[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Kolo births etc.

[DLPratt123 at aol.com]

Kolo births for the years 1865 to 1877 have been extracted and are  
available at geneteka.genealodzy.pl, courtesy of the Polish Genealogical Society  
(PTG). (I sent these extractions to SGGEE about a year ago in the same format 
as  previously accepted extracts, but they were not accepted. One person 
suggested I  use a program like Legacy to retype them into a gedcom!)
 
The Polish website is partly available in English and very easy to use.  
Just search on a surname and you get the available extracts. Births,  
marriages, and deaths appear in separate lists. The variety of variant spellings  is 
surprisingly helpful. Often there are hyperlinks to a scan of the  original 
record.
 
There are many millions of records available. Although the majority are  
from Catholic parishes, a search on any German surname of interest to me 
yields  hits from a number of Evangelical parishes. This website found several 
relevant  records for me. One was the death of an ancestor in the same month 
and parish as  her young granddaughter; the latter record was already in our 
MPD, and  ordinarily I would conclude that the MPD would already have all 
records from  that time and place. 
 
In particular, the file "Job Central Part B" must be used with caution, as  
data sets which are claimed to have been fully extracted sometimes have not 
 been. Please note that there is no record that the person listed as having 
fully  extracted the data is in any way responsible for this file's claim 
to that  effect. So far I have about half a dozen records relevant to direct 
ancestors  from times and places that might reasonably be expected to appear 
in the MPD,  based on this file and other considerations.
 
In hopes of explaining this situation to the hard-working Research and  
Databases Committees, I focused on a parish and year with only eight marriages. 
 Three were already in MPD, with no other explanation for their presence, 
such as  the individuals' being the ancestors of an SGGEE member. It turned 
out that one  marriage was completely missed by the MPD, but for the other 
four grooms (and  probably brides), the "hidden" MPD already contains a 
reference to the marriage  record, without naming the spouse! The Committees' 
solution, so far, has been to  incorporate the missing five marriages into the 
MPD; this does nothing for  missing marriages from surrounding years with 
more than eight marriages, of  course. (One person suggested that I extract 
only those events not already in  the MPD! Of course, even if I performed this 
onerous feat, the data would be  submitted in a spreadsheet, like the 
rejected Kolo births.)
 
To possibly locate such marriages in the "hidden" MPD, and who knows what  
other useful information, you can request a Family Group Sheet from the 
Research  Committee. Obviously, if all 700 of us did so for ten relevant 
families apiece,  it would create a problem, but such requests have been infrequent 
to date.
 
I might add that some researchers have ignored death records of children.  
While it's true they have no descendants, the information can be 
surprisingly  useful, as I will illustrate in a forthcoming  post.