Look, Pa! I Can Read Polish!

As I struggle my way through documents with unpronounceable words, I realized something. After several years of banging my head against the brick wall blocking my paternal grandfather's story, I must have developed a knack for learning Polish by osmosis. Not that I can read Polish, exactly, but I'm starting to get the hang of it.

Take my current struggle with finding documents for the Olejniczak branch of the family. The transcriptions for several family members are at BaSIA, but to see the actual scans of the documents, I need to click through to szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl.

Of course, once I got to that website, I realized the entire thing was written in Polish. Well, what did I expect, right? But somehow, looking at choices like this didn't baffle me for long.

Or how about this one?

Incredibly, I guessed right on both of these. So I've spent my days happily clicking on "link do skanu" to produce URLs like the one above—which, by the way, extends far beyond what is showing in the little white box with the archive's web address—and then clicking on "kopiuj link" to harvest and paste the document's specific address into my family trees, or wherever I want to preserve that address for future reference.

I realized that, repeated often over years, a few words from other languages can sometimes become far less intimidating than they at first seemed. Of course, it helped that about five years ago, it occurred to me to learn how Polish phonics work—especially given their use of diacritical marks—and I created a blog post with links to help me remember for the next time I visited this research challenge. Websites like this one on the Polish alphabet and a companion site guiding me on pronunciation became indispensable cheat sheets for future work. 

Now that I'm deep into Polish research once again, I'm finding more resources to add to my Polish toolkit. For instance, I found this charming article helpful in navigating the very different world of Polish names of months—which also made me realize how so many of the Western European heritages follow the same conventions for names of the months. Not Poland, once again, which makes researching Polish ancestors so very different.

While Polish is a language far more difficult than I think I could ever learn, with a little help, it is possible to gain a working knowledge of the terms we researchers are most likely to encounter in our exploration of birth, marriage, or death records. And given Poland's predominant religious heritage as Catholic, many documents were drawn up in Latin—a more universal language to conquer. Then, too, with their political history as part of the dominion of other nations—producing some records, for instance, in German or Russian—a working knowledge of such other languages may make research progress a bit easier...or harder. But with the advent of computers, a little morphing from the dominant language of many programmers—English—can yield a little creative "Polish-izing" which can be deciphered by even someone like non-Polish me.

Still, knowing all that about researching Polish ancestors leads us to develop toolkits and cheat sheets to tap dance our way through multiple languages and handwriting styles. Perhaps that is the only way we can move forward in researching our Polish roots. But after several years of doing so, it is rather refreshing to realize, hey, we can do this, after all.