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 caller 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?

Access to many genealogical records is restricted by date. Generally, if even one record out of a whole collection of records would be restricted, the whole collection is restricted even if the other records fall within the allowable date range. Now that records have been digitized, it should be possible to withhold the display of an image with restricted records on it while allowing the display of other pages that fall within the allowed date range. I heard a couple of years ago that the LDS was working on this feature.

Some folks are lucky! They can type a name in Family Search and get all kinds of records with event dates. Poles are generally unlucky because we live in an Anglo world. The problem is that records are often indexed by Anglos who do not have any knowledge of the Polish alphabet or language. When we can't find information, it is likely due to bad indexing. See Indexing Errors for a summary of the most common indexing errors. While some of the indexed material on Family Search allows users to correct errors, it is a lengthy process.

Newspaper death notices are very useful for establishing family relationships. A death notice index for the Dziennik Chicagoski is on this site. If your relative had a death notice published in that newspaper from 1890 through 1942, you can now see the death notice online. Just select the year and the date. Death notices are usually set off in black lined boxes. This service is provided by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL).