PolishOrigins Databases tool. Help - Practical Tips

Tips for a More Effective Search using the POD tool

Searching within specific websites and their translation

Effective Database Search Tactics - video lecture

Suppose you wish to find information about Józef Markiewicz (first name and surname). The words or phrases that we search for are shown in italics.

1. Simple search

You may enter words without the typically Polish letters with diacritical marks (the tails and dots, often mistakenly called “accents”). But to get more search results, you can click the on-screen keyboard next to the search box to enter the “Polish letters”. In our example, the second letter in Józef is an o with an “accent”.

So, let’s type Józef Markiewicz

The search returns a list of webpages containing these two words, but you may find combinations of the name Józef with different surnames, or the surname Markiewicz with different first names. You may also find names with Polish case or gender endings, e.g. Józefa Modzelewska, Pelagia Markiewicz.

Fig. 1. Results of the POD search for Józef Markiewicz

 

2. More specific search

You can put the whole phrase in inverted commas to refine your search. If you type “Józef Markiewicz”, you will see pages containing this specific combination of first name and surname. Instances with Polish case or gender endings (for example Józefa Markiewicza) will be omitted in the results.

Fig. 2. Results of the POD search for “Józef Markiewicz”

You can also add the name of a city, village or region connected with your ancestors, e.g. Wilno (Vilnius).

Let’s type: Markiewicz Wilno. This search will return pages containing the surname Markiewicz and Wilno. You do not need to type the AND operator.

Of course, you can also add a year or a few different years, for example:

Markiewicz Wilno 1940 1945 to get search results including these years (see Fig. 3 below).

If you are looking for a place name that consists of two or more words, put it in inverted commas for better results, for example: “Kazimierz Dolny” or “Kazimierz nad Wisłą”.

Fig. 3. Results of the POD search for Markiewicz Wilno 1940 1945

 

3. The OR operator

Suppose you are not sure about the spelling of a surname. Is it Kruszewski or Kraszewski? If you want to find pages containing either of these names, please type Kruszewski OR Kraszewski. Both letters in OR have to be in uppercase. Instead of OR, you can use the | symbol (the key is located above the Enter key on most keyboards).

Fig. 4. Results of the POD search for Kruszewski OR Kraszewski

4. Excluding words or phrases from your search

Suppose you are looking for the Markiewicz family, but you are not interested in people connected with Wilno (Vilnius). In this case, you should type Markiewicz -Wilno.

You simply type a “minus” sign before the word to be excluded (no space between).

Fig. 5. Results of the POD search for Markiewicz -Wilno

 

5. Wild card *

The asterisk * can be used as a wild card representing a word you are not sure about.

For example, you are looking for the Markiewicz family connected with a town whose name contains the word Nowy (meaning ‘new’).

Please type Markiewicz Nowy * or, better still, Markiewicz “Nowy *” (with quotation marks) and you will get pages with towns such as Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki, Nowy Targ or Nowy Sącz.

Fig. 6. Results of the POD search for Markiewicz Nowy *

 

6. Searching for a name and a range of numbers

Last, but not least, a trick worthy of a true Internet wizard!

Let’s assume that you are interested in webpages mentioning the surname Markiewicz but you want to focus on the time after the Second World War instead.

You can get more relevant results by typing Markiewicz 1945..1989.

Using the X..Y operator (with two dots or periods in the middle) will return any number in the range between X and Y.
 

Fig. 7. Results of the POD search for Markiewicz 1945..1989
 

Searching within specific websites and their translation

1. Suppose you have searched for Markiewicz Wilno and you get the following results:

Fig. 8. Results of the search for Markiewicz Wilno

2. Now let’s try the first result (excluding the frame with the Ancestry.com search results). We click the title of the webpage Wilno, parafia Św. Jana - śluby późniejsze.  It serves as a link that will take you to this specific website. The website’s content is translated automatically into understandable English (see below for more details about the translation tool)

3. If the webpage is a long article and contains a lot of text, you can find your keyword more easily by using the combination of the “CTRL” and “F” keys on your keyboard. This will bring up a search box. Let’s type the name Markiewicz and click “Enter”.

Fig. 9. Searching for a name within a website and find the link to a subpage

In this example (Fig. 9), the name cannot be found on this specific page (the search box shows zero occurrences). Let’s try one of the subpages called Vilnius, the parish of St. John – baptisms (see the highlighted text in Fig. 9).

We repeat the “CTRL” and “F” search, and this time we find 33 instances of the name Markiewicz – you can see the highlighted name on Fig. 10 below.

Fig. 10. Finding the keyword within a webpage

4. The content of most websites found via the POD tool is translated automatically into understandable English. Remember, this is machine translation which is rarely as good as a translation done by a professional human translator. Some translations are funny, some do not make sense. Nonetheless, you will get a general understanding of the content, particularly in the case of standard texts such as lists of people who were born, married or buried in a given parish.

5. Sometimes Google translates the literal meaning of surnames or places. For example, Nowak and Kowalski, two of the most popular surnames in Poland, may be translated into Smith; and Zięba, the name of a bird species which doubles as a surname, may become a chaffinch.

Fig. 11 shows another example of a mistranslation. Wola occurs in numerous place names in Poland (e.g. Wola Okrzejska, Stalowa Wola), but there is also a common noun wola meaning ‘will’ (as in ‘free will’).

To avoid such misunderstandings, we suggest that you hover with your mouse over the translated sentence to see the original Polish text. In some cases, there can be an option “Show alternative translations”.

Fig. 11. Mistranslation of a place name Wola

6. In the case of webpages with a lot of content in one long page, for example this one, you may find that part of the text has not been translated. A simple solution to the problem is clicking the Reload or Refresh button in your browser, or pressing the F5 key on your keyboard (or CTRL and R) a few times until the whole page is translated into English.

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