A Translation Guide to 19th-Century Polish-Language Civil Registration Documents (including Birth, Marriage and Death Records). 3rd Edition, by Judith R. Frazin. Published by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois, 2009. Hardcover, coil-bound, 464 pages. $35.00.
It has been about 20 years since I had my first “Eureka!” moment as a genealogist. Several smaller discoveries led up to this great moment. First, I discovered that my great-grandfather, Harris Glickstein, had been born in the town of Konin, Poland; second, that his father’s name had been Rafael; third, that our family name had originally been Glitzenstein. At my local LDS library, I loaded a reel of Jewish records from Konin into a microfilm reader and began scrolling. After several minutes, before even finding an index, I spotted the name Rafael Glicensztajn on an 1846 marriage record. My eyes swam uncomprehendingly over a page of difficult handwriting in an antiquated Polish script. What did it all mean? Even without knowing, my ecstasy was immense. For the first time, it seemed, I felt the joy of reaching out, as it were, and shaking hands with the past.
I don’t recall how many days I sought a means of translating these Polish hieroglyphics before making another monumental discovery—that there existed a perfect solution to my scholarly dilemma. It was a book, then only recently published in second edition—the very useful Translation Guide, by Judith R. Frazin, that now has come out in a third and much improved edition. I relied heavily, and, in fact, exclusively, on this book in translating that initial 1846 marriage document of my great-great-grandparents, Rafael Glicensztajn and Rotesz Hahn—and another 350 or so 19th-century Polish documents that I would find—all connected to my paternal ancestry.
The third edition, I am happy to say, retains all of the good features of its predecessor. It provides a good description of the evolution of the Napoleonic format by which births, marriages, and deaths were recorded and a logical system of translating them quickly and efficiently. It presents a useful variety of sample documents from different periods, carefully outlining the special difficulties of translating documents from the first stage of record keeping from 1808 to 1826. Its alphabetized vocabulary lists are presented in a range of logical subject categories to simplify and streamline the translation task: the categories relate to age, birth, census (new), death, family, illness (new), legal matters, location, marriage, miscellaneous, nationality (new), numbers and dates, occupations, religion, and time. All the words are also included in an omnibus vocabulary index for easy cross-reference.
There is also advice on identifying an ancestral town, a Polish letter-writing guide, information on Polish-language declensions, and tips on deciphering Polish script—a vital necessity considering the often minimally legible handwriting of many civic officials in the days before typewriters. A list of Jewish given names proves useful when trying to recognize first names that seem quite unfamiliar today: Gnendla, Iciek, Idel, Johehwed, Marjem, Maurycy, Mojzesz,
Szprynca, and Szulem. There is also an explanation of surname suffixes such as the Church-derived Latinate endings in which Rafael appears as Rafaelem, Jacob as Jacobus. A Cyrillic alphabet chart helps in deciphering post-1868 records in the Russian script beyond the Polish period that the book covers in detail.
New in the third edition is a section on census records, including books of residents, with information that directs researchers to related resources and archives, including the Polish State Archives. But perhaps the greatest improvement consists of the expanded vocabulary lists, especially the occupations list, with hundreds of new words and phrases added.
To my knowledge, Frazin has never received a medal for this work, but in my opinion she deserves one, as would any intrepid explorer through an uncharted jungle, laying out a path and guideposts for all those who would follow. Her Translation Guide is the standard reference work, unique and irreplaceable, for all researchers in this field. Thanks to the online JRI-Poland indexing project and the continued availability of Polish Jewish records on microfilm through the LDS (Mormon) Family History Library, the number of researchers requiring such a guidebook probably has never been greater. With its new coil-bound format, it opens conveniently flat at any page, making it more useful than ever.
Postscript: As Paul Simon sang, we live in an age of miracles and wonders. Yesterday, a researcher from Massachusetts contacted me after using the JewishGen Family Finder: What did I know about his Hahn relatives from Konin? Quite a bit, it turns out. Thanks to both the LDS microfilms and Frazin’s Translation Guide, I had translated dozens of 19th-century records pertaining to that family. Astonishingly, though he had also mined the LDS records after utilizing the JRI-Poland indexes, he did not have the names of his fourth and fifth great-grandparents, which I was able to provide. The reason? It is little remembered today that in the period between 1808 and 1825, the period of first civil registration records in Poland, Jewish records often were assimilated into Catholic record books. That is the case for Konin, and the researcher who scrolls through the unindexed Catholic microfilm for this town will find many early Jewish records dispersed therein. I forget where I first learned to look for Jewish records among the early Christian microfilms—probably in the pages of AVOTAYNU—but people who are most apt to use Frazin’s Translation Guide may find this a highly useful suggestion.
Bill Gladstone
