[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] St. Pete Archives

[Jerry Frank]

Baptisms and deaths were administered by the local Kantor.  He kept records 
and, in most cases, turned them over to the pastor who then transferred the 
data to both the parish books and the Bishop's books.  The latter are the 
St. Pete records that we have.

Marriages could only be conducted by the Pastor and were usually done as he 
travelled his circuit.  In the parish book a great deal of detail would 
appear - names of parents, ages, places of birth, etc.  In fact, if you 
look at the real early St. Pete records, you will see this detail.  For 
some reason this detail was no longer required by the bishop's office and 
it became abbreviated to names and date.  The village of record was also 
dropped.  In most cases therefore, we can only determine the parish name 
for the marriage.

So the marriage probably did take place in Protowka but the record does not 
confirm it.



At 10:30 PM 09/07/2003 -0700, Family History wrote:
>I was doing some searching for all people with connections to Protowka using
>both the SGGEE site and the Pixel site. I have found lots of births connected
>to Protowka using either mechanism in the past. However, when I try to do the
>equivalent search for either deaths or marriages, the results come up empty.
>Even when going to the Volhynian decade marriage file in Pixel there isn't
>very many parishes in which marriages took place.
>
>I know that there was a Lutheran church in Protowka, but could it be of
>insufficient status that marriages could not take place there and they had to
>be in either Zhitomir or Heimtal?
>
>Can someone explain the intricacies of the St. Pete records as to this
>interesting point.
>

Jerry Frank - Calgary, Alberta
jkfrank at shaw.ca