Free Family Tree Legend Search

[kaima]

"We've outdone ourselves this time! Everything is free in the FTL Records
Collection until the end of the month. Over 400 million records FREE at:
www.familytreelegends.com/records/
"

I did a quick and dirty check and it seems to search. Any good researchers out there who can confirm this?

Kai

[jimpres]

Kai,

Not much help to me. I found nothing new at this site. Ancestry is still better but costs. And most of my research is in Poland.
Mother and Father came from Poland so only the children are here. One sister remained in Poland.
And the spelling of my last name is a function of who is spelling it.

[kaima]

Jim,

It sounds like a typical central European problem. History and knowledge in our American schooling stops with England and France, Germany kind of existed, andeast of there is terra incognita.

I can say the spellings were quite changable & in Slovakia perhaps moreso. When I research I have to consider Slovak, Hungarian, German & Cyrillic Rusyn in several forms to gather information. My own aunt (in Slovakia) asked why I spell my last name with a "y". I told her she would have to ask her brother, my dad. That was an incomplete comment, as the spelling has changed twice since independence form the Hungarians in 1918.

It sure makes for a fascinating stew!

Kia
PS I also had no luck at the site & it did not turn up documents I found elswhere on the web..., but I had to share & hope itwould do some good.

[jimpres]

Kai,
I have the same experience with records. They are in Polish, Russian, German and Latin. And my last name get a 'z' added then a 'w' in Russian, then dropped in Polish. And when they spoke to the ships captain he wrote what he heard which is different then what was written at Ellis Island.
Good mysteries to research.
In fact I could not find my ggrandmother in the LDS files so the last time I went to Poland I went to the church and we actually looked at the origional records from the early 1900s.

Jim

[nancy]

Kai,

Thanks for posting the info on the limited free search at FTL. It's good PR for these sites to let people in for free from time to time.

However, I agree with Jim, ancestry.com is better, and they also have free periods. Recently people have had access to WW1 draft cards and the email lists are going crazy with people asking for help.

Like both of you, I have had some name change problems. The most bizarre was looking for my grandfather in one of the Federal censuses. I knew for certain where he lived at the time, so finally found the entry by going page by page. "Maciolek" had been recorded as "Maccoca" - not even a soundex search had picked that one up!

[jimpres]

My mothers name Bl~az~ejewska was changed to Bagunski for her brothers
Soundex won't make it.

[kaima]

The other fun search for me was the amazing number of variations on the village name. For me there were the large and the small villages (Velky & Maly), which happened to be in separate counties of Spis and Saris. That got the Poles involved when the one was part of the Spis lands pawned to the Polish king so the Hungarian king could have his war with Venice. Some 300 years later it returned to Hungary with the first partition of Poland. Then there was the mistake someone made of putting an L where SZ belonged. Then of course there is the neighboring settlement of Zavodie, which is very similar to the names of two other villages that are some distance away. Care must be taken on which history or name variations are accepted… It is like being sure two people in Alaska are talking about the same “Birch Creek” or “Summit Lake”.

Well, from you stories you know the situation full well. When the "Lord of the Rings" movie came out 2 years ago I went to see it and about 1/3 of the way through had to tell myself it was great fantasy, but it was no more exotic than what my ancestors experienced in Hungary in the last 1100 years with all of the exotic peoples, cultures, costumes and values that each group brought with them. I suspect your Polish history is much the same, neighbor!


Kai

[nancy]

Village names in Poland are also often spelled in various ways that make it difficult for researchers to be sure which village is meant on various forms.

OTOH, when, after 2 years of searching, I found the correct name of my maternal grandfather's village, I also found that there were 10 places in Poland with the same name. I started with the one that is closest to his wife's place of origin and thankfully it was the correct one.

[jimpres]

Nancy,

As we can see in this forum. Yanc is from Brodnica. I talked about another Brodnica and Jaga thinks now that Yanc is not from Brodnica. There are three of them in Poland.
At least they are spelled correctly. You should have seen the ships manifest for my dad. Zatorowizna was pretty garbled as was Szczutowo for my mom.