Where to Look

 

It definitely helps to know where to look when you're researching your roots in Poland. This country presents some research challenges, being a prime example of what I mean when I say that genealogy can no longer be a case of one-stop shopping.

I found that to be especially true while I was working on my paternal ancestors from Pomerania, that northern region stretching across both Germany and Poland. While working on the Radomski line this month, I've relied on one particular website which zeroed in on records from Pomerania. That website, hosted by the Pomeranian Genealogical Association—the acronym PTG referring to the organization's name in Polish—held a database of transcriptions having one unifying detail in common: they all were records from the region of Pomerania.

While countrywide resources like Geneteka may be helpful in finding your Polish roots, I've come to appreciate the specialization of such a narrow scope as I find at PTG. But now that the coming month's research focus moves us away from Pomerania to the old Prussian region, then called the Province of Posen (the Germanisation of the Polish place name Poznań), I'll need to switch to another regional resource.

Actually, over the years, I've used two different websites for my long-distance quest to discover more about my Polish ancestors. At first, I began checking transcriptions of marriage records through the Poznań Project website. That resource was helpful, but left out details cataloguing the rest of life. To find birth and death records, as well as marriage details, the Poznań Project pointed me to BaSIA.

BaSIA—the website's Polish name is translated as Database of Archival Indexing System—provides indexed material from what was once called Greater Poland, from the eighteenth century onward. Significantly, records stretch well into the 1900s, which will help me with my upcoming goal to trace the lines of descent for all the Jankowski children.

The BaSIA system, powered by volunteers, gleans key details from both church and governmental archived records from the region, which is then put into a searchable system online. From those entries, links to the actual archived records enable a researcher to pull up the corresponding images, which can then be downloaded to the user's own computer.

While I've been able to access many records from this region for my Jankowski family through digitized records, there have been several children in that line for whom I can find no record at FamilySearch.org, my primary resource for Polish research so far. The process from this point forward will be to cross check what I've found—or not found—at FamilySearch with what I can access at BaSIA. A tedious process, indeed, but a necessary one to fill in the many blanks on this branch of my family tree. With access to records up into the twentieth century, I'm hoping the process will enable me to push forward another generation on this family group.