[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Kochanow / Erdmannsweiler - Russian Poland

[AlbertMuth at aol.com]

I have printed out Tom Stangl's transcriptions of Kochanow records from
Gluchow parish--some 90 pages, so think twice before you try this at 
home!  I did it at the university where I teach.  
http://pixel.cs.vt.edu/library/churches/link/kochanow.txt

I am interested in these records because here are quite a few people, born 
at Kochanow, who married at Ilow Lutheran parish starting in the early 
1830's.  I have finished transcribing Ilow marriages 1826-1847, and so 
can easily correlate the two sets of records.

Reinhard, Engelbrecht, Ulmer, Schiewe, Reuter, Pfau, Graf, Roehm, 
Wilhelm are the names I see from Ilow in the Gluchow films.  I wish I 
could see later Ilow marriages because they might point to when some
of these families moved northward from Kochanow into the bounds of 
Ilow parish.  Unfortunately, LDS did not film any marriages for the 
years 1848-1868 inclusive; PRADZIAD shows that the archives holds 
uninterrupted records 1834-1879 (and many more, by the way).

Tom notes in his introduction that there is a sharp reduction of German
entries in the Catholic parish of Gluchow around the year 1829, which
is consistent with the founding of a local Lutheran parish at Rawa
Mazowiecka (unfortunately, the on-line catalog of the holdings of the Polish
State Archives at http://baza.archiwa.gov.pl/sezam/pradziad.eng.php
fails to show any records for Rawa.  Poof!  They're gone.  I suspect that
some of the Ilow families were still in the Kochanow area in the 1830's,
recording vital statistics at Rawa, but there is no way to verify this.

A reminder is in order.  The earliest Ilow records show people residing
over vast areas of this region, as is also true for Wladyslawow, Chodecz,
Kalisz and Stawiszyn (the ones I am aware of).  But the fact that people 
show up at all is due to the presence of the itinerant minister to record 
events.  They are not all-inclusive.  With the start of civil registration in 

Poland in 1808, the ONLY authorized places to register were the Catholic 
parishes.  The founding in 1826 of LOTS of Lutheran parish records clearly 
shows that they were at this time authorized to record vital statistics.
Keep in mind, though, that if the village lied at some distance from the
Lutheran center, Germans could continue to go to the closer Catholic
parish to record their births, marriages and deaths.  It is only in the 
1840's
that it must have been required to do so exclusively in the Lutheran
parish (and we can see another wave of Lutheran parish foundings at 
this time).

The Polish gazetteer for 1934, arranged alphabetically by village name, 
lists every village in Poland. In the far right column, it identifies whether 

there was a Catholic parish in the place ("loco"), or specifies which one 
was the one residents went to (indicated with the initials r-k for 
rzymsko-katolicki, or Roman Catholic)--and of course, other religions, 
if any.  This is LDS film #1,343,868.  The source is not perfect for us; 
parish boundaries may have changed.  I tried locating a parish for 
Swe~do~w (in Zgierz Lutheran parish); the gazetteer told me Strykow, 
but I actually found the people I wanted in the adjacent parish Szczawin.

This gazetteer source is a must-use for anyone who wants to go beyond
what is found in the SGGEE pedigree database.  Jerry Frank rightly points 
to the completeness of the Catholic records.  I will add that they often not
only indicate the village of origin in Brandenburg, Wuerttemberg, Bayern,
and so on, but they may also indicate the name of the exact parish where 
the person was born/baptized.

Happy searching.

Al Muth

P.S.  Good work, Tom!