[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Civil transcripts of Protestant Parish registers Przedecz, Poland

[Gary Warner]

Gail,

Both the Polish and Russian language records of births in Poland are 
according to the Napoleonic format.  So the answer to your question is yes, 
they are all essentially the same for every record.  The differences are 
the obvious names, dates and places.  In addition, there is the occasional 
birth out of wedlock, or a still born that makes that adds a few words here 
and there to the record.  Finally, since we are all human, and the record 
is a  verbose entry of the facts, some of the people entering the data 
occasionally rearranged the sentence a little without changing the meaning.

I assume that when you said that you looked at the SGGEE site, that you 
mean that you looked at the Russian entries and the sample Russian alphabet 
on the web page at http://sggee.org/TranslationHelps.html?

Russian is not a language that I know a great deal about, but here are some
ideas on how to at least collect the records that are of interest to you, 
even if you later have to get someone to do a full translation for you.

1.  Make sure you are looking at the correct type of record (a birth record 
if you are looking for a birth, a death record if you are looking for a 
death, or a marriage record if you are looking for a marriage).  That may 
sound silly, but since you cannot read the record, then you will not know 
which record format is being used for comparison to the sample records 
noted above.

2.  Although the indices are likely all in Russian for the years you are 
looking at, the actual record will likely have the name entered in both 
Russian and German, so you will get a good hint at who the record is for if 
you look through the actual records instead of just the index.

3.  Russian appears to have been a new language to write for the pastors 
who were making the entries in the 1880s, so the penmanship is often much 
better than the earlier Polish records.  Take some time to compare the 
letters of the words to the sample Russian cursive alphabet also shown on 
the above noted web page.  You will be surprised what you can decipher if 
you look at it for awhile, but it will take you some time to make 
progress.  Try translating the names of the people from Russian to German 
to start with, and then progress to words that represent a part of every 
record, like the Russian word for son or daughter that will be in every 
birth record, every marriage record, and many death records.

4.  Get yourself a Russian dictionary and look up the English word that 
seems to belong in a certain place on the record.

5.  Call the Salt Lake City Family History Library and tell them that you 
desperately need a Russian genealogical word list.  They may already have 
one, but I see that it is not yet on their web site for downloading.  If 
anyone else on this list know of a place where a word list can be 
downloaded, please let all of us know.

Gary Warner
Gig Harbor, WA

At 07:03 PM 7/9/2002 , Gail Wilson wrote:
>I have several LDS films that I am going through that are the civil
>transcripts of the Protestant Parish registers for Przedecz, Poland. The
>years are 1864-1885.  I understand the one I am currently using for 1880 is
>in Russian.  I know that the civil registers I have used before for German
>records are stock forms that are filled out and just the dates and names
>are plugged in.  Is this true for the Polish/Russian records?  It seems as
>though the say pretty much the same just by looking at the words. (they are
>in handwriting and not preprinted)  Is there somewhere on the internet that
>I can find out what these say?  I tried the sggee website but what is
>posted there does not seem to match what I have.
>
>I am researching Thiede - Tide and Krueger  (also from Kalisch)
>
>Thank you for your help.
>
>Gail Wilson
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