Two Stop Shopping

 

When it comes to Internet resources for researching Polish roots, the typical places Americans use—with the exception of FamilySearch.org—have few Polish resources. For those willing to brave the strange world of websites composed in foreign languages, there is one resource for genealogical information from what was once the Prussian region called Posen: a website called the Database of Archival Indexing System, or BaSIA for short.

I've been there before, and hopefully, that website, combined with the other ones I usually use, will help out once again in my two-stop-shopping approach to searching for ancestors from the small Polish village of Żerków.

BaSIA is volunteer operated, with a long list of contributors who serve as transcribers of records from the region. Though the website, based in Poland, includes an option to select the language in which to view the material, even using that feature only covers a few basic entries in the system.

Perhaps I've just moved into a stage in my research requiring reliance upon not just one website, but a tap dance through a combination of many resources. For me, one-stop genealogy is dead. While I've learned to spot the few key Polish words that are of most interest to genealogists, I've also gotten used to cutting and pasting phrases from their "English language" version of the website into Google translate to guide me.

For instance, take their statement on the website's landing page. There are a few headings in English, but the text below each readable header is obviously not in my native tongue. For instance, look at the subtitle, "About the Project." Understandable enough—until you begin reading the text below that headline. No, your eyes are not deceiving you; you don't need to get a stronger prescription for your reading glasses. The rest of the article is in Polish. But if I run that foreign language statement through a translation system online, here is what our Polish friends behind this useful website are telling us:

The BaSIA project, or 'Archival Indexing System Database', was created for a wide range of genealogists and researchers of the history of Greater Poland from the 18th to the 20th centuries (although it also contains older information). Through a user-friendly interface, it provides users with a database containing indexes compiled by volunteers, derived from materials stored in state and church archives, among others. It allows users to find the names of people they are searching for, links to scans, vital records, and other information that helps identify families, places, and basic facts from their history. The database is created using the ASIA application ('Automatic Archival Indexing System'), which primarily allows for user-friendly indexing of archival records and simultaneously acts as an intermediary in the process of indexing and making the results available online.

As they've expanded over the years at BaSIA, they have included links to the state archive in Poznań, so that you can click through on a specific transcribed record and be led to the actual document from which the transcription was drawn. Thus, I can pull up the actual death record for Elżbieta Gramlewicz Laskowska, drawn up following her April 1886 passing.

What is helpful in this specific case is that the record provides the names of several people related to Elzbieta's family, including the name of her father, given in the document as Andreas Gramlewicz. What I can't yet decipher is what follows the "und" after Andreas' name is entered. It's Elżbieta's mother's name, I'd presume—but what is it? Even the transcriber couldn't decipher the entry.