Translation Archives - Zalewski Family Genealogy

Stearns/Schumacher Family Letter

Posted on 31 January 2024by Brian Zalewski

Many years ago I found an old letter, written in German, in my grandmother’s family collection. I tried to translate it myself a bit but found it very hard to read the German script. At one point, my dad knew someone who said they could translate it and copies were given to them, but they did not translate it and the copies were returned.

Many years later, I checked into the WikiTree Translators groups and asked if anyone had some spare time to translate it. Not too long after asking, someone responded with a wonderful translation of the letter.

It is dated 11 Apr 1923, not long after Germany lost World War I. It’s a fascinating view into history on how things were in the area in the early 1920s, how tough it is dealing with French occupation in certain areas, and how expensive everything was after the war.

Featured Polish Slownik Geograficzny Translation

Slownik Geograficzny Translation – ?wi?te

Posted on 9 November 2011by Brian Zalewski

Update 11/5/2014: I made another run-through of this translation and am fixing a few things.

I recently took another shot at translating an entry from the Slownik Geograficzny. This time I worked on translating the entry for ?wi?te, which is the town where my great-great grandparents were married and some of their family had lived.

Here is my translation. You can find the original entry by visiting the University of Warsaw’s website that allows you to view the original book with a Firefox plugin. You can also view it on this site, without a plugin, though the site is in Polish so you may need some translation.

The translation is a work-in-progress and is obviously not completely perfect. I am grateful for some help from Al at Al’s Polish-American Genealogy, who has translated many entries himself. I will mark the words or phrases that I am confident are wrong or are not even translated as I could not find any information on them, with italics. The rest, while they may not flow very well, are mostly right and just need some small tweaking. Some of the diacritics on the letters did not copy over, I plan to fix those once I have some time. Any errors in the translations are completely my own.

Polish Slownik Geograficzny Translation Zalewski

Slownik Geograficzny Translations

Posted on 10 April 2011by Brian Zalewski

One of the things you need to do once you track down the origin of your Polish ancestors, is to search for an entry for the location in the S?ownik geograficzny KrÃ³lestwa Polskiego i innych krajÃ³w s?owiaÅ„skich (or Geographic Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and Other Slavic Countries.)

According to a description of it on the “Genealogy of Halychyna/Eastern Galicia” website:

This massive collection took over 20 years to publish all 15 volumes. [15 volumes. 1880-1902.] The gazetteer was published when officially there was no Poland in existence. From 1772 to 1918, Poland was dominated by three empires: Austria (later known as Austria-Hungary), Russia and Prussia. The gazetteer contains a great wealth of information on cities, towns, and villages, as well as mountains, rivers, and other geographic points of interest in the lands that were once a part of the old Kingdom of Poland.

When I searched for the location that I was pretty positive was the origin location of my ZALEWSKI and LINDNER ancestors, Gottschalk or Gocza?ki, there were a few entries. But, after some searching I think I narrowed it down to one entry. The entry is located in Volume 2, Page 755 under Gocza?kowo. You can use the online search engine to find an entry, though you do need to install a document viewer plugin, but it works nicely.

The book gives amazingly detailed descriptions of even the smallest towns.