A Day in the Archives
Last night I walked by a “duchowne” building the night before, and forgetting to learn what a duchowne was, I didn’t think anything of it. This morning I went to the historical society of the diocese, and asked the museum director where I could find the church archives. The director, dressed like a pastor, exhibited pastorial patience.
“Sit down,” he told me in Polish, as he wrote out the name and the address of the diocesian archive on a slip of paper.
“Stand up,” he told me, just as I was sitting down. I looked at the slip of paper, and it turned out that the archive was in the “duchowne”.
I walked across town to the duchowne. The curator opened the door, I tripped over a few Polish words, and she told me to step inside to help me relax. I wrote down some info, and she came back with a hefty tome.
I was overwhelmed. Not only was the handwriting illegible, it was in cyrillic. I had heard before that archives were switched to the Russian language in 1868, but had conveniently not had time to study cyrillic before my trip. This was completely incomprehensible!
I was staring off into space and thinking about how I would have to settle for just partying the rest of my time in Poland, as is proper for a vacationer. I could see Poznan, I could visit Gdansk! Just then another researcher asked me if I wanted help. His command of English spanned all of about 15 words, but they were all key genealogical terms, and he was able to find the record of my great grandfather’s birth. I literally had to stare at the strange cyrillic code for a good two hours before I began to find the patterns and locate siblings of my great grandfather. What looked like an “ir” was actually an “l”, what looked like a “b” was actually a “w”, and what looked like “@” was an “s”. And the female names had a different ending. Some progress…
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My second stop was at the national archives, where I met a man who at first looked like he was too busy coping with a hangover to be of any help to me let alone to himself. Fortunately, what I thought was a debilitating migraine was just intense concentration. The man proved to be extremely helpful and patient, lecturing me for at least ten minutes straight at one point about the challenges of Polish genealogical research, even after I had explained that I didn’t understand much Polish.
I had felt enormous guilt at having him haul out some 30 tomes for me. But the archival office had its revenge- following office protocol, the archivist insisted that I fill out and sign a small form for each of the 30 tomes I had reviewed- even the ones in which I didn’t find anything. Okay, if I had known, would I really have wanted to look in all those books? Such are the hardships of genealogical research… |
Tags: Ancestry, Genealogy, Language barriers, Poland, Travel
treeseventy
November 26th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Hey,
Love your blog. Reading it here in Michigan as I research my Calumet mining ancestors via the Internet!
I’ll be interested in seeing what-all you find.
Sto Lat!
Ceil (Cylka)