Back at the beginning of this year when I was deciding which of my Polish ancestors to research in November, I had just broken free from those hindering doubts—the kind which prod people with the rhetorical question, "Why try?" After all, Polish records—or more accurately, Prussian records—are not exactly the forte of my primary genealogical resource, Ancestry.com. Finding such records at FamilySearch, where admittedly they could be in the collection, was akin to snatching up the proverbial needle in the haystack. Only this haystack had billions upon billions of strands of information.
The one resource which shook me loose of my doubts last year was an obscure website hosted in Poland. In English, it is listed as the site of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, but its web address beginning with "ptg" hints of the name by which it is known in its home country: Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne.
If you can read—and understand!—Polish, the home page of that website offers up helpful articles on researching Polish ancestors, specifically from the region known as Pomerania. Alas, I am a mere mortal and can only understand one language, and it certainly isn't Polish, let alone any regional dialects. But I try.
Embedded within that maze of helpful Polish material on the PTG website is the capability to search through a database of transcribed vital records from the region of Pomerania. And yes! That can indeed be done in English, provided you first click on the flag for the corresponding language translation.
That is how I found the 1896 entry in the index of local death records for my second great-grandmother, Marianna Wojtaś Zegarska. It was Marianna who was the mother of my unfortunate great-grandmother Anastasia Zegarska whom we studied last month. Thankfully, that index of Polish records included Marianna's "family name" in their readout. Despite that clue, however, I've yet to find a digital copy of the document which, presumably, provided that detail.
Finding the PTG website was indeed encouraging because it turned around my despondent concern that I would never find anything more about my Polish roots. With that transcribed and translated entry from one small website, I was encouraged to try to find more information. That is what inspired me to name Marianna Wojtaś as my November selection for the Twelve Most Wanted this year. I may indeed be able to discover more about this branch of my paternal ancestry this month, thanks to the availability of resources from this northern Pomeranian region of what is now the country of Poland.
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