FOTO Pexels-Suzy Hazelwood
Box of old photos
Genealogical research is said to be the most popular hobby in the world. Interest in it is also growing in Poland. We have more and more tools to do it ourselves, and it is largely free. Professional help in searching for your ancestors can be obtained from experts.
The changing borders, the looting and destruction of archives during the wars, and the dramatic fate of people of different nationalities and religions in Poland have made genealogical research difficult, but at the same time exciting. Sometimes it suddenly brings together people from other countries and continents.
Each of us has a unique family history. The best way to discover it is to start by looking through the documents, collections of photographs, letters and notes available at home. Some, let’s call them the ‘lucky ones’, have them close at hand or tucked away in drawers, but others have no family heirlooms. There is a chance that traces of ancestors may be found in government and church archives, including metric and other records containing personal data.
The State Archives in Poland report that their holdings comprise 45.5 million archival units and occupy 385 km of shelving. In this mass, somewhere, there may be a small piece of information about a particular person to complete a genealogical tree or a scattered puzzle about a particular family event.
The Internet has revolutionised this search. The National Archives provides free access to digital copies of digitised documents. Costs are only associated with additional services to support the use of the materials. The website of the Polish Genealogical Society (PTG) offers constantly updated databases, including Geneteka, Skanoteka, obituaries and biographies. We have a selection of genealogical portals and programmes. Their reach seems limitless, and they certainly make it possible to travel quickly through the centuries in the often intricate footsteps of great-grandparents. However, this field of knowledge does not like to be rushed. Sometimes it is better to go to the archive in person and sit quietly in the reading room.
For more complex cases, it is worth working with professional genealogy researchers.
Anna Wiernicka, the founder (in 2007) of Ancestor Antenat – which has received most of its orders from people abroad since its inception – was led to this work and passion by her professional experience. She had previously been involved in historical research for various institutions. However, her own history has had a huge influence on her profession and passion. She remembers spending her childhood holidays in the area of present-day Lithuania where her grandparents stayed after the Second World War. She used to walk with her grandmother along the road from Jashun through Chetyrki to Dziagushki and on to Kėdė. This is the area of the former Vilnius-Trotsky district, between Vilnius and Šalčininkai. I can see my grandparents’ house with its beautiful shingled roof, decorative wooden shutters and doors with bars,” she says. Her parents left Lithuania when she was young and settled in Poland. Together with her husband, she developed a passion for genealogy. She suspected that he probably had Jewish roots. She found confirmation by accessing information about her husband’s ancestors from the 18th century. She helped him to find out who he was.
Many people all over the world owe this fundamental discovery to the support of Ancestor Antenat. About two years ago, Dawid Walendowski joined the company. Born in Poland in the 1970s, he moved to the United States with his family as a teenager but has always had strong ties to his home country. He has been here permanently for over two decades and has been a history enthusiast since his youth. ‘Genealogy in Poland is incredible,’ says Dawid. He is impressed by the dedication of the volunteers, the wealth of databases and the technological level of research.
Ancestor Antenat was recently contacted by a young foreigner who, after his grandmother’s death, found a box of old photographs belonging to her. The grandmother had never told anyone about herself, and it was her silence for so many years that became a fascinating burden for the grandson. This case illustrates the typical situation of people violently cut off from their roots and uprooted from their part of the world. They are driven by curiosity, but they are also undergoing a kind of therapy. We observe the whole spectrum of emotions and participate in them at the same time,’ says Anna Wiernicka. She knows that to unravel the mystery of who was captured by the photographs in the box, archives from the borderlands will also be needed. This is a challenge at this historical moment, at a time of war in Ukraine and with limited relations with Belarus.
Genealogy researchers in Poland also face difficulties in the national archives. Both world wars robbed us of a huge number of documents. They were taken by the Russians in 1915 and burned by the Germans after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising – Warsaw lost over 90 per cent of its holdings, and archives relating to the Jewish population were systematically destroyed. Sochaczew and other cities and towns, such as Kolno in Podlaskie or Strzyżów in Podkarpacie, have no Jewish records at all, and the few that remain are badly shredded.
A major effort in this area is being made by JRI-Poland (Jewish Records Indexing – Poland), an NGO and online resource for people searching for Jewish metric records in the current and former territories of Poland. JRI-Poland cooperates with PTG. So far it has managed to collect about 5 million deeds from over 550 localities.
Genealogical research continues to gain new tools. DNA testing is not yet very popular in Poland, but in the West, especially in the United States, it is used by millions of people. The impact of artificial intelligence in this field is difficult to assess, but we can assume that it will be both positive as it will make many tasks easier, and negative – it may lead the amateur researcher astray. You will have to be even more critical of sources than you are today. ‘AI will never replace human sensitivity, intuition and general knowledge of, for example, our customs,’ says Anna Wiernicka, encouraging attempts to reconstruct family history. ‘It is often in what seems ordinary, typical and uninteresting that the most interesting things can be found. Let us give colour to our ancestors. It is far too little to mention when someone was born when they married, how many children they had and when they died. Let us find out who he was, what he was like, what happened to him. Then we will know ourselves better.’
Karolina Prewęcka
Surce: DlaPolonii.pl
