The parish of Bieżuń, powiat Żuromin, Poland was in the Russian partition of Poland so its birth, marriage and death records were recorded in paragraph form (rather than an easy to read table form). I indexed the marriage records for Bieżuń parish for the years 1860-1885. Until about the middle of 1868, the records were recorded in Polish. Thereafter, the records were recorded in Russian using the Cyrillic alphabet. In the 1800s, there was one volume devoted to each year.

It seemed logical that a family would hand down any claims to land to their children when they ‘retired’. The grantor of the property usually adopted the status of inquilinus-- Latin for lodger because they still lived with the family in retirement. These transfers of property were often documented. Several years ago I came across a transfer document called a Bond of Support pertaining to my great grandparents in Wisconsin. As you will read, in exchange for the property, the great grandparents were to be supported for the rest of their lives.

The Boston area Polish immigrants were different from those in Chicago or Milwaukee. Chicago attracted people mostly from Prussian Poland as did Milwaukee. The Boston Poles were mostly from the eastern regions of Poland (Russian Poland) including what are now parts of Lithuania (if you see a Wino as part of a place name, it was probably a typo for Wilno), Belarus, and Ukraine. It was common to see some of the brides/grooms listed in the marriage records were from the orthodox rite rather than Roman Catholic rite as noted by many dispensations for mixed marriages.

Handwriting can often be difficult to read and is a problem for genealogists. Some of us may be more successful than others in figuring out what we are looking at. Someone (I'll call her Ms. Kowalski) once did a search on 'Hamslans' trying to understand what that was. I immediately realized that what she was looking at was 'Stanislaus'.

The original version of this site's marriage index was begun in the mid-1980s to assist me in my family research. At that time church records were only available on microfilm at a Family History Center. I chose to index all the marriages in a volume regardless of whether I was related to the bride or groom. That orignal index showed only the names of the brides and grooms and their date of marriage. Now, most of the parishes have parent names (if part of the record) included as well.

It seemed that most Polish immigrants to Rossford, OH (during its early years) came from the villages of Wzdów, Jaćmierz, and Besko which are shown on the map below.

Maple Grove Township is in eastern Shawano County in Wisconsin. It is close to Pulaski, Wisconsin and the nearest big city is Green Bay. John J Hoff was a land developer in the Green Bay area in the late 1880s. What had been timbered land was offered to settlers to be farmed. Apparently, he had not been particularly successful promoting his holdings to his Norwegian brethen and turned his marketing to Polish immigrants. His first venture was land near the community of Hofa Park in Maple Grove Township.

I was doing some research on a family from Dobrzyń, now known as Golub-Dobrzyń after the merging of two towns on opposite sides of the river Drwęca. Dobrzyń was a part of the parish in Dulsk and part of the Russian partition of Poland. I was surprised the records were written in Polish as most of what I have worked with has been in Latin or German. I was puzzled by two dates always being given next to one another. I later realized that one date was the Gregorian calendar date we commonly use and the other was the Julian calendar date being used in Russia at that time.

It can be difficult enough to read the writing in some parish records but it is made worse when the image is blurry. I noticed many LDS images of Buffalo area churches were blurry. Is there technology to sharpen such images and make them more readable?