Indexing Pakość-wieś: WWI Deaths in One Rural Community
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 ...