these examples.  That’s even true during the period from about 1868 until 1918, when records from Russian Poland were required to be kept in Russian.  Take a look at this death record from Mistrzewice in 1897, for my 3x-great-grandmother, Antonina (née Ciećwierz) Grzegorek (Figure 5):5

Figure 5:  Death record from Mistrzewice for Antonina Grzegorek, who died 21 March 1897.5antonina-grzegorek-death-1897-crop

Translation:  “Mistrzewice.  It happened in the village of Mistrzewice on the 11th/23rd day of March 1897th year at 12:00 at noon. They appeared, Józef Grzegorek, farmer, age 47, and Wawrzyniec Wilanowski, farmer, age 38, residents of Mistrzewice, and stated that, on the 9th/21st day of March of the present year, at 1:00 am [literally, “in the first hour of the night”], died in the village of Mistrzewice, Antonina Grzegorek, farm wife, age 59, born in Mistrzewice, daughter of Jan and Katarzyna, the spouses Ciećwierz. She leaves after herself her widower husband, Ludwik Grzegorek, residing in the village of Mistrzewice. After visual confirmation of the death of Antonina Grzegorek, this document was read aloud to those present and was signed.”

The style of this record is very much the same as in the previous examples.  This is good news for those who are interested in learning to translate vital records, and it suggests a potential research strategy:  If the prospect of translating Russian records is intimidating,  try to trace back before 1868, and work on the records written in Polish first.  This worked really well for me.  My first foray into vital records from Poland occurred when I began researching the family of my great-grandmother Weronika Grzesiak.  She was born in 1876 in a village within Russian Poland, so her birth record was written in Russian, along with the birth records for most of her siblings. I took one look at the page and thought it was hopeless. However, I knew her parents were married about 1865, back when the records were still written in Polish.  I decided to look for their marriage record first, and then research earlier generations of the family tree.  Starting out with those Polish records gave me a chance to familiarize myself with the grammatical structure of Slavic languages and the format of the vital records, and eventually I gained enough confidence to tackle that Russian cursive.

There are some good translations aids out there, some of which I shared previously.  However, if you’re going to get serious about learning to translate Polish and Russian vital records comfortably, then you really need to get copies of Shea and Hoffman’s translation guides that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. I know quite a few people — native English speakers — who never studied Polish or Russian formally, but have nonetheless taught themselves to read vital records in those languages, and it’s thanks to Shea and Hoffman.

Examples from Austrian Poland

In contrast to the relatively stable format found in records from Russian Poland, Austrian records seem to become progressively more informative throughout the 19th century, to a greater extent than is true for the other partitions.  In this first example (Figure 6) from 1843, we see the typical columnar format that was prescribed for both church and civil records at this time:6

Figure 6:  Marriage record from Kołaczyce for Franciszek  Łącki and Magdalena Bulgewiczowa, 3 August 1834.6franciscus-lacki-marriage2

Column headings, from left to right, tell us the month and date of the wedding, the house numbers of the bride and groom and who is moving in with whom.  In this case, “de 33 ad 84” suggests that after the marriage, the groom will be moving from his house, number 33, to the bride’s house, number 84.  The groom’s name and occupation (“figulus,” i.e. potter) is given, and check marks in the appropriate columns tell us that he was Catholic and a widower.  The “Aetas” column tells us that he was 46 years old.  Similarly, the bride was a 35-year-old Catholic widow named Magdalena Bulgewicz, widow of the late Dominik.  Although the standard nominative form of Magdalena’s married name was Bulgewicz, the form used here, “Bulgewiczowa,” describes a married woman of the Bulgewicz family.  Her maiden name is not provided.  Additional information includes the names and social position of the witnesses, and the name of the priest who performed the marriage.

In contrast, this slightly later record from 18617 in the same parish (Figure 7) includes all the same information as the earlier record, but also includes the names of the parents of the bride and groom (boxed in red) and provides a bit of a description about them (“oppidario,” meaning “townsperson”).

Figure 7:  Marriage record from Kołaczyce for Jakub Łącki and Anna Ptaszkiewicz, 26 November 1861.7jacobus-lacki-marriage2

Disappointingly, this early marriage record from Kołaczyce from 17507 (Figure 8) shows relatively little information.

Figure 8:  Marriage record from Kołaczyce for Stanisław Niegos and Teresa Szaynowszczonka.8stanislaw-niegos-and-teresa-szajnowska-1750

In translation, this reads, “On this same day, I who am named above, blessed and confirmed a marriage contract between Stanislaus Niegos and Teresa Szaynowszczonka, having been preceded by three banns and with no canonical impediments standing in the way, in the presence of witnesses Casimir Rączka and Joannes Dystanowicz, all of Kołaczyce.”  The form of the bride’s name used here, “Szaynowszczonka,” indicates an unmarried woman of the Szaynowski family, which would be rendered “Szajnowska” in modern Polish.

It helps to remember that this record predates the requirement for church records to perform double-duty as civil records for the Austrian authorities.  Therefore, the priest’s only purpose in keeping it was to fulfill the obligations imposed upon him by the Roman Ritual.  Since the Church had no interest in the addresses, ages, or occupations of the individuals mentioned in the record, that kind of information does not appear.  In any case, finding a marriage record from 1750 for one’s Polish ancestors is actually pretty respectable, which brings us to my next point.

A Word About Early Records…..

Don’t expect too much from early records, and by “early,” I’m referring to Polish vital records for peasants, late-1600s to about 1750 records.  As is evident from the history, recognition of the importance of vital records developed gradually.  Perhaps this is why I have frequently found church records to be somewhat “spotty” in the late 1600s and early-to-mid 1700s.  By “spotty,” I mean that records that “ought” to be found in a particular parish in a given year just aren’t there.  It’s impossible to say for certain why this is, and in some of these cases, the event may have occurred in Parish B, despite evidence from other documents stating that it occured in Parish A.  But for whatever reason, it seems that priests became more conscientious about over time, as their responsibilities as record-keepers for the civilian authorities increased.  If you’re able to locate those early vital records, that’s a victory, but understand that there’s a chance the record will just not be there.

Poland’s complicated geopolitical history is reflected in her record-keeping practices, which can be confusing to the uninitiated.  The different languages in which the records are kept might be challenging, too.  However, the payoff comes in the satisfaction of being able to locate and read your ancestors’ story for yourself, as preserved by their paper trail.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at the history of Polish vital records, with some examples from each partition.  As always, I welcome feedback, including observations and insights based on your own research, so feel free to leave a note in the comments.  Happy researching!

Sources

1 Roman Catholic Church, Gąsawa parish (Gąsawa, Żnin, Poland), Księgi metrykalne, 1782-1960, Akta urodzeń 1847-1860, 1859, births, #73, record for Stanislaus Lewandoski.; 1191249 Items 1-3.

2 “Urzad Stanu Cywilnego Kucharki,” Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Szukajwarchiwach (http://www.szukajwarchiwach.pl/), Akta malzenstw 1874-1909, 1890, #13, marriage record for August Draheim and Agnes Jamrozik, accessed on 1 October 2016.

3 Urząd stanu cywilnego gminy Młodzieszyn, Sochaczewski, Mazowieckie, Poland, 1936, #16, death certificate for Marianna Zielińska.

 4 “Akta stanu cywilnego Parafii Rzymskokatolickiej Kowalewo-Opactwo (pow. slupecki),” Narodowego Archiwum Cyfrowego, Naczelnej Dyrekcji Archiwów Panstwowych, Szukajwarchiwach (Szukajwarchiwach.pl), 1838, Zgony, #5, record for Wojciech Grzeszkiewicz, accessed on 1 October 2016.

5 “Akta stanu cywilnego parafii rzymskokatolickiej w Mlodzieszynie, ” Polskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne, Metryki.genealodzy.pl:  Projekt Indeksacji Metryk Parafialnych (http://metryki.genealodzy.pl/), 1897, Zgony, #3, record for Antonina Grzegorek.  Accessed on 1 October 2016.

6 Roman Catholic Church, St. Anna’s Parish (Kołaczyce, Jasło, Podkarpackie, Poland), “Śluby, 1826-1889,” Stare Kopie, 1834, record for Franciscus Łącki and Magdalena Bulgewiczowa, Archiwum Archidecezjalne w Przemyślu, Przemyśl, Poland.

7 Roman Catholic Church, St. Anna’s Parish (Kołaczyce, Jasło, Podkarpackie, Poland), “Śluby, 1826-1889,” Stare Kopie, 1861, #11, marriage record for Jacobus Łącki and Anna Ptaszkiewicz, Archiwum Archidecezjalne w Przemyślu, Przemyśl, Poland.

8 Roman Catholic Church, St. Anne’s parish (Kołaczyce, Jasło, Podkarpackie, Poland), “Księga małżeństw parafii Kołaczyce 1748 – 1779,” 1750, marriage record for Stanislaus Niegos and Teresia Szaynoszczonka,  Archiwum Archidecezjalne w Przemyślu, Przemyśl, Poland.

© Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz 2016

Overview of Vital Records in Poland, Part II: Practical Implications of Historical Practices

Published on by Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz2 Comments

In my previous post, I gave an overview of the history of vital records in Poland.  Today I’d like to go into a little more detail about the implications of that history.   Originally I thought I’d offer some examples of vital records from the different partitions as well, but in the interests of keeping these individual blog posts to a reasonable length, I think I’ll break it down a bit further and include those additional examples and observations in a “Part III.”

1.  First, there is no single, centralized repository for vital records in Poland (or in any other country, for that matter).

It sure would be nice if there were, but just as in the U.S., where  you have to go to a town clerk’s office to find a civil marriage record, and a parish to find a church marriage record, the same is true in Poland — more or less. The lines get a bit blurred because of the role that church officials played in acting as civil registrars, so sometimes it’s not immediately apparent whether a given register is the original church register or a civil transcript.  It’s probably safe to say that the state archives have more civil records collections than they do church books, but the state archives do have plenty of original church books nonetheless, as you can see from this collection.  Theoretically, church records more than 100 years old are supposed to be transferred to the appropriate diocesan archive, just as their civil counterparts are supposed to be transferred from the registry office to the appropriate state archive.  However, some parishes choose not to comply with this, so it’s not uncommon to find parish priests with 300 years’ worth of vital records sitting in their office.

Because of this, you may have to get creative in order to get full coverage for your parish of interest, and check a variety of sources.  Some diocesan archives are more forthcoming than others about what their holdings include, and some parishes and diocesan archives aren’t very responsive to requests for records by mail, so I often find it’s most expeditious to hire a local researcher to investigate holdings and obtain records from parishes or archives.  For example, for my ancestral parish of Kołaczyce, records can be found in the parish, in the Archdiocesan Archive in Przemyśl, in the USC (civil registry office), and in the Sanok Branch of the Polish State Archive of Rzeszów (Figure 1):

Figure 1:  Vital Records Coverage Table for Kołaczyce, Podkarpackie province, Poland

Repository Range of Years for Birth Records Range of Years for Marriage Records Range of Years for Death Records
Sanok Branch of the State Archive in Rzeszów

1900-1908

 1871-1896

1863-1906
USC in Kołaczyce Presumably, 1916 to present Presumably, 1916 to present Presumably, 1916 to present
Archdiocesan Archive in Przemyśl 1746-1782; 1826-1889 1748-1779; 1826-1889 1762-1779; 1826-1889
St. Anne’s Church in Kołaczyce 1784-present 1784-present 1784-present

As you can see from this table, there’s quite a bit of overlap in the coverage, which is nice, but there are also a few gaps.  The Archdiocesan Archive’s collection only includes births through 1782, which suggests that birth records from 1783 are missing, since the parish collection of birth records begins in 1784.  Similarly, there’s a 4-year gap from 1780-1783 in both marriage records and death records.  It’s not clear why the State Archives have relatively few records and such a disparate range of years for the different vital events, but the fact that there’s so much overlap in coverage means that researchers interested in this parish won’t lack for material.

Coverage differs dramatically in different parts of Poland.  If you’re researching in Galicia, you’re lucky, because coverage there is generally good.  Researchers in Mazovia might have a different experience, however.  Figure 2 shows the coverage table for another one of my ancestral parishes, Młodzieszyn, in Sochaczew County.

Figure 2:  Vital Records Coverage Table for Młodzieszyn, Mazowieckie province, Poland

Repository Range of Years for Birth Records Range of Years for Marriage Records Range of Years for Death Records
Grodzisk Mazowiecki Branch of the State Archive in Warsaw  

1885-1912

  

1889-1911

  

1889-1901
USC in Młodzieszyn Presumably, 1916 to present Presumably, 1916 to present Presumably, 1916 to present
Diocesan Archive in Łowicz —- —- —-
Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Młodzieszyn 1945 to present 1945 to present 1945 to present

This area suffered a great deal of damage during the Battle of the Bzura in 1939, and all the vital records from before 1885 were destroyed.  All of them.  Gone.  The point here is that your mileage may vary quite a bit when it comes to the availability of records for your ancestral parish of interest.  Records may exist dating back to the 1600s, or the only existing records may be relatively recent.

2.  The existence of separate record books for each village within a parish in Austrian Poland/Galicia means that you can search for individual village names in sites like Baza PRADZIAD and Szukajwarchiwach, rather than searching only under the parish name.

For example, the village of Nawsie, which belonged to the parish in Kołaczyce, has its own collection of birth records here (births from 1859-1900) at the State Archive Branch in Sanok.  As a corollary to this, since I know that my ancestors were from Kołaczyce, the other villages belonging to that parish would be the very next place I would look for records, if I could not find a record of a particular vital event in Kołaczyce itself.  Note that this is only true for villages and parishes that were within Austrian Poland/Galicia.  If I want to find records for the village of Wierzbno in Słupca County, Wielkopolskie province, which was in Russian Poland, I will not find them by searching under “Wierzbno” in Baza PRADZIAD, Szukajwarchiwach, or any other site which indexes or catalogues  Polish vital records.  Instead, I have to use a gazetteer to determine the parish, which is Kowalewo-Opactwo in this case.  Records from Russian Poland and Prussian Poland typically note the home village(s) of the key participants within each record, but all the records are bound in the same book.

3.  The existence of separate record books for each village within a parish in Austrian Poland means that you need to identify the present parish for the village, when requesting records from the parish itself.

As new parishes are created in Poland to serve the evolving needs of the community, parish borders change.  When a village that belonged previously to one parish is reassigned to a new parish, all the old record books for that village are transferred to the new parish.  As an example, my great-great-grandfather Andrzej Klaus was born in the village of Maniów in gmina Szczucin in the Małopolskie province in 1865.  At that time, Maniów belonged to St. Mary Magdalene parish in Szczucin, so that is the church in which he was baptized.  However, in 1981, a new parish  called Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima and of the Rosary,was founded in the village of Borki,  and the village of Maniów was assigned to this new parish.  So when I visited Poland last summer, and wanted to see the original record book which contained Andrzej Klaus’s baptismal record, that book was in the shiny new parish in Borki rather than in the centuries-old parish in Szczucin.

Of course, in this case the problem is somewhat academic, because these records are also available on microfilm from the LDS.  However, it does frequently happen that the desired parish records that are not available online or on microfilm, and in that case, it is incumbent upon the researcher to determine the correct parish to write to before making an inquiry.

4. The fact that duplicate copies were created in every partition increases the likelihood that at least one copy survived.

There’s a pervasive myth out there that “all Polish records were destroyed in the wars” that often keeps people from even trying to find those records.  While it’s true that many records were destroyed, there are plenty of records that survived, and in some places, it’s possible to find both the civil and the church record for the same vital event.  As an example, Figure 3 shows the church version of the 1843 baptismal record for my great-great-grandmother, Marianna Krawczyńska,1 from the parish of Zagórów, in what is now the Wielkopolskie province, but was at the time part of Russian Poland.

Figure 3:  Baptismal record from Zagórów for Marianna Krawczyńska, born 1 February 1843.1film 2162127 item 2 record 31 page 226

The record is in Latin, in paragraph form, and it’s fairly brief.  It’s dated February 2, and in translation, it indicates that the same priest who was named in the preceding record baptized a female child named Marianna, born the previous day at 9:00 in the evening, daughter of Antoni Krawczyński and his lawful wife, Wiktoria Dęboska. (The spelling of Wiktoria’s surname is usually standardized to “Dębowska” in modern Polish.)  Godparents are also named.

In contrast, Marianna’s civil birth record2 includes quite a bit more information (Figure 4).

Figure 4:  Civil birth record from Zagórów for Marianna  Krawczyńska, born 1 February 1843.2 maryanna-krawczynska-1843

The translation is as follows:  “It came to pass in the village of Zagórów on the 21st day of January /2nd day of February, at 3:00 in the afternoon.  He appeared: Antoni Krawczyński, shoemaker, of Zagórów residing, having 39 years of age, in the presence of Mikołaj Otto, shoemaker, age thirty, and Sylwester Bogusławski, farmer, age 41, both residing in Zagórów, and showed us a child of the female sex born in Zagórów in house number 113 (?), born yesterday at 9:00 in the evening of his wife, Wiktorya née Dęboska, age 37. To this child at Holy Baptism performed today, was given the name Maryanna, and her godparents were the aforementioned Mikołaj Otto and Antonina Bogusławska. All parties mentioned in this Act were of the Catholic religion. This act was read aloud to the declarant and witnesses, but signed by us only, because they do not know how to write. [signed] Fr. Mikołaj Wadowski, Pastor.”

Although the key facts are identical between these two records, the civil version includes the names, ages, occupations, and places of residence of two adult, male, legal witnesses in addition to the age, occupation, and place of residence of the father.  This particular record provides the address of the house where the child was born, although this information may be omitted, depending on the parish.  The use of double dates for both the date of baptism and the date of birth was required by the Russian authorities, and reflects the fact that Poland and Western Europe had adopted the Gregorian calendar, while Russia and Eastern Europe persisted in using the old Julian calendar.  The second date (Gregorian) is the one we use today.

This brings us to our next point:

5. Whenever both church and civil records exist for the same vital event, get both.  One may be more informative or accurate than the other.

In Russian Poland and Prussian Poland, the civil transcrips were created in parallel, at the same time as the church record.  So a record from the civil transcript (“Kopie księg metrykalnych”) is likely to be as accurate as one from the parish register, (“Księgi metrykalne”) though it might contain additional information, as shown with Figures 1 and 2.  However, one would predict that discrepancies between the church and civil records might occur somewhat more frequently with civil transcripts (“Kopie księg metrykalnych”) from Galicia, where church records were recopied at the end of the year.  If a discrepancy were found between the civil transcript and the parish register for a vital event from Galicia, I would be inclined to trust the parish register over the transcript.  In many cases, only one set of records (church or civil) is available, so you may not have the luxury of comparing the two.

6. If you’re looking for a relatively recent record, and the state archive does not have it, write to the USC for the township where the village is located.

As an example, my great-great-grandmother had a sister, Barbara Mikołajewska, who died in 1926 in Juliopol, gmina Młodzieszyn, Mazowieckie province.  Since her death occurred more than 80 years ago, it is classified as archival, and therefore anyone may request a copy whether or not they are a direct descendant.  However, If you check the holdings of the state archives (e.g. Baza PRADZIAD, as discussed previously) you see that the the local archive for Młodzieszyn, which is the Grodzisk Branch of the State Archive of Warsaw, only has death records for Młodzieszyn going up to 1901. Records from 1926 have not yet been transferred to the local state archive, so this particular record was still found in the USC for Młodzieszyn.  Tip:  USCs can be rather slow to respond to requests for records, especially if you don’t have an exact date for the event.  You may have better luck with hiring a local researcher to visit the USC in person to obtain records for you.

In the next post, I’ll provide some additional examples of vital records from all three partitions, as well as a few additional tips and observations.  In the meantime, happy researching!

Sources:

1Roman Catholic Church, Zagórów parish (Zagórów (Słupca), Poznań, Poland), Księgi metrykalne, 1592-1964, 1843 #31 birth record for Marianna Krawczyńska, p. 226.; 2161271 Item 5.

2“Akta stanu cywilnego Parafii Rzymskokatolickiej Zagórów (pow. slupecki)”, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Szukajwarchiwach (http://www.szukajwarchiwach.pl/), 1843, #31, birth record for Marianna Krawczyńska, accessed on 18 September 2016.

© Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz 2016

Overview of Vital Records in Poland, Part I: Historical Background

Published on by Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz10 Comments

Finding vital records in Poland can be a little confusing to the uninitiated, and sometimes even to more experienced researchers.  I’ve written about obtaining copies of vital records by writing to the archives in a previous post, but today, I wanted to give you a general overview of vital records in Poland.  Understanding how and why they were created can give you some insight into determining where to look for them.  In my next post, I’ll discuss the implications of all of this, and provide some examples for you.

Vital records, by definition, are records of life events — primarily births, marriages, and deaths — and the keeping of vital records began with the Roman Catholic Church.  At the Council of Trent (1545-1563), the Church decreed that, “The parish priest shall have a book in which he shall record the names of the persons united in marriage and of the witnesses, and also the day on which and the place where the marriage was contracted, and this book he shall carefully preserve.”1  Additional rules regarding the sacraments of marriage and baptism were set forth at this time, with instructions to the priests about recording those sacraments.  In 1614, Pope Paul V further defined the rites pertaining to the administration and recording of sacraments in his Rituale Romanum (The Roman Ritual) and introduced a requirement for priests to record deaths in their parishes as well.  At the same time, priests were required to maintain a register of souls (Liber Status Animarum) in their parish, for the purpose of ensuring that all their parishioners were receiving the sacraments as appropriate and were being duly catechized.  These parish census records later came to include additional information about each household in the parish, such as home addresses, and the ages and relationships of household members.

Over time, civil authorities came to recognize the value in these vital records as well, primarily for their use in documenting the local population for taxation and conscription.  Civil vital registration was introduced in different parts of “Poland” at different times, depending on which empire was in power in a given time and place.  During the years of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, church records were the only vital records in existence.  The very earliest church records are more informative for the nobility than they are for peasants, as surnames for peasants did not come into general use until the middle of the 18th century in some places.  Following a series of three partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795, “Poland” disappeared from the map as an independent political entity, and the lands which had formerly been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were divided up by the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian Empires.

Civil Records in Austrian Poland

In 1784, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II gave official status to Catholic parish registers, and authorized Catholic priests to act as civil registrars for vital events pertaining to all people in their parish, regardless of faith. At that time he also prescribed the use of the columnar format for parish registers, and the use of individual records books for each village within the parish, replacing the practice of combining vital events from every village within the parish into one parish register. These records were required to be kept in Latin. It wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that legal authority was granted to Protestants and Jews for the maintenance of their own vital registers, independent of those maintained by the Catholic Church.  A duplicate copy of the parish vital register was created at the end of each year, and was required to be sent to the civil authorities.

Civil Records in Russian Poland

Meanwhile, in another part of “Poland,” Napoleon introduced the practice of maintaining civil vital registers in the Duchy of Warsaw, starting in 1808.  The format of these civil vital records, prescribed by his Napoleonic Code, was quite different from the earlier Latin church records.  They were written in Polish, in a very flowery, legalistic style, and often included quite a bit more information than the Latin church records.  When the Duchy of Warsaw was incorporated into the Kingdom of Poland (“Congress Poland“) in 1815, the Napoleonic format continued to be used.  In 1826, the true Napoleonic format was replaced by a modified form, and at the same time, other religions were granted the authority to maintain their own civil registers distinct from those created by the local Catholic priest. Civil records from this period were written in Polish until about 1868, when Congress Poland, which was a Russian puppet state since its inception, was absorbed entirely into the Russian Empire, erasing any semblance of autonomy that existed previously.  Both church and civil records were required to be kept in Russian from this time, making the two types of vital records virtually indistinguishable.  The use of Russian continued until the emergence of the Second Polish Republic in 1918, when civil records were recorded in Polish once again.

Civil Records in Prussian Poland

In Prussian Poland,  parish vital registers were created in duplicate starting in 1794, based on a proclamation by Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm II, with the original being reserved for the church and the copy being provided to civil authorities. Both Catholic parish priests and Lutheran ministers were required to send these transcripts (Kirchenbuchduplikate) to the local courts.  In 1874, civil registration began in Prussian Poland that was independent of any churches.  People were required to report all births, deaths and marriages to a civil authority (Standesamt), the territory for which might be different from the territory of the local Catholic or Protestant parish.  Records were kept in German.

Civil Records since 1945

Since the end of World War II, civil registration in Poland has been carried out in local civil registry offices.  Each township (gmina) has its own registry office, or Urząd Stanu Cywilnego (USC) which creates and maintains official birth, marriage, and death records, as well as civil divorce records.  Official recognition was also given to civil marriages that take place independently from church ceremonies.  Until recently, any vital records that were less than 100 years old were protected by Polish privacy laws, and only immediate family or direct descendants (with proof of relationship) could request copies.  However, since 2015, a new law was enacted that makes marriage and death records available as archival documents after only 80 years, although births are still protected for 100 years.  Records older than 100 years are supposed to be transferred from the USCs to the appropriate state archives, and stiff penalties are in place to ensure that this happens on schedule.  However, in cases where the births, marriages and deaths are all bound in the same volume, it might happen that the USC retains possession of the volume for 100 years, but provides copies of the marriage and death records after only 80 years, as permitted by law.

In my next post, I’ll discuss some implications of these historical practices and how they influence where to find vital records, and after that, I’ll give some examples of vital records from each partition.

______________________

1Eternal Word Television Network. “Pius IV Council of Trent-24.” (https://www.ewtn.com/library/COUNCILS/TRENT24.HTM  (accessed September 16, 2016).

For further reading:

http://www.halgal.com/vitalrecordsaustria.html

https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/Poland_Civil_Registration

https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/Poland_Church_Records

https://www.archiwa.gov.pl/pl/dla-uzytkownikow/genealogia/typy-%C5%BAr%C3%B3de%C5%82-wykorzystywanych-do-bada%C5%84-genealogicznych

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urz%C4%85d_stanu_cywilnego

https://mswia.gov.pl/pl/sprawy-obywatelskie/rejestracja-stanu-cywi/12982,Rejestracja-Stanu-Cywilnego-Wiadomosci-ogolne.html

© Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz, 2016

Fun With Genetic Genealogy, Revisited

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Back in July, I wrote about a recent DNA match whose great-grandmother, Catherine (née Ptaszkiewicz)  Grzebińska of Buffalo, New York, seemed likely to be the double first cousin of my great-great-grandmother, Marianna (née Łącka) Klaus.  Marianna had a known double first cousin named Katarzyna Ptaszkiewicz whose birth record I had obtained from the parish records of their home village in Kołaczyce in what is now the Podkarpackie province of Poland. The DNA evidence was consistent with the relationship I hypothesized, and the birthdate of “my” Katarzyna Ptaszkiewicz was fairly close to the estimated birth date of Catherine (née Ptaszkiewicz)  Grzebińska.  However, my newfound cousin did not have a marriage or death record for his Great-Grandmother Grzebińska, so we had no documents indicating her parents’ names or her place of birth.  The year of immigration reported on the 1900, 1920, and 1930 censuses was the same for both John and Catherine Grzebiński, suggesting that they might have married in Poland and emigrated together.  With this in mind, I requested a search of the records of Kołaczyce from the ever-reliable Lucjan Cichocki, whom I frequently work with when I need records from that part of Poland.  He was unable to find a marriage record for Katarzyna Ptaszkiewicz, suggesting that the marriage might have taken place in Buffalo.

This past weekend, I was in Buffalo giving a talk for the Polish Genealogical Society of New York State, and I planned an extra day into my trip for some research at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.  The Library has a fine collection of Buffalo church records on microfilm, and it was there that I hoped to find the marriage record for John and Catherine Grzebiński.  Sure enough, there it was, in the collection of marriage records from St. Stanislaus Parish (Figure 1):

Figure 1:  Record of marriage of Jan Grzebiński and Katarzyna Ptaszkiewicz on 24 July 1884 at St. Stanislaus Church in Buffalo, New York.1jan-grzebinski-and-katarzyna-ptaszkiewicz-1884-closeup

The record states that Katarzyna Ptaszkiewicz was the daughter of “Franc. P.” (i.e. Franciszek Ptaszkiewicz) and Anna Łącka, and that she was born in Kołaczyce, exactly as the earlier evidence predicted.  What a nice, tidy way to wrap up a little genetic genealogy puzzle!

As I thought about this, I wondered if my great-great-grandmother Mary Klaus was close with the family of her cousin.  Surely she would have known that her first cousin (double first cousin, no less!) was also living in Buffalo.  But did the families socialize together much?  Amazingly, I found the answer to my question in those very same records from St. Stanislaus Church.  While searching baptismal records for children of Katarzyna and Jan Grzebiński, I stumbled across a baptismal record I’d somehow missed before. Apparently, my great-great-grandparents Andrzej and Marianna Klaus had a child that must have died young, a child unknown to subsequent generations of the family, until now.  In 1895, there was a baptismal record for a Bolesław Klaus, son of Andrzej Klaus and Marianna Łącka (Figure 2)!2

Figure 2:  Baptismal record for Bolesław Klaus, born 24 October 1895 in Buffalo, New York.boleslaw-klaus-1895-crop

The godfather’s name, underlined in red, is a bit hard to make out in that version of the record, but this expanded version (Figure 2a) reveals that he was none other than Jan Grzebiński.

Figure 2a:  Close-up of baptismal record for Bolesław Klaus, showing godfather’s name as “Grzebiński Jan.”jan-grzebinski

The fact that Marianna Klaus asked her cousin’s husband to be godfather to her child suggests that the two families were on good terms.

This record was also an interesting find for me because it helps me to date the arrival of my Klaus ancestors in Buffalo.  Prior to this, I knew only that they were in Buffalo by September 1897 when my great-grandmother Genevieve (Genowefa in Polish) was born there.3  Before that time, the family was living in St. Louis, Missouri, where their daughters  Anna and Pauline were born in 18924 and 1894,5 respectively.  So until now, I knew only that they arrived in Buffalo some time after January 1894 and before September 1897. This baptismal record for Bolesław demonstrates that they were already in Buffalo by October 1895.  All in all, it was a very successful research trip to Buffalo.  It’s such a thrill when all the puzzle pieces fall into place!

Seeing as how I’m stoked about the wonderful discoveries that can be made via genetic genealogy, I’d love to win a copy of Blaine Bettinger’s new book, The Family Tree Guide to DNA Testing and Genetic Genealogy.  Geneabloggers is giving away a free copy, and if you check out this link, you can enter the giveaway, too.  Good luck, and happy researching!

Sources:

1Roman Catholic Church, St. Stanislaus Parish (Buffalo, New York), Marriages, 1874-1917, 1884, #42, record for Jan Grzebiński and Katarzyna Ptaszkiewicz.

2Roman Catholic Church, St. Stanislaus Parish (Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA), Baptisms, 1874-1903, 1895, #757, record for Bolesław Klaus.

3Roman Catholic Church, St. Stanislaus Parish (Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA), Baptisms, 1874-1903, 1897, #620, baptismal record for Genowefa Klaus.

4Roman Catholic Church, St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish (St. Louis, Missouri, USA), “Church records, 1880-1993,” Baptisms, 1880-1923, 1892, #127, record for Anna Klaus.; 1872178.

5Roman Catholic Church, St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish (St. Louis, Missouri, USA), “Church records, 1880-1993,” Baptisms, 1880-1923, 1894, #2,  record for Apolonia Klaus.; 1872178

© Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz 2016

 

A Case of Mistaken Identity

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Have you ever known something about your family for a fact, yet discovered through research that it’s just not true after all?  I’ve had this experience very recently, and it came about as a result of this blog post.  Recently, my mother-in-law’s cousin shared with me this photograph (Figure 1).

Figure 1:  Konczal Fabiszewski family circa 1906 lower resolution 001He wondered if I might have any insight into who the people were.  I was excited to see the photo, and believed I could tell him exactly who these people were because Grandma Barth showed me this same photo before she died, and filled me in. I thought this photo would be a nice subject for a blog post, so I started to gather a bit of background documentation to provide some insight into the lives of the people shown here.  In the process,  I’ve discovered that things aren’t really what they seemed, and maybe — just maybe — Grandma might have been wrong about a thing or two.

I admit that I haven’t done much research with Grandma’s family.  She had accumulated so much information on her own, including where her family had come from in Poland, and preliminary research showed her information to be pretty accurate.  So it was easy to accept all her information as fact, and put this on the back burner while working on lines that seemed more challenging.  By way of background, Grandma Barth’s parents were Albert Drajem and Mary Kantowska, both born in Buffalo, New York, to Polish immigrants.  Mary Drajem, Grandma’s mother, was the fourth of seven children born to John Kantowski and Mary (née Kończal) Kantowska, who came to Buffalo from Łabiszyn, a small town in what is now Żnin County in the  Kujawsko-Pomorskie province of Poland, but what was at that time part of the Prussian Empire.  According to Grandma Barth, her maternal grandmother, Mary Kantowska, had several siblings who also eventually settled in Buffalo:  a brother, John Kończal, and sisters Katherine and Josephine.  Grandma also reported that Katherine married Constantine Fabiszewski and had seven sons, while Josephine married Teofil Mroziński, and had four children.  It is the Fabiszewski family —  Constantine, Katherine, their children, and an old woman, whom we’ll discuss more closely in a moment — who are shown in this photograph.

The Fabiszewski Family of Buffalo, New York

Figure 2 shows the Fabiszewski family in the 1910 U.S. Federal Census:

Figure 2:  Extract of 1910 U.S. Federal Census for Buffalo, New York, showing the Constantine Fabiszewski family:

Fabiszewski family 1910 census

Based on their heights in this photograph, it seems logical to infer that the oldest son, Peter, is standing in the back row, behind his father, with his brother Casimir to the left in the photo, and Leon to the left again, behind the old woman.  The fourth-oldest son, Frank, appears to the be boy holding the candle and prayer book, both of which suggest that this portrait was taken on the occasion of his First Communion.  The very youngest son, Stanislaus, is standing between his parents, with Joseph and Anthony to the left in the photo of the old woman.  So who is the old woman?

The Mysterious Anna (née Woźniak) Kończal

Grandma Barth told me that this woman was her own great-grandmother, that her name was Anna (née Woźniak) Kończal, and that she was the mother of Katherine Fabiszewski, John Kończal, Josephine (née Kończal) Mroziński, and Mary (née Kończal) Kantowska (Grandma’s grandma).  Grandma remembered her vividly, even though Grandma was only six years old when Anna died in 1922.  She’s buried in St. Stanislaus Cemetery, whose records indicate that she was 60 when she died,1 conflicting with Grandma’s assertion that her great-grandmother died at the age of 70.  In 1920, per both Grandma and the 1920 U.S. Federal Census, Anna was living with the family of her daughter Mary Kantowski, in the same house as Grandma Barth’s family (Figure 3):

Figure 3:  Extract of 192o U.S. Federal Census for Buffalo, New York, showing the Kantowski and Drajem families at 221 Clark Street.  Anna Konczal is noted as mother-in-law to head of household, John Kantowski. 1920 Census Kantowski family

Grandma Barth appears in this census as “Jennie,” age 3 years 8 months.  The census indicates that Anna is a 70-year-old widow (Grandma wins on the age question!) and a resident alien who immigrated in 1891.  This immigration year is in contrast to her daughter Mary, who immigrated in 1886 with her husband John.

That 1891 immigration year gave me a good lead in finding her passenger manifest,2 which shows Anna and daughter Josepha Konszal (sic) arriving at the Port of New York on 19 November 1892 (Figure 4).

Figure 4:  Passenger manifest2 for Anna and Josepha Konszal (sic), 19 November 1892:Konszal passenger manifest 1892

 

Anna is 40 here and Josepha is 16, which is consistent with their dates of birth from other sources.  They’re from “Clotildowo, Germany,” which fits nicely with the village of Klotyldowo, a village which belonged to the Catholic parish, in Łabiszyn.  They’re headed to Buffalo, New York, which makes sense.  So we know that Anna came over with the then-single Józefa, but was living with her daughter Mary in 1920.  Where was Anna during those intervening years?

Well, ten years earlier, in the 1910 U.S. Federal Census, Anna Kończal  seems to be found living with her daughter, Józefa Mrozińska, and family (Figure 5):

Figure 5:  Extract from the 1910 U.S. Federal Census for Buffalo, New York, showing the Mroziński family.Teofil Mrozinski family 1910 census

Although we suspect immediately that this is really “our” Anna Kończal and not Teofil’s mother, there are a couple of problems.  Anna’s name is misrendered as “Kończak” instead of “Kończal,” and she is erroneously reported to be Teofil’s mother, and not his mother-in-law.  However, “Kończak” seems pretty close to “Kończal,” and her age and year of immigration match up nicely with the information for “our” Anna that was reported on the 1920 census.  Unfortunately, it can be argued that these latter facts might also be true for Teofil’s mother, so they don’t constitute irrefutable evidence that this Anna is his mother-in-law and not his mother.  Perhaps his mother remarried a man named Kończak after Teofil’s father died, so she was no longer “Mrs. Mrozińska” at the time of the census.  Fair enough.  So how do we resolve this problem?

Next stop, Pennsylvania

Well, Teofil and Josephine’s marriage record should tell us their parents’ names.  Where do well look for that record?  If you’ll notice, the final column on the right in Figure 4 indicates that the oldest two Mroziński children, Stanislaus and Casimir, were born in Pennsylvania, while the younger two were born in New York. Similarly, if you go back to Figure 1, you see that the oldest two Fabiszewski boys, Peter and Casimir, were also born in Pennsylvania.  These data suggest that both the Mrozińskis and the Fabiszewskis might have married in Pennsylvania, prior to the births of their children there.  Sure enough, I found records of marriage for both couples in Shamokin, PA.

The  Mrozińskis’ marriage record  (Figure 6) gave valuable information, but no surprises.

Figure 6:  Marriage certificate for Teofil Mroziński and Józefa Kończal, 1894.Teofil Mrozinski and Jozefa Konczal marriage 1894 crop

Both the bride and groom are from Prussia, consistent with the “German Polish” notation found on census records.  Teofil was living in Shamokin and working as a miner.  His parents were Andreas Mroziński and Rozalia Mrozińska (no maiden name provided).  Josephine was also living in Shamokin, working as a domestic, and her parents’ names are given as Franciszek and Annie Konczal [sic].  Taken together, these facts offer conclusive evidence that the “Anna Kończak” living with the Mroziński family in Buffalo in 1910 really is Teofil’s mother-in-law, and not his mother.

Will the Real Katherine Fabiszewski Please Stand Up?

However, the real surprise came with the marriage record for Josephine’s sister, Katherine, to Constantine (Konstanty, in Polish) Fabiszewski (Figure 7):

Figure 7:  Marriage certificate for Konstanty Fabiszewski and Katarzyna Kubiak, 1894.

Konstanty Fabiszewski and Katherine Konczal 1894 crop marked

Katherine’s name is given as Katarzyna Kubiak, not Kończal, and she’s the daughter of John and Agnieszka Kubiak!  What?  How can that be?  Grandma said that Katherine was sister to John, Mary and Josephine Kończal, and she’s been right about everything else so far!  How could Katherine be a Kubiak?  Could there be two Konstanty Fabiszewskis in Shamokin, both about the same age, both married to women named Katherine?  Well, stranger things have happened, but then where is the marriage record for Katherine Kończal? And didn’t Grandma say that her great-grandmother’s name was Anna (née Woźniak) Kończal, not Anna (née Kubiak) Kończal?

At this point, I don’t have enough data to resolve this problem.  More work needs to be done. Grandma Barth has proven to be a very reliable source in the past, but this could very well be an instance in which she’s wrong.  I looked back to see where Grandma might have gotten the idea that the surname Woźniak was associated with this family, and found it in Mary Kantowska’s birth certificate, an official copy of which Grandma had carefully preserved (Figure 8):

Figure 8:  Official transcript from 1906 of Mary Kantowska’s 1891 baptismal record from St. Stanislaus Church, Buffalo, New York

Maria Kantowski 1891.jpg

This indicates that Mary Kantowska’s parents were, in fact, John Kantowski and Maria Kończal, and that her godparents were John Kończal and Anna Woźniak. John Kończal is likely to be Mary (née Kończal) Kantowska’s brother, whom Grandma mentioned among the known Kończal siblings. So Woźniaks might indeed be connected to the Kończal-Kantowski family, but this does not explain why Katherine, who was purportedly”née Kończal” Fabiszewska, is actually Katherine, née Kubiak, Fabiszewska.

The Poznań Project Weighs In

Some interesting insight is gained by search results from the Poznań Project. A search for Franciszek Kończal and Anna, no surname specified — which are the names reported for Josephine’s parents on that marriage record — reveals the following (Figure 9):

Figure 9:  Extract of results from Extended Search in the Poznań Project for marriages between grooms with name Franciscus/Franz/Franciszek Konczal and brides named Anna.Franciscus Konczal and Anna Kubiak Poznan Project hit

Here we see Kubiak again, and in Łabiszyn, the home parish of Grandma’s Kończals.  Anna Kubiak’s age in this record suggests a birth year of 1844 –older than what we would expect based on U.S. records, which point to a birth year of 1850-1852, but within the ballpark.  Moreover, a search for Jan Kubiak and Agnieszka, no surname — the names reported for Katherine Fabiszewski’s parents — produces this hit (Figure 10):

Figure 10:  Extract of results from Extended Search in the Poznań Project for marriages between grooms with name Joannes/Jan/Johann Kubiak and brides named Agnes/Agnieszka.

Jan Kubiak and Agnes Konczal

Curiouser and curiouser!  Same parish, and it would seem that Katherine Fabiszewski’s mother was a Kończal.  Taken together, this might suggest a case of siblings marrying siblings — perhaps Joannes Kubiak and Anna Kubiak were siblings, and they married siblings Agnes Kończal and Franciscus Kończal.  The records from Łabiszyn and Buffalo will tell us for sure.

The Mysterious Anna (née Woźniak) (née Kubiak) Kończal

So where does this leave us?  Who IS the woman in the photo, after all?  Is she Grandma Barth’s great-grandmother, Anna (née Kubiak) Kończal?  If so, why is she in a portrait with the family of her probable niece, and not her daughter?  Was Grandma mistaken, and this photo shows Katherine Fabiszewski and her family with her own mother, Agnes (née Kończal) Kubiak?  It appears that Grandma was misinformed about Katherine Fabiszewski being a sister to her own mother, Mary — present data suggest that they were cousins, or perhaps double cousins, but not siblings.  Yet one wonders if it’s even possible that Grandma would misidentify her own great-grandmother in a family photo.  Like Grandma Barth, I was six when one of my great-grandmothers died, and I can easily pick her out in old family photos.  The very fact that this photograph was handed down in Grandma’s family, and not just in the Fabiszewski family, suggests that it was significant to both families, possibly due to the image of a shared great-grandmother.  Moreover, when Anna Kończal died in 1922, her daughter Mary Kantowska was 54, and her granddaughter Mary Drajem (Grandma Barth’s mother) was 31.  Surely they were the ones to pass this photo down to Grandma Barth, and they would have been able to correctly identify their own mother and grandmother.

There are two final bits of information that we can wring out of that 1910 census listing for Anna Kończal in Figure 4.  The “M1” in the column after age tells us that Anna Kończal was married once, and that she’s been married for twenty years.  The next two numbers tell us that she was the mother of six children, three of whom were still living at the time of the census. Starting with those numbers about Anna’s children, the fact that is says three children still living at the time of the census is significant — not four, Katherine, John, Mary and Josephine — as Grandma Barth recollected.  This would make sense if Grandma was wrong about Katherine Fabiszewska being one of the Kończal siblings.   The next bit, about the “M1/20” only adds to the confusion, however.  Josephine Mrozińska is reported to be 36 years old at the time of this 1910 census — making her 16 at the time of her mother’s wedding, if her mother’s only been married 20 years.  So the census-taker appears to have erred with at least some part of that story.  Either this is a second marriage for Anna, or she’s only been married once, but Josephine was born 16 years out of wedlock.

It’s hard to think of a single hypothetical scenario that would resolve all these conflicts in the data. I considered the fact that perhaps Anna Woźniak was married twice — first to a man named Kubiak, with whom she had Katherine, and then to Franciszek Kończal, with whom she had Josephine, John and Mary.  But if that were the case,then the mother’s name reported on Katherine Fabiszewska’s marriage record should be Anna, and not Agnieszka, and we would expect to see two marriage records for Anna in the Poznań Project.  It’s possible that mistakes were made in recording the census, and also possible (though it seems less likely) that a mistake was made in the marriage record.  Further research should be able to resolve these conflicts and reveal the full story.  In the meantime, we’re left with something of a mystery, and questions today where I thought I had answers yesterday.

Sources:

Note:  Where possible, links are provided to sources online.  Other sources are summarized below.  

1St. Stanislaus Roman Catholic Cemetery (Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA) to Julie Szczepankiewicz, Phone Call, Inquired about a burial for Anna Konczal.  Was informed that she died on April 23, 1922 at age 60 and was buried April 26, 1922  in Sec. K, Lot 79, Grave 7.  Her funeral was at Corpus Christi Church and Urban Funeral Home.

2Anna Konszal, 19 Nov 1892; citing departure port Rotterdam, arrival port New York, ship name Werkendam, NARA microfilm publication T715 and M237 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.), accessed on 30 August 2016.

© Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz 2016