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Indexing Pakość-wieś: WWI Deaths in One Rural Community

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In my family tree, some of the hardest blanks to fill in have been death dates, particularly as the years get closer to the mid-twentieth century and online access to records ends. On some branches, I have large families with many children, but no hits for any later marriages or descendants of those children. What happened to them? Did they move far from home? Change their last names? Die at an early age? It's frustrating - without a death date, it leaves the possibility open that some distant DNA match might be a descendant of one of these families, so I’m always searching. Recently, I learned the fates of two of those children, Jan and Jósef Wiśniewski, through indexing death records for Pakość-wieś, a rural standesamt (urząd stanu cywilnego or USC) in Mogilno County in the German partition of Poland where many of my ancestors lived.   For this project, I chose to index all of the deaths in this standesamt from 1900 to 1919, the year easy online access ends. This date range ...

Żnin County, Poland: Traveling in the Footsteps of my Ancestors

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  Żnin County, Poland: Traveling in the Footsteps of my Ancestors Is a genealogy-based tour worth your while if you are many generations removed from your immigrant ancestors? What can you learn about their lives just by visiting the towns and villages where they once lived when so many years, and world events, stand between you today and their lives long ago? This past September, I had the opportunity to answer those questions with a walk in the footsteps of my ancestors on a trip to Poland. I’ve been to Poland before, but both trips were before I had the luxury of time on my hands to pursue my interest in genealogy. In 2002, I traveled with my mom and sister. Mom only knew that her grandmother's family was from ‘Posen’, so off we went to visit Warsaw, Krakow, and Poznań , the city, on a bus tour. We had a wonderful trip, and enjoyed just being in Poland, even if we weren’t quite sure where our ancestors were from.  In 2014, I returned to Poland again, this time with my husba...