Both FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com have community indexing projects where volunteers all over the globe can contribute to the indexing effort. This distributed "share the work" concept leads to indexing millions of records in a short period of time. For example, the indexing of Illinois (midwest region) naturalization cards took less than a year. Another example is the 1940 US Census which took about six months.

Volume 1 of baptisms suffers from bad design, and multiple entries per page. Missing portions of names were often inferred or corrected based on the volume index at the start of the volume. The page numbers in many cases are worn off so locating them by image sequence is a good strategy. The paper was probably brittle and the pages got out of order-- another reason to locate them by image sequence. So, some pages require two images to get the complete record. The links show photos of the combined images-- it's easier.

This Polish parish identifies itself as St. Michael the Archangel but the LDS has it listed as just St. Michael. The LDS has St. Michael the Archangel listed, but they're not Polish. Records for the Polish parish are on 2 rolls of microfilm and had been cataloged together.

The map provided plots the locations of Polish Roman Catholic Churches in the Belleville Diocese of Illinois.

The map provided plots the locations of Polish Roman Catholic Churches in the Archdiocese of Chicago. These are the churches identified in Joseph John Parot's book, Polish Catholics in Chicago: 1890-1920.

There are other Slavic peoples in this parish (use of v accent mark) at its beginning but then not so many as perhaps they established their own ethnic parishes or moved away. The writing in volume 1 gets very bad about half way through the volume. In volume 2, after page 105 the pages are not numbered but the index continues the page sequence as though they were. The enumeration number is probably more useful once you know to look at the back of the volume for pages beyond 105. These pages are smaller in size and contain only 6 baptisms per page.

The map provided plots the locations of Polish Roman Catholic Churches in the Diocese of Toledo in Ohio.

Google Street View image of the church in 2001 before it was taken down.

Rossford, OH was founded in 1898 by Edward Ford, who opened a glass company there. Many immigrants came from settlements in Pennsylvania to work in the new plant. Rossford is a suburb of Toledo and some came from there as well.

by James J. Czuchra

A common design for baptismal registers was to spread records across two pages with the father's name on the left hand page and the mother's name on the right hand page. The problem is that often the father's surname and the mother's given name are unreadable as they are pinched in the crack of the binding where the two pages come together. The same problem sometimes occurs with names in marriage registers.