This gazetteer of the Republic of Poland from 1933 is valuable because it is a single resource for all of Poland back then. Prior to the restoration of the Polish state, you often needed a different gazetteer specific for the partition you were working in. Furthermore, modern gazetteers do not include the eastern territory that was taken from Poland after World War II. This gazetteer includes the parish that a locality belonged to so you know where to looks for parish records.
If you have used Family Tree at familysearch.org, you know how great it is to have potential sources found for you to evaluate. Sometimes it takes a bit of prodding to get it to find new sources. Here's a couple of examples of how I did this today.
As of about mid-July 2019, the Family Tree of familysearch.org has added a feature which allows you to edit some of the names in their indexes of various record collections. This has been a desirable feature for a long time since many names were badly indexed either due to bad information in the original document, bad writing of correct information, or bad indexing (the indexer did not have the skill to read Polish names). When you edit a name, you are asked if it was an indexing problem or if the original document was incorrect.
I had always been hesitant to share my family history research because I didn't want it appearing on for-profit websites where it is then sold to others. I also question sometimes whether what I have seen on those sites is a rehash of what I gave to a relative and has been passed around, or did someone do the same research and verify that the facts I recorded are valid. The inclusion of sources is lacking.
It can be difficult to find the ancestral villages of our ancestors in Poland. The first difficulty is finding documentation that even attempts to provide the place name. Some church records and immigration/naturalization records provide this information, but not always.
A few years ago (2017) there was an immigrant database on the Castle Garden (New York) website that no longer is there. The database was the Germans to America database that is accessible through the National Archives. When using the database, I encountered several oddities which will be treated separately.
Family Search has made available online an index of burials in the Archdiocese of Chicago Cemeteries. The index was prepared from microfilmed records made in 1989. In that regard, the index does not include records beyond 1989. If you find someone of interest in the index, you can click on the name and be taken to the image of that record. You will need to be logged-in at familysearch.org to see the image. The images are of the index cards that reside in the cemetery offices.
I was contacted by the web hosting company (the one hosting this site) to say that Google Chrome will be updated in January 2017 to be more proactive in its efforts to provide for a safer browsing experience. Chrome will begin to expect that the more secure HTTPS server be used rather than the simple HTTP server used by this site. As a result, the browser may display some sort of "Not Secure" message on some pages where some sort of login field or fill-in form is used.
Polish immigrants from the German occupied regions of Poland were arriving in Chicago in greater numbers during the 1860s. Some of them joined the German parish of St. Boniface because the Poles had no church of their own in 1865. St. Boniface was founded in 1865 in the West Town neighborhood of Chicago. The Polish parish of St. Stanislaus Kostka was founded in 1869 and most of the Poles became members there. The indexed portion of St. Boniface records includes only the years of 1865-1870 when the Poles were more likely included.
