I’ve been a big fan of the Poznan Marriage Database project for many years. Without it I would probably never have found ancestors who lived in Poznan area. The site definitely helped me figure out my great grandmother, Josephine Szwajkowski, was from the Kurnik area. I discovered this because I had her parent’s names from her marriage record: Joseph and Frances Kasperska Szwajkowski. So I put them into the Poznan Marriage Project site to see if I could find them, and I got the following result:
As you can see, this shows Josephine’s parents, Joseph and Frances, married in Krerowo in 1859. So this gave me a location to begin my search in Poland. At this point, I could have ordered the records through FamilySearch.org and gone to my local LDS church to view the microfilm. But with all the families I’ve been focusing on lately, the Szwajkowski’s were not really on my radar screen at the moment. So I logged their marriage and put it all away for another time.
Then the other day when I was at the Poznan Marriage Project site, I noticed a link to the “Basia Database.” So I spent some time checking out the site. According to the information there, volunteers are currently in the process of transcribing records for births, marriages, and deaths in the Poznan area. Then these records are made available through the site. So far it appears they have primarily covered the southern portion. Seeing that this covered the area near Kurnik and Krerowo, I put in the Szwajkowski name. And I was rewarded with records allowing me to discover many new family members along with a death record for my great great grandfather, Joseph Szwajkowski – Josephine’s father.
If you’d like to check it out for yourself, you can click on over to http://www.basia.famula.pl/en/. Once there you can fill out your search parameters as I’ve done in the image below by clicking “Extended Search” below the Search button and filling in the blanks with what you know:
After you have your information typed in, click the search button. Here’s how my results looked. I clicked the green area to get the listing below the map to show up:
This listing includes the marriage record for Johann Szwajkowski who is a son of Joseph and Frances and a brother to my great grandmother, Josephine. The listing also shows the death record for Joseph. To view the record, you need to click the little numbers on the right that look like this: 1876/4/82, scan 39. This takes you to a page that shows the actual document. This is the record for Joseph’s death which included the names of his parents, Johann and Marianna Kuzma Szwajkowski – my great great great grandparents!
Be prepared though if you find documents for your ancestors – the ones I found appear to be in old German and Polish. Even the handwriting is in an old German Script. I used this site to be able to figure out the letters: Gothic Handwriting. Fortunately, between that site and Google Translator, I was able to figure out what each document said.
We are fortunate that there are so many people willing and able to transcribe these documents for us. And thanks to the State Archive in Poland for making these records available online. I’ll be eagerly awaiting the results for the rest of the area.
Here’s a photo of my great grandmother, Josephine, and her husband, Joseph Norwich.
