Follow Friday: Polish

Since I’ve done a lot of Polish/Prussian research this week, I’m going to point at some helpful resources and blogs.

Al’s Polish-American Genealogy by Al Wierzba

This one has been on my blogroll for awhile, since Al posts useful Polish information and interesting tidbits on his blog. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also researching mainly in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. I visit it frequently. I actually just went there to copy the URL and got lost in some other posts. Keep up the good work, Al.

Steve’s Genealogy Blog by Stephen Danko

This one has also been on my blogroll for awhile. Steve mostly posts original family documents, but a lot (or maybe all of them) are Polish and he usually also posts translations and other useful information. It’s interesting to browse the documents and learn about the different areas and records.

Kartenmeister

Kartenmeister is a must bookmark for anyone with German/Polish/Prussian roots. According to its front page it’s “the most comprehensive database of its kind in the world. It contains 88,334 locations with over 38,691 name changes once, and 5,500 twice and more.” Using the site, you are able to search place names by German version or Polish version, get much information about the location and even other researchers looking for ancestors in these places. This is how I found the (hopefully) current location of my ZALEWSKI ancestors using the German name of “Gottschalk.” There is no equal.

Free Research Courses at FamilySearch

There are more than just Polish research classes here, but I really enjoyed the “Intro to Polish Research” course I watched the other day. It was very informative, easy to follow, and it helped me try some new things. I am currently watching the next video, “Advanced Polish Research.”  The presenter of the class, Ceil Wendt Jensen, was very well-versed in the subject matter and easy to listen to.

Germans to America (1850-1897) search tool by Steve Morse

While this search tool is helpful by itself, it’s much more powerful if you have access to Ancestry’s passenger lists. You can search by name, origin, destination and then use those results to find the corresponding passenger list image. I found my great-great-grandfather Frank Zalewski’s brother’s passenger list this way. There are also many other useful search tools on his main site, stevemorse.org.