Lucky Day! Friday the 13th!

Thanks to the work of the volunteers at The Poznan Project, I was able to identify 2^nd and 3^rd great grandfathers and brothers of my great grandfather.  Found them all on Friday the 13^th!!

The Poznan Project is working to transcribe all 19^th century marriages in the Polish province of Poznan. A very efficient search engine looks for either or both bride and groom. I’ve used it successfully searching for 3 of my lines, and finally got around to the 4 of my surnames.

Searching just on Ganas as the groom’s surname, I got 12 matches.  But the best part is that they’re all clustered in a relatively small area.  In some cases the search results include the names of the parents of the bridal couple.  Four of the grooms share the same parents. I ordered LDS films and hit a small jackpot on the first one I viewed.

I found my great grandfather’s 3 brothers, his parents and his grandparents! WOW!

There’s a lot more work to do here but I knocked at least one brick out of one wall.

I have the data - now to add the information.

My ancestor search (for my own ancestors) is slowly coming to a halt approaching a big brick wall.  Well, actually it’s not brick but I’m not sure I have what it takes to penetrate it.

Polish Roman Catholic church records before the 18^th century – and in some cases into the 18^th century are paragraphs of handwritten text in Latin. Later records generally have the data entered into labeled columns in the record books like this:

Language isn’t the problem with the early records, the problem is mostly the handwriting. Add to that the fact that many of the pages are faded or damaged by time. Ancient European handwriting is my (not exactly) brick wall.  Here’s a sample of one of more legible record books.

While it would be nice to know the names of my 3^rd 4^th and 5^th great grandparents, I’m not sure that it is worth the effort to try to decipher these earliest records.

Why not?

My goal has been to understand my family history. I believe that I now know enough about that history to be able to add context to the names and dates.  My ancestors were peasants in a part of the world where civil records were not kept until 1874. They were farmers and laborers who were pretty much invisible in their times except to one another.

I can extrapolate from the known names and dates to guess when earlier generations lived. So even if I don’t know their names, history tells me much about their circumstances.  Were their leaders tyrants or magnanimous? What wars were going on?  Were there famines or floods?  I can go far back in time even without being able to name individuals.

I won’t stop searching. Don’t get me wrong. But I’m at the point of getting diminishing returns from poring over the available records.  

New projects for my ancestors will involve trying to depict my ancestors and their lives in words and images and share those with my extended family.  That’s a daunting challenge.  Maybe it would be easier just trying to decode the ancient scribbles.