6) How can I find out what village my ancestor came from? [WIP]

[newman]

[This is a Work in Progress [WIP]]

Finding the ancestral village of an ancestor is often easy, but can be difficult or even impossible. However you don't know until you try. Below is a list of places that I have found either the ancestral village name or a clue:

• Inverviews of older relatives
• Family documents from Poland
• American church records
• Death Records
• US census - can learn immigration and/or naturalization year
• Passenger ship records, and indexes like "Germans to America"
• Naturalization records - usually held at the county level in the US
• Obituaries, especially in Polish Language Newspapers.
• County histories/genealogies
• Local historical/genealogical societies
• Local fraternal and other ethnic or cultural organizations
• Tombstones and cemetery records
• US Social Security records, for individuals living after 1935
• Probate records
• US Civil War pension or other military records, if appropriate
• Neighbors in America, because sometimes unrelated families emigrated together
• Contemporary newspapers, which often printed passenger lists and emigrant correspondence

If there is someother source for finding the ancestral village please email <place email here>

[bobby]

Finding my grandmothers birth place in Poland was a fairly easy one - we had the name, but since history was kept quite, we needed confirmation.

So i googled quite a bit, and actually found a same surname person living in her town of Birth, (SE Poland), i actually found this person on the Polish google - i wrote to him, and it was a 2nd cousin and of course my grandmothers place of living prior to WW2.

My grandfathers place of birth was different - the spelling we had was not correct, and actaully, we had different spellings from different documents - all of which could of been another town altogether. Border changes did not help the situation at all, and at one stage i was searching in Poland, but as it turned out, its the Ukraine. It took about 1 year and a bit to really get confirmation and this was done through the article i had put in their local paper.

[newman]

Thanks for sharing your experience. The Internet seems be more help these days. I'll be sure to include the Internet as tool for FAQ question.