Marriage Index Refined

This web page originally from May 2013 has been updated to talk about some early history of the marriage index used elsewhere on this website.

by James J. Czuchra

When I first began indexing marriage records in the 1980's, the goal was merely to create an index as opposed to a transcript of the marriage records. To that end, only the names of the brides and grooms were listed along with enough information to locate the original record on microfilm-- call it phase 1. One of the practical reasons for doing the index in this way was that the laptop computer I used had very limited storage capacity which ruled out the inclusion of additional information. In fact I had to abbreviate given names to save space! Data entry took place at the Family History Center during their daytime hours in the summer. The most efficient use of my time was to prepare the index based only on the bride and groom names.

Now with digital cameras and images online, data entry can be done any time of day on any day. It means that I can go back to parish records I'm interested in and add additional data, like parent names-- call it phase 2 of the project. It resulted in the database now used on this site. Phase 2 was also designed to show surnames and place names with the diacritical marks used by the Polish language. If an online image is known, its sequence number is also given. The phase 2 index is also a bit more accurate as records were read for the second time and corrections due to typos or more experienced readings are made.

The data in the Marriage Database, like all data, should be verified by looking at the original image. The quality of the handwriting is probably the biggest factor affecting the accuracy of the index. Extraction of data is complicated further by the Polish grammar. Names of parents are given in the genitive case (the son or daughter of so-and-so) . Given names are pretty standard but mother's maiden names are more challenging. Many of the maiden names end in -ow and most were retained in the index if a reasonable translation was not apparent. The names of places in the record are given in the locative case while we find names on maps given in the nominative case. This mismatch of case is problematic so you will find some places in this index still in the locative case and others put into the nominative case.

Another problem is multiple places of the same name. It's like saying I live on Main Street. Lots of towns have a Main Street so unless we know the town or otherwise qualify the location, we have a lot of work ahead of us trying to narrow it down. I used an atlas to edit some place names so that they can be located on a modern map more easily. When possible, the place name is qualified by town, parish (par.), county (pow. or kreis.), gubernia (gub.), diocese (dioc.), and province (ks. Poznan, West Prussia, kr. Poland, Galicia). Be particularly mindful that if Poznań is mentioned, it need not mean the city of Poznań. Our immigrant ancestors probably were not well versed in geography nor were their parish priests. So you need to be forgiving if someone from Poznań was listed as from West Prussia, or the powiat name was not the official one the town belonged in. I added the powiat names in many cases if I located the town and chose the closest powiat. The powiat names were those that existed around 1900. For example, one of my ancestral villages was in the powiat of Pilzno back then, but would now be located in the powiat of Dębica.