As a part of our Genealogy Pro Tip series, we created another video that can help you in starting or expanding your adventure with genealogy.
Even if you have learned the name of the town or village your ancestors came from, it still might be hard to determine where its geographical position is exactly. In some cases, there are dozens of places in Poland with the same name and they can be spread across the whole country.
Very often the names of the villages were misspelled by the immigration clerks and figuring out which one did the mean poses a different challenge.
This is why in our video we present you two tools that we use in our daily work and that can help you with this matter.
First of them is a Polish web mapping service that offers a more detailed map of Poland than other more global services. For example, it marks places that throughout the years have been incorporated into other towns and villages and are no longer visible on regular maps. It can also show you the location of every place in Poland with the same name with just one click. Its autosuggestion feature is useful in cases where the name of your ancestral village is misspelled. After typing the first three letters of the place’s name, it will show you a list of every place in Poland that starts with them.
The second tool is an online database of every surname in Poland and its geographical distribution. You can verify if the last name of your interest still occurs in the village of your ancestors or see different spellings of your ancestral surname as it might have changed through generations. This is a private-owned database, therefore not everything will be 100% accurate and some of the information will probably be outdated but it is still very useful and, most importantly, fairly easy to use.
You can find the video and the mentioned sources on our YouTube channel here.
Aleksander Zawilski
PolishOrigins Team
Parents born in Lvov obkast