[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] New SGGEE Data Resources

[DLPratt123 at aol.com]

The SGGEE homepage has information on two new data resources for  
members-only:  Rozyszcze marriages (1862-1909) and Volhynian Archives  (1900-1918).  
You can read the details there for yourselves.  

A thousand pardons if this new information has already been publicized in  
this forum and I somehow overlooked it.  I do have a few comments in any  
event.
 
I believe that Dick Stein was the driving force behind the marriages,  and 
that Ken Krell first proposed that SGGEE acquire the Archives  information.  
Many others helped.  Including me -- I learned a  lot from Dick.  Thanks to 
him and to all.
 
A feature of SGGEE databases is that they are not easily updated.   Hence 
when you look for a Rozyszcze marriage up to about 1885, you are likely to  
get duplicate results.  I believe the first set of results ultimately  
originated in text files long available online courtesy of the Ukrainian  
Genealogical Society.  Of course it is not necessarily a bad thing to get  two 
opinions on the information in a record of interest.
 
Possibly this explains the reluctance to make the Volhynian Archives data  
available before now.  Ukrainian extractors unfamiliar with German names  
sometimes make mistakes.  After many hours of work, many of these have  
already been corrected.  Some remain, like Hirsecorn for Hirsekorn, but in  time, 
all possible corrections will be achieved.  In the meantime, we can  
probably find what we are looking for anyway.
 
As an illustration, consider this personal anecdote.  Half a century  ago 
my mother told me the name of her father's half-sister, and I've been  
looking for a marriage with the two surnames ever since.  It appears in the  new 
data, further east than I had had any reason to suppose my ancestors were  
living.  With corroborating evidence accumulated over the years, finally I  
know my great-grandmother's given name.  Omitting a morass of details, I  can 
say that a sister of my grandfather's was married in Silesia in 1930, where  
she was still living at least as late as 1942; a brother was living in the 
same  Silesian village in 1940.  After the war, the sister finally 
reestablished  contact by mail with my grandfather and mentioned that their mother 
had  died.  She offered no details, but it probably wasn't a recent death, and 
 possibly the death occurred in that village.  Email to the relevant Polish 
 civil records office went unanswered, so I went there in person.  There  
were relatively few records from this village, and as it turned out none  
involved the family surnames.  The clerk helpfully offered to search for my  
ggm by her given name (in case she had remarried), but I had to respond "Nie  
znam".  I believe SGGEE had received the Ukrainian extractions years rather  
than months earlier.  So the change in policy comes too late for me.
 
Nonetheless the new policy is very welcome news indeed.  We can all be  
grateful to the Research and Databases Committees for the change and  for all 
this new information.
 
Best wishes for your research,
Dan Pratt