[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Importance of diacritic letters

[Jerry Frank]

Even seasoned researchers learn new things from time to time.  This issue came up for me this weekend.

Diacritic letters are those with a symbol attached to them.  In German this would typically be the umlaut.  In Polish there are several including the L with a slash through it, some vowels with hooks underneath or a dash above, etc.  Here follows what I have learned using the L with a slash as an example.

Some websites are smart enough to interpret L with a slash (I will show it further as L~) as a plain L.  So if you search for Lodz (which in Polish is actually L~odz) in either the LDS Family Search site or the Pradziad Polish Archives site, you will get numerous results.  However, this is not consistently true.

This weekend I was searching for available records for Bl~onie, a town a short distance west of Warsaw.  As I had always done, I entered "Blonie" in the search box and got few to no results on both sites.  Several of those hits were for other locations which I was not interested in.  But, when I entered "Bl~onie" as the search term, I got hits from both sites.  I now know which microfilms to order.

It is possible to use special keystrokes to achieve diacritic letters but we often forget the code for them.  If you use GOOGLE Translator, you will find that each language comes up with a little keyboard that holds the special characters you need.  Just copy and paste them into the applicable search box.  OR, just open any Polish language website and copy and paste your special character from there.

Jerry