[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Finding missing Lutheran records

[Jerry Frank]

I certainly agree that Catholic records are your best bet.  It was required 
by civil law that births would be recorded and they would probably have 
done so at the nearest church, whether Roman or Greek Catholic.

This region was certainly heavily covered by the Greek Catholic 
Church.  The closest Roman Catholic that I could find with either LDS or 
SEZAM sources would be Leczna, significantly closer than Lublin.

If not there, then perhaps the records are lost or the people found it too 
difficult to travel the required distance.

I assume the Greek Catholic records you checked were for Swierczow and 
Cycow????  My map indicates churches at Wytyczno and Wereszczyn but no 
records apparently for same.



At 01:36 PM 19/05/2004 -0700, Karl Krueger wrote:
>At this moment I am trying to find out where I could find some important 
>birth/marriage/death records. Since I have a good idea of all 
>births/christenings recorded in the Lutheran Lublin church archives it is 
>clear that many/most of the Lutherans, particularly prior to 1850, are not 
>in those records. I have ancestors that were among the first settlers of 
>the first German community northeast of Lublin (Michelsdorf starting in 
>1822) but the Lublin archives has almost nothing of these settlers in the 
>1820s-30s and just a little in the 40s.
>
>Does anyone have more experience on where I might find these records? 
>Below are some possibilities I considered and I welcome anyone to comment 
>with more experience in this type of search.
>
>1) Perhaps they went to a Catholic church to record births. I checked the 
>two closest churches I found in FHL films (both were Greek Catholic) but 
>no luck. In this area of Poland Greek churches seem to be present among 
>small towns while the Roman Catholic churches tended to be in larger 
>towns/cities.
>
>2) Would they be more prone to go to a Roman Catholic church to report 
>births? The nearest Roman Catholic churches (at least in FHL films) were 
>not that much closer than Lublin itself.
>
>3) Were they required to have their births recorded? Is it possible that 
>these Lutherans slipped by the system and no records were ever produced?
>
>4) Maybe records were produced but they have been destroyed. If this is 
>the case then it is not likely that these records were ever in Lublin as 
>their archives seem to be rather complete on christenings that were 
>reported in Lublin. By 1851 it seems that Michelsdorf is included in the 
>Lublin archives, but even in the late 1840s-early 50s the Michelsdorf data 
>in Lublin appears rather incomplete.
>



>

Jerry Frank - Calgary, Alberta
FranklySpeaking at shaw.ca