[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] several miscelaneous questions - a clarification

[F&RM Haddad]

Thank-you to those who responded to my questions, both privately  and here.

I do hope I haven't stirred up any kind of hornet's nest with my  question
about the Stammbuch.

I wonder if in addition to Gunther's classifications of those who  needed
a Stammbuch there might be another. Is it possible that those
Germans from Poland and Volynia who were trying to return to Germany during
this  time also needed such a record. This would be the class that my
ancestors would have fallen into. They were good and God-fearing people,
none of them Nazis, much less SS or high-ranking state officials. Common
people, all of them. I wonder if they were required to write to the relevant
churches to obtain the information, for I note that beside many of the
entries there are numbers like #23/1877, #55/1823 after the place-name. I
would assume that these refer to record #23, 55, or whatever, of that year
of records.

When I began independent research (i.e. microfilms of church records)
I naively assumed that the Stammbuch entries were totally correct -
it is only lately that I've begun to realize that the Stammbuch
information was only as accurate as the care taken and expertise of what
must have been harried church secretaries, or who-ever did the research for
the books in question. So, to answer my own question, so far, the
information from the S-book I have is remarkably accurate.

The clarification I need to make is that in the same email I made
reference to Pommeranian nobility, and may have given the impression that
this was from the Stammbuch. In my case it is from a Swedish g-grandmother
(paternal) who happened to have nobility in her ancestry. For a
while Pommerania was part of Sweden, and hence the Pommeranian nobility. The
S-book people were maternal side. I can see now that this may have
been anything but clear.

An aside: my study of my genealogy has made me aware of what a "long shot"
I am. Because a move was made from Germany to Poland, from Poland to
Volynia, from Volynia to Canada, and from Germany to Canada, because a
wife died, and the husband remarried, or because a husband died and the wife
remarried, because person "a" fell in love with and married person "b"
and not person "c", and even because an angry passion caused someone to rape
an ancestress, I am who I am - in fact, I am at all. If even one of these
events had turned out differently, I would not be. I am truly an accident
of birth. I find my study of genealogy fascinating, and likely spend far too
many hours on it - but I also hold the results with a light hand. So I may
have descended from King so-and-so. If it is far enough back, you likely did
too – or one of his contemporaries. I'm told that every peasant has kings in
his ancestry, and every king has peasants in his. I just happened to find
some of mine, peasants and kings! The search goes on.

Rose-Marie Haddad from Canada