Okay, now I have a number and I want to start researching the family in Poland!!  I’m excited.  But where is my local Family History Center (FHC)??  Go back to the Library tab, and then click on Family History Centers.  Enter your country and state.  I tried entering the county, but it just gave me the whole state list anyways.  Scroll thru the list and find the center nearest you.  What I found is you need to go in person to order the film, fill out the form and pay the rental fee.  They told me it should take two weeks to arrive, it was more like five weeks; but I survived the wait.

You might want to print out the genealogical word lists that you think you’ll need and take them with you when your film arrives.  My center also had some printed word lists available at the desk, but I don’t know if they had every language available. 

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When I had my first look at the Muszyna birth records of the late 1800’s, I looked at them with the intent of finding the four surnames of my grandfather, Joannes Joseph Wisniowski’s grandparents, Wisniowski, Gorecki, Miczulski and Tryszczyl~a.  And like I already said the very first entry was a Gorecki.  In the mid to late 1800’s the church records were entered into a table-like ledger.  The headings were in Latin so I had to decipher them to know what I was looking at.  My take-with Latin word list came in handy.  (I have some images of late 1800’s records here, the headers are a little cut off, but you can get the idea.)

Understanding the records takes a little homework, and as I found out, the record format kept changing with the years.  So I needed follow the format and recognize my family names. Another issue with the understanding is that different people made the entries over the years.  Some had beautiful handwriting, and others, I could barely read it.  Once I got used to looking at the names in the good handwriting I could go back to the not-so-good handwriting and make some best guesses at the names in front of me.

So back to the headings of the late 1800’s baptismal records.  The first column is just the entry number; at this time about 100 children were being born each year.  Next is the date column, 'dies et mensis' is the 'day and month'.  'Nat.' is the actual birthdate and 'Bap.' is the date of baptism.  And next is 'nros domns,' house number.  The house number can come in handy as you progress with your collection of family members, because, as I found out, there are a lot of people named the same, even couples having the exact same names.  For example, my great-grandparents were Michal Wisniowski and Sophia Gorecka.  Well the first Michal and Sophia I found in the records had children much older than my grandfather.  As time went by, I discovered there were in fact two couples named Michal Wisniowski and Sophia Gorecka.  The second Sophia is my great-grandmother’s aunt.  I’m still not sure how the other Michal is related, if at all.  So with the house numbers you can verify family relationships too.

The next column is the name of the baptised. 'Bin' or 'binom' under a double name tells you the child was given two names.  You may also see 'geminus,' or some variation of the word, and this indicates a twin birth.  Usually though, twins are obviously two entries (at least in the later table format of records.)  There may also be other notes in this box, or near by, relating to the child.  A plus or cross (+) with a date to the right is the date of death of the child.  Date notation is day/month, and then the year.  Sometimes the year is just the last three numbers, like 893 means 1893.  Another interesting date format I found as I went back in time was the shorthand for some of the months.  September, October, November, and December were written as 7ber, 8ber, 9ber, and Xber, respectively.  Once I figured this out, I thought it was kinda cool!  Marriage and confirmation notes may also be found in the baptism entry. 

The next two columns indicate religion, Catholic or not.  Greek Catholic was differentiated from Roman Catholic.  The next column indicates the sex of the child, 'puer' is boy and 'puella' is girl.  Then 'thori' tells us if the child was a legitimate birth or not.  The parents are listed next, with the father (patris) listed first, along with his parents. Depending on who and when the entry was made, sometimes the parents age is listed, sometimes the year of their marriage is listed.  'Fil' and 'filus' mean child of; so you might see father’s name fil. and then his parent's name. The mother’s (matris) name follows next.   'Parentes' is parents, and 'patrini' is godparents. The last column identifies the godparents.  I’m not sure what the 'conditio' column tells us??

So now I had an idea of what was in front of me with a late 1800’s baptismal record, so I could concentrate on looking for my family names.  And as I turned the pages I kept finding my names, multiple times on each page! Wow!

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So many names and no idea how they all fit together!  For the first couple weeks I was at the FHC copying as many pages as I could and then rest of the time I was reviewing the pages for family names, especially for family names that directly connected to what I already knew.  Not knowing how to approach this huge task, I kept changing my tactic.  Enter all entries with one of the family names, enter only entries that connected to who was in my tree already, or enter every entry.  My mind was racing. First let me say that I use the Family Tree Maker database software, but any family tree software should do.  I would not do this without a computer program.  Way too much data to deal with.  As time went by I settled on my first two entry criteria options.  Add an entry if it has a family name, and add an entry if one or more of the people in that entry were already in the tree from previous entries.  I tried to do only the second for a while, but there were some entries that just didn’t get into the tree, and I wanted them there because someday I’ll connect to them.  I currently have 2700 people in the tree, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.  I don’t know how large a large file is in Family Tree Maker, but it is already starting to get a little slow, but I guess that is good cause it slows me down a little, which is something I need to do.

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Because I only ordered the one film the first time I went to the FHC, I had the first batch of birth records all copied before the next films with birth records arrived, so I looked at the marriage and death records.  The early marriage records were intimidating because they were written in paragraph form, no tables to clearly identify what was what.  The early death records seemed to provide very little information, so I wasn’t interested in spending much time on them.  The later death records started to provide family relationship info, so they will have more value.  But I wanted to find out when my great-grandparents were married, and luckily the later marriage records are in table form.  Although, there is one draw back to the table form, they had only one to two inches of space in the name columns.  As the information was written down, the priest (I am assuming) would write to the end of the column, and where ever he was in the name, he would just pick up his pen and start on the next line.  For example, line 1 was – Joannes Trys – and line 2 was – zczyla  fil Petri – etc.  I was like, what is zczyla?? I finally got used to it, but it still catches me off guard sometimes. 

So anyways, my G-grandparent's marriage record.  When would it be?  Actually I looked for my GG-grandparents records first; you know, to go back even further!  Again, I needed to study the marriage records for a while to understand what I was looking at.  Learning to read the old handwriting was still an issue.  Some of it I just couldn’t make sense of.  But with persistence I found them.  Francisek Wisniowski and Maria Tryszczyl~a were married in 1839 and I now had the maiden names of their mothers; two more ancestral names in my tree, Wygonek (I’m still not sure if I am spelling this one correctly) and Romanczyk. The other GG-grandparents, Joseph Gorecki and Josepha Miczulska were married in 1862, and their mother’s maiden names were Grotkowska and Wronska. And then I went back a little more, and finally I made a connection to Samuel Tryszczyl~a himself.  Wow, did I feel accomplished!  But what about all of the cousins I am connected too??  More work!

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Not only are there masculine and feminine variations of names, there is the diminutive and all that.  And there is the just plain different spellings.  I’ve seen Grotkowski spelled Grodkowski and also interchanged with Grotek.  Gorecki has shown up as Gurecki.  Romanczyk might also be written as Romanowski and Rymanski.  For the time being I am considering all of these to be family names.  They become “real” family names when I find them in a record that has all other family relationships matching known data.  I also need to learn more about Polish naming conventions.

And don’t forget about watching for first name variations.  Marianna and Maria are basically the same.  In Muszyna, the first names are mostly written in their Latin equivalents.  The last names are written in Polish. 

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These are my ancestral names from Muszyna thus far:  Wisniowski, Moszczak, Wygonek, Sliwinski, Tryszczyl~a, Sikorski, Zebracki, Romanczyk, Stawiarski, Gorecki, Rej, Grotkowski, Miczulski, Katucki, Jedrzejowski, and Wronski.  Some of these have variations as noted above. There are also the family names of the aunt's husbands.  Those are still in the works.

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