While in Salt Lake City at the National Genealogical Society’s Family History Conference last week, I seized the opportunity to conduct some research in the Family History Library. My primary research objective was to identify the administrative divisions for parishes in the area north of Warsaw where my Burski, Chodkowski, Czarzasty,Kamiński, Klonowski,Krzyczkowski, Milewski, Mossakowski, Niedziałkowski, Rembowski, Skierbowski,Smoleński, Ślaski, and Zaboklicki ancestors lived.
The Family History Library catalog classifies places according to the administrative divisions at the beginning of the 20th century, a time when most of our Polish ancestors immigrated to the United States. One advantage of this classification system is that it corresponds to the time when the Słownik Geograficzy Królestwa Polskiego was written and when the 1907 Map of the Kingdom of Poland was drawn.
My goal in the Family History Library was to examine the civil registration records in these parishes in order to identify the administrative divisions to which the parishes belonged in five time periods: 1807-1815, 1815-1816, 1816-1837, 1837-1844, and 1844-1867. To do this, I really only needed to look at the records for the year 1808, since the administrative divisions for this part of Poland in all these time periods can be deduced fairly easily from the administrative structure in 1808.
Typically, only the civil registration records from 1808-1825 included the names of the administrative divisions in the records themselves. During this time, the names of the administrative divisions changed from powiats and departments to obwóds and voivodeships, and so I checked the registers for a number of years throughout this time period just to verify that my conclusions about the names were correct.
While in Salt Lake City, I was able to examine at least some parishes in each of the following powiats:
- Ciechanów Powiat, Płock Gubernia, Vistula Land, Russian Empire
- Maków Powiat, Łomża Gubernia, Vistula Land, Russian Empire
- Mława Powiat, Płock Gubernia, Vistula Land, Russian Empire
- Płock Powiat, Płock Gubernia, Vistula Land, Russian Empire
- Przasnysz Powiat, Płock Gubernia, Vistula Land, Russian Empire
- Pułtusk Powiat, Warsaw Gubernia, Vistula Land, Russian Empire
Coming up: the results of my research.
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen J. Danko