[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Edmund Milling, born 13 December 1897 in Zabloty, birth registered at Zdunska-Wola

[Anne Keen]

I am new to the mailing list and am hoping that someone can point me in the right direction for finding out more about the above gentleman.

He was my maternal grandfather.

I have a copy ( made in 1952) of his marriage certificate. My mother needed this to come to England, which she did in 1953, to marry my father, an English soldier whom she had met in 1950 or so when he was stationed in Krefeld, Westphalia.

The copy is in German Suetterlin script, but I now have the translation into .modern' German and English.

I have been combing the Internet for details of Pre-WWI Poland. And I have got myself very confused!

>From what I can make out, at the time of Edmund's birth, Zabloty and Zdunska-Wola were both in Congress Poland and belonged to Imperial Russia.

I cannot for the life of me work out which Archive to write to try and get details of his birth certificate. The administrative districts have changed so much over the last 100 years that I'm in a tangle.

Someone suggested that I try the Posen mailing list, but I don't think that Zabloty or Zdunska-Wola were in Posen - I think they were in Kalisch.

I have a passport photo of him, showing him as a young man. I think he must have left the Kalisch region and moved to Westphalia in the early years of the 20th Century - his occupation on the marriage certificate is given as 'fitter'.

He worked as a foreman coal miner in Westphalia.

I know there is a National Archive at Lodz, which is quite near where he was born. I tried the LDS site to see if they had microfilmed any of the records from there but came up with no listing. Could be they haven't got round to it yet.

Unfortunately, my mother died last September - she never spoke much about her family, and the finding of these documents and some old photos of what appear to be her parents and brother and sisters all came a complete surprise to us. We had never seen them before.

If we wanted to talk about her family, she would just throw us a couple of names, and then change the subject.

She did tell us that her father was what she called 'Polish' and her mother ( who came from Graudenz region) was German.

Has anyone had any success in writing to Polish Archives, especially those dealing with the Kalisch/ Lodz area?

Anne