[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Importance of diacritic letters

[Albert Muth]

Rose,

This was news to me, so I tried it.  Yup, you are absolutely correct.  Gabin
gets you nowhere.  Gąbin wins you a prize.

I tried Lodz. It gave me only a few Roman Catholic records.  To locate the
Lutheran records, you must spell the town correctly as Łódź.

Wonder why this is happening there.  Like the old familysearch, Pradziad
used to be a place where you could either spell 100% in Polish (Gąbin and
Łódź) or without ANY diacritics (Gabin and Lodz) and the system would return
you all relevant places.

Conclusion?  Spelling matters.  Apparently, the computer geeks have spoken.

Al

P.S.  by "prize", I mean only the information that you desired.  Sorry if I
got your hopes up!



On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 1:14 PM, Rose Ingram <roseingram at shaw.ca> wrote:

> Last week I was seaching on the Praziad database and was surprised to
> discover a search for Gabin had no results.  By copying and pasting  Gabin
> with the diacritic  the search result brought up the list I was looking for.
>   They have changed things, a tad frustrating.
> http://baza.archiwa.gov.pl/sezam/pradziad.php?l=en
>
> Rose Ingram
>  ----- Original Message -----
>  From: Jerry Frank
>  To: ger-poland-volhynia at eclipse.sggee.org
>  Sent: Monday, October 17, 2011 10:00 AM
>  Subject: [Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Importance of diacritic letters
>
>
>  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
>
>  _______________________________________________
>  Ger-Poland-Volhynia Mailing List hosted by
>  Society for German Genealogy in Eastern Europe http://www.sggee.org
>  Mailing list info at http://www.sggee.org/communicate/mailing_list
> _______________________________________________
> Ger-Poland-Volhynia Mailing List hosted by
> Society for German Genealogy in Eastern Europe http://www.sggee.org
> Mailing list info at http://www.sggee.org/communicate/mailing_list
>