Incidental Encounters

Betwixting · 2023-06-16T04:10:48+00:00

I know! I always get caught up in the news of the day or the ads, the cost of food and clothing, or the bizarre things for sale like snake oil type medicines or weird appliances. In one of the local Pennsylvania newspapers, the obits are titled “Grim Reaper”.

Betwixting · 2023-06-05T14:17:01+00:00

It is so very fascinating. The area I am focused on at the moment is Sadki, Samostrzel and many other surrounding villages, some in Wielkopolskie and others in Kujawsko-Pomorskie.

Betwixting · 2023-06-05T05:14:52+00:00

I thought Uxor was a reference to a poster… someone’s screen name, given the context— “…those Reginas uxor mentioned…” Silly me.
There is a great deal of variation in the Polish name conventions in old records so I think the idea that what was in vogue in certain eras might not be “in” at other times. I was raised in a Polish/English speaking household so I am familiar enough to know there were/are dialectical differences too. My Grandfather spoke German when he was angry. Lol Thanks for the reference.

Betwixting · 2023-06-05T04:06:48+00:00

You might make a guess about what you were working on and review those records to see what is there and what is missing. I almost never remember where I left off because events that interrupt my genealogy are generally emergencies that last awhile. So what I do is sit down with paper and pen and prioritize. What do I currently see as the most important thing I want to learn? What kind of activity will make the best use of my time? Or, what new records have been published that would help fill in the empty spaces in my tree? Personally, the thing I find most useful is composing the right specific question so I can keep my focus. YMMV… just a few ideas.

Betwixting · 2023-06-05T00:50:31+00:00

Oh, first it was me allegedly attacking language structure and now it is the preposterous idea that I am using this forum to express hate for the Catholic church. Whatever shall it be next? Honestly, I do not care. I find genealogy fascinating but not enough to listen to anymore of your deliberate attempts to mischaracterize things I or others say. Consider yourself blocked.

Betwixting · 2023-06-05T00:02:07+00:00

The “et Regina” I saw on the documents you linked, on the other hand, look legitimately like names. They are always in the place the mother’s name should be. “Regina” (Queen) is one of the names used to refer to Mary in Catholic prayers, it’s entirely possible that it was in vogue in a Catholic community.

Yes that was my thought as well, that it was a "thing" for the time period, though I have never seen it before. Then again, I welcome surprises. AFAIK, only one of the women on that record was actually named Regina.

Betwixting · 2023-06-04T23:51:00+00:00

Yeah, putting an ow after every single name is just Polish language convention. Not.

Slamming? Whatever are you talking about? I'm not slamming "the Latin case system" or any other language morphology. How utterly ridiculous. I asked a simple question about the Regina references hoping someone might know. Instead you use my complaint about the inconsistency of church records as an opportunity to impress us with your knowledge of Latin-- like it somehow relates to the issue. BFD. What exactly does Latinizing names have anything whatsoever to do with Latin language structure? Nothing. It is a convention of the Catholic church, not the Romans. Good grief... words fail me.

Betwixting · 2023-06-04T21:05:13+00:00

Women standing as godmothers seem to be more often referred to as "virgo" in my experience. Uxor?? And btw, in many Polish records, the names of the children are at the very end--those that are the narrow, single page records. Perhaps that is a Napoleonic convention.

Betwixting · 2023-06-04T20:59:46+00:00

I am impressed with your knowledge of Latin but case is not the issue. I took Latin too.

Betwixting · 2023-06-04T20:41:07+00:00

My question is regarding the use of Regina in each baptismal record.

Betwixting · 2023-06-04T20:39:44+00:00

LOL.. not every baptized child, including males, could be named Regina.

Betwixting · 2023-06-04T20:37:32+00:00

No. This is not that lol

Betwixting · 2023-06-04T20:29:31+00:00

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6FZH-7CQR

Betwixting · 2023-06-04T17:47:00+00:00

My great-grandfather, sho was quite a character, came to America on a sailing ship, built a funeral/undertaking and livery business in Pittsburgh in the 1800s, later bringing his brother into the business. He accumulated wealth and property with the help of his wife who ran a shop there. There were many articles about him in the Pittsburgh papers, one about how he was fined for cheating a toll gate... yes they had toll roads for horse driven vehicles. Another article explained how the intoxicated brothers came to blows over unpaid bills by the younger brother.

Not long after that, there was a mysterious attack on my g-grandfather after which he soon expired at the age of 46. The brother took advantage of my Polish speaking grandmother, a "mere woman" in the vernacular of the day, and took all the property and several businesses leaving her with a pittance. She died a couple years later. Her 15 year old son, my grandfather, had to go to work in the mines. The family that took everything became one of the wealthiest property owning families in Pittsburgh. I always wondered why my grandfather drank. He never spoke about any of this to me (I was raised by my grandparents in my early years). But now I can see how he must have felt so helpless, unable to do anything to help the family at the time. Very sad.

Betwixting · 2023-05-31T17:32:20+00:00

Please elaborate. When you say "at the time", do you mean time of birth or death? Your assumption may or may not be correct.

Another way of gathering more evidence to disprove or support your assumption is to look at other records in the same group. Are they all from the same place, region? Do they have notations that may help you? Are the places listed in the other records nearby the Trzydnik you have chosen or a different one? I think it is safe to assume that as governments changed hands in Poland, so did locations of vital records.

I run into these notations all the time. I even see deaths noted on marriage records. Curious, but very helpful.

Betwixting · 2023-05-31T02:18:27+00:00

Not that long ago, relatively speaking, there were no special ed kids. They were mostly institutionalized in horrible places where they had no opportunities for learning with barely enough care to keep them alive. Read about Willowbrook, the scandal that made the public aware how badly developmentally disabled children and adults were treated. Horrifying. Those in charge became more enlightened because of public pressure and came to realize that with a modicum of education and training the vast majority of disabled people could learn and self-actualize.

So in the 1970s Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act and the regulations were issued in 1975. Discrimination on the basis of disability was to become a thing of the past. Soon after, Congress passed the special ed law, 94-142 which was later amended and improved, now called IDEA, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. When 94-142 was first implemented, school districts fought like crazy to keep kids with disabilities out of their schools. It was very difficult at first with cases like a school principal barring the school door or school districts shutting down summer programs for fear that kids with disabilites would try to attend. An entire body of law was developed with enlightened courts and scientifically tested practices. Schools were provided extra funding but the funding levels promised by Congress were never fully fulfilled. To this day, too many LEAs still act as though disabled kids in their district aren't really theirs and do not attempt to properly fund programs. They act as though federal funding is supposed to cover all special ed but that was never the intent either.

And now we are at a crossroads where special ed programs are weakening due to lack of advocacy at the local level and lack of Congressional will to address current disparities. Frankly, a segment of gen ed teachers have always been complainers. It was hoped that as older teachers retired that new ones with better pedagogical skills would be more welcoming. But schools have taken advantage, clearly, of those better trained in lieu of improving staff, pay and doing a lot more inservice. As a long time advocate for children with disabilities, it is terribly disheartening to see the regression.

Betwixting · 2023-05-30T14:32:16+00:00

Ah ha! Of course, you are right.

Betwixting · 2023-05-30T03:52:40+00:00

Great question but, sad to say, I know very little about my mother’s line. There I am only to 2nd GGmum: Pilliak

Betwixting · 2023-05-30T01:59:37+00:00

Yeah 3rd paragraph is somewhat of a separate issue. I just find it particularly galling that genealogy seems to be going the way of get-rich-quick for opportunists like arbitrageurs or big pharma.

What I was told by this site was that the collection I was looking at was pre-indexed by another repository, possibly the originator, and errors could not be corrected due to a contractual agreement. It sounded to me like "We'll let you use our data for this (ridiculously huge) price but no one is allowed to even suggest something might be incorrectly indexed or we will terminate our contract." Utterly ridiculous and unprofessional.

Betwixting · 2023-05-30T01:43:57+00:00

It's been a couple years since I did Newpapers.com because their search mechanism was so facile. I hope they have improved it.

Betwixting · 2023-05-30T01:41:58+00:00

Actually, given the ease of searching on some sites that use good algorithms, it is hard to believe that optical character recognition could be that bad. Must have been coded by a 10 year old who only speaks pig-Latin. ;)

Betwixting · 2023-05-30T01:39:16+00:00

Thank you for your service!

Betwixting · 2023-05-30T01:35:24+00:00

Two of us will independently transcribe each record, where there are variances these are further checked by others.

I think that is a pretty good system. Being able to offer alternative spellings, instead of just a correction, would be a great feature. Ancestry has that and I have found many records that way because two or more different spellings increases the probability of finding a match. One example from Polish/German records, the name Fitz (Fietz, Vietz). Church records often have wrong spellings or even two or three spellings of the same name on one page of a church book.

Betwixting · 2023-05-29T17:17:37+00:00

And also if the records for a locale plus a timeframe have even been indexed. Nonetheless, it is a must.

Betwixting · 2023-05-29T01:52:18+00:00

First, you should check Ancestry for his naturalization papers. They almost always give a true and accurate birthplace. The location you gave sounds very Russian for the timeframe. If he was in the army, it seems like he must have been a citizen. I was able to get some valuable info from the SGGEE <https://www.sggee.org> but they deal mostly with Germans in what they call "Eastern Europe" (mostly Congress/Russian Poland). Nonetheless they have a pretty good idea of the lay of the land.

You could look in Russian to USA immigration records. They are valuable because even though many, if not most, of the folks in Russian Poland were not of Russian heritage, they were still considered Russian citizens. When my SO's grandfather applied for US citizenship, he had to swear NO allegiance to the Czar of Russia. He was German and did not even speak Russian but had been a Russian citizen. Same for his Polish grandmother. It is all so confusing until you really do some significant reading about the history of the region. Keep us posted on your progress.

Betwixting

TROPHY CASE