St. Louis, Missouri Polish Church Notes

St. Stanislaus Kostka Church
The first Polish Roman Catholic church established in St. Louis, MO was St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in 1880. It's earliest marriage records provide little more than the date and the names of the brides and grooms. The parish moved to a standard "fill in the form" format but the priest usually left out the locale where the participants were from or just said "St. Louis" for everyone when that was probably not the case for immigrants. At a certain point, the locales were consistently added (and in the nominative case more easily locatable on a map). In many instances, the locale names were changed for this site's index to reflect modern boundaries. These names will end in POLAND (in all capital letters). Because multiple locales in Poland may have the same name, you may still need to do more homework if the suggested locale isn't the right one. If you see Galicia, this is the same as Austrian Poland. If you see kr. Poland, this the same as Russian Poland. If you see ks. Poznan, this is the same as the province of Poznan (in Prussia). If you see Prussia, this is the same as German Poland. Handwriting was an issue in these records with the usual letters easily confused. Later on when a new priest took over, the handwriting got worse. While one can assume fewer immigrants were coming here and getting married, it still seemed like the new priest was happy to assign everyone's locale as St. Louis.

Inserted at various pages in the marriage volume were other notes and forms. There were three frequent inserts: Dispensation forms most usually dealing with mixed religions but also consanguinity (relatedness). Pre-nutial agreement forms where the non-Catholic party of the marriage agrees that the children will be raised Catholic. Hand written in Polish, these inserts deal with persons who were belonged to schismatic independent Polish churches. Presumably, these renounce their membership with that faction and their intent to rejoin the Roman-Catholic rite.

Births
In volume 4 of baptisms, St. Stanislaus Kostka, section of pages 171-178, are out of place coming after page 144. The numbering of records continues chronologically as though this never occurred. This note merely informs you that if you are browsing the volume page by page, no pages are missing but some may be out of place.

Deaths
St. Stanislaus Kostka volume 1 of deaths usually gives only basic information like name and age.

St. Casimir Church
Volume 1 of St. Casimir Church marriage records initially did not include the mother names. In a few instances where someone did include them, someone else crossed them out. During this time, the localities were routinely included in the record. About the time mother name inclusion became routine, the locality names were left out!

Volume 2 of St. Casimir Church marriage records included a lot of information. Even though ages or birthdates often appear in these records, that information is not indexed (because you will look up the record and retrieve that information for yourself). As noted above, the localities are "suggested" based on the record and not verbatim transcripts.

Deaths
St. Casimir volume 1 of deaths often gave the place of birth of the deceased. Of those who were foreign born, many were from Subkowy and Tczew in Tczew County, Poland. Pages 4 and 15 appear to have been skipped in filming because there is a chronological gap in the records. Prepage 1 has some summaries of deaths for the Napieralski & Jasinski families. One or more of the 1 year ages is really 1w as the wk abbreviation looked like rok (the Polish word for year).

Our Lady of Czestochowa Church
Volume 1 of Our Lady of Czestochowa Church includes mixed records with only a few containing marriages. Most of the marriages of this volume were copied into Volume 2 so a few marriages are referenced twice. All locations were listed as St. Louis, MO so these were not indexed. Later in Volume 3 of marriages, place names become included as part of the record.

Our Lady of Czestochowa Church baptisms start in one volume with marriages and deaths and get recopied into another mixed record volume so some baptisms are indexed twice.

St. Adalbert Church
St. Adalbert Church was founded in 1912 but for some reason its early records are not accounted for (except for deaths). The marriage records beginning in 1938 through May 1992 are available but not the earlier marriages. The whereabouts of the baptismal records is not known.

Deaths
St. Adalbert volume 1 of deaths has a very nice design including separate fields for parents, spouses, birthdays as well as the usual fields. While this is great, the priests did not always provide the information. Actual birthdates didn't become regularly recorded until about 1948 (although age had been included). The writing turned small and difficult to read. Luckily the Missouri death certificates are indexed online for 1910-1972 and the site has a good search engine so that questionable spellings can be tested. [In one test, I searched for Casimir Jasinski who died in 1918 and he wasn't there. I searched on the death year and surname starts with Jas. This turned up Casimir's record where he had been indexed as Jasiuski!] The birthdates in the church record and the death certificates often conflicted. Many times this had to do with how ages were reckoned. In the US, our age starts at zero and increases by one on each birthday anniversary. In some cultures, a newborn is reckoned to be in their first year (one year old) so may be a year older than by US custom. I don't know if that's the case for the Poles but, many listed birthdates differed by a year. Sometimes the church record would give additional information that the death certificate did not and vice versa, so check out both records. The church was more likely to give the Polish spelling while the death certificate may have an anglicized version (-oski instead of -owski).

St. Hedwig Church
St. Hedwig volume 1 of baptisms had several affidavits where apparently the baptism took place but was not recorded. These certificates are usually attached at the page where the record might otherwise have been included.