[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] GOOGLE - Books for research

[Jerry Frank]

If you haven't already done so, you may want to expand your usual GOOGLE searches to include their Book Search feature.  You can try searching for your town or parish of interest, or a surname if somewhat unique.  It will primarily help if you are interested in the history of the regions where your ancestors lived.

Note that what you can read will appear either as snippets, limited access, or complete books, depending on copyright issues and permissions to publish received by GOOGLE.

Just one example - in searching for the term, "Russian Poland", I came across the full book:

An Illustrated Description of the Russian Empire
by Robert Sears, published in 1855

A lot of modern material and viewpoints about Russian Poland can be found with a regular GOOGLE on the Internet.  But here one gets a lengthy chapter on the topic describing the history, culture, and geography of the region from an 1855 point of view.  The 1863 rebellion of course has not yet happened so the context is the Polish-Russian relationship as affected by the 1831 rebellion.  There is also a much smaller section describing the Volhynian region.

If you find a book that interests you, you can conduct further word searches within that book.  So in the example above, I originally found it with a search for "Russian Poland" but then used the internal search to see what it said about "Volhynia".  Similarly you could see what it has to say about "Plock" or "Lublin", etc.

I don't know how many books GOOGLE has scanned but the results of searches are numerous and include many languages - English, German, Polish - to name a few.  I often swear at my computer but some things like this make it the most wonderful tool in the world.

Have fun!


Jerry Frank
Calgary, AB