On a Lark, a Wide Open Search

 

After attending to the uploading of several additional Polish ancestors to my various family trees online, on a lark, I tried my hand at a wide open search of the research location which kept my focus for the entire month of October, and is set to be my continued focus in November. I opened up the search engine at Google and entered the term, "Żerków." After all, that is the Catholic parish where many of my paternal grandmother's family records were found, and the seat of an administrative district by the same name. I was curious to see what else might be out there, online, and of possible use, so I conducted a general search.

Granted, the town of Żerków has barely more than two thousand residents right now, so I doubted there'd be much to find online of genealogical use. One resource I wanted to check for sure was the FamilySearch Wiki. I wasn't sure whether there would even be a page devoted to Żerków as a subject—and there wasn't, specifically. But there were some useful finds.

For one thing, doing a Google search of the overall FamilySearch.org website yielded two entries. The first was a catalog entry for the microfilms of Lutheran and Catholic church records for Prussia dating from 1430 through 1998, with many of the films available for viewing online. The second discovery was an inventory of those church records, sorting out the data by locality, district, and church organization, all laid out in a table format alphabetized by locality—with, of course, a long way to scroll to reach the bottom and the entry for Żerków.

There were other results for Żerków found through my experiment with Google. Since I've already written about this location in prior blog posts, it was not unexpected to see those articles show up in Google, too—but an appearance on that Google list by fellow geneablogger, Julie Roberts Szczecinkiewicz, was a pleasant surprise to see. I was already aware that Julie has blogged about her Polish roots, but I hadn't noticed this particular post mentioning Żerków, specifically.

Since adding this expanding branch of my family to my trees posted at several other sites has been a goal, it was good to notice that results for my Żerków search included an information page at WikiTree including subcategories of Prussian villages in the area, as well as an alphabetical listing of all those individuals in the universal WikiTree from Żerków. While I see no relatives on that list other than those I had added, myself, that is a list I'll come back to over time, in hopes of discovering others researching this same line.

While in November, I'll move on from researching that Olejniczak line to that of my second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski, we'll still be relying on records from the same general vicinity around Żerków. I'm looking forward to seeing how many additional records I'll be able to find on the Laskowski side, now that I've found the archival link to transcribed records at my new favorite go-to Polish website, BaSIA.