[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Rozyszcze Death Records Revisited

[Jerry Frank]

DECIPHERING  THE  PLACE  NAME:


At 07:06 PM 07/12/2005, William Remus wrote:
>I have gotten a number of questions by email on these records. So 
>following will be an illustration followed by a mystery record to 
>challenge for intermediate researchers and then one for advanced 
>researchers. And thereby explain better these records for everyone on the list.
>
>First, these records prior to 1893 are pretty easy to work with even 
>without German. So here is an example followed by a close up of 
>record. Click on the this link (be sure to expand the image)
>http://www.cba.hawaii.edu/remus/genes/volhynia/danielfrohlichbig.jpg
>
>And notice the typical page layout with death date, burial date, who 
>died and their parents and village if young or spouse if older, 
>location of birth, and age at death. Look at record 305. From column 
>3 you will see that Daniel Frohlich from Stanislawka died. His wife 
>was Wilhelmine nee Labrenz. Column 1 shows his death date was 26 
>October 1876 (the month is several entries above the death date and 
>the year is at the top of the page).




Bill thinks the place name looks like Lestick.

I prefer to work with the full page rather than just one small 
section of it.  This allows you to compare letters where they may be 
difficult to decipher.

In old script, an L is sometimes hard to distinguish from an S so we 
must first check that.  I compare to other known words such as 
Labrenz, Ludwinow and Sapust and am convinced it is an L.

The next letter is difficult  Bill thinks it might be an "e".  Again 
look for other words that include that later.  In virtually every 
instance, it is written similar to an "i" without the dot.  I 
therefore rule out "e".  That pretty much leaves "a" or "u", neither 
of which matches the normal writing so he got sloppy.

I agree that the third letter is "s".

For the fourth letter, compare to words like Dorothea, Gustav and 
others and I am convinced it is not a "t".  Compare to other words 
like Wysockie I start to think it might be "k" but then I go to words 
like Schmidt, Deutsch, and others and have a gut feeling it is "h".

The last 3 letters seem clearer - I think "isk".

That gives me Lashisk or Lushisk.

Bad news though.  The "sh" is not a common letter combination in 
Polish writing so this must be a Germanized spelling OR maybe it is a 
"k" after all.  Regardless what it is, I cannot find a good match.

I consider Lasice, Laziski or Laziska, but none of these are in the 
Kolo region.

My best guess is Laski though I remain far from convinced.  One 
exists in the Kolo region - about 23 km almost due south of Kolo, or 
4 km SE of Turek.  For lack of a better solution, it is probably 
worth looking into.

I went through this analysis so that all of you could learn how to do 
it.  I have no special skills at reading this stuff but sometimes, by 
a process of elimination, you can come up with a viable solution to 
your place name dilemma.

Now if some of you were related to other people on this page, I could 
point you clearly to the specific location of birth.  This brings me 
to a good example of hanging letters that you must be aware of.  Look 
at entry 304 immediately above Bill's example.  Do you think the 
person was born in Deutsch Wymisch?  Almost but not quite.  Look at 
the line below and you will see it starts with "le".  Not 
really.  Those two letters belong to the place name above which is 
actually Deutsch Wymischle.






Jerry Frank - Calgary, Alberta
FranklySpeaking at shaw.ca