[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Town-based searches on the Odessa Digital Library

[Karl Krueger]

In some research I have been doing lately on my great grandfathers brothers who moved to Volhynia in the 1870s I have realized the nuisance of the Odessa database having surnames with different spelling variations. I find that doing searches by towns has yielded very fruitful information as you can often pull up occurrences of misspelled surnames that you might miss by doing the ordinary surname search. Furthermore, you can virtually see most families that lived in each town. Parents often asked other relatives or close friends and neighbors to serve as godparents and the geographical basis for these interacting families clearly surfaces when one does a town-based search. In essence, the town-based search brings forward an entire community. This becomes more challenging when a name is shared by more than one town in Volhynia.

 

Of course towns may show up with different spelling variations so any town-based searches should include any known variants to completely pull all records from the database. These variants can be discovered by searching for known surnames in the town and identifying records where the town was misspelled.

 

Members of SGGEE have the advantage of searching for a town by providing a partial name. For example, Grab will bring up all occurrences of Grabina and Grabna, both being alternate spellings for this town. The Odessa search engine apparently suffers from the need for a complete name/term to be searched.



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